Before long, my brothers and I were local celebrities. People would say, “Have you heard the Evans kids? They’re really good, and that little Sara can sing anything.” So at the age of five, my professional music career had begun. By age six, I was fronting the Evans Family Band. My brother Jay played guitar, my brother Matt played bass, and I sang lead and played the mandolin. I suppose the acclaim could’ve gone to our heads, but it just didn’t. Being poor and working hard on the farm kept us humble. Our music brought us attention, and that was great, but our band helped support the family as well.
Then when I was eight years old, something happened that would put everything on hold.
Chapter 2 THE ACCIDENT
June 29, 1979, is a day that will be etched in our memories until we die. Around 5:30 p.m. my mom, my brother Jay, and a hired guy were working on a tractor that had broken down out by the barn. My little sisters were in the house playing, and my brother Matt was watching TV. Dad was in the shower getting ready to go to work at the Tribune. It seemed like just another lazy summer afternoon.
All day I had been playing pretend with my dolls on the wraparound porch that I’d turned into my playhouse. This part of the porch was off the side of my parents’ bedroom, and I spent hours alone there, playing house with my dolls all lined up or tucked into little beds. I played wife and mom doing wife-and-mom duties like instructing my babies in how to behave, cooking Sunday dinner, or hanging their little dresses on a makeshift clothesline. I often sang along to an Emmylou Harris record and would race inside to the record player when the album ended. I’d climb up a stool and move the needle back to start the record over again. I’d watch the slight roll of the vinyl as it turned, listen to the scratchy sound of the needle as it began its journey back to the center. Then I’d race back to my babies as Emmylou’s voice filled the house again.
Just a few days earlier, I had decided that part of my pretend mommy duties included getting the mail. Our mailbox was at the end of our long gravel driveway and on the other side of the country highway. I knew I’d get in trouble for going down there alone if I got caught, but once I got something in my mind there was no stopping me.
I was just as much a tomboy as I was a girlie girl, being that I was the first daughter, with two older brothers. I played sports, and I also took ballet lessons. I played with Barbie dolls, and I rode a motorcycle. I rode horses, and I had slumber parties with my girlfriends. That’s the kind of girl I was, but one thing I loved most was my motorcycle. It wasn’t a small bike—it took all of my eight-year-old strength to roll it out to the driveway and kick-start it. Then I’d hop on and rev up the engine. We all had motorcycles—well, at least my brothers, my dad, and I all did. Jay and Matt both had Hodaka bikes. Jay had a Dirt Squirt and Matt had a Road Toad, and Dad had a Yamaha Virago. Mine was a Yamaha 80 that I was so proud of and loved to my core, because what eight-year-old girl has her own motorcycle to ride?
My mom said if I wasn’t with my brothers, the farthest I could go was up and down the driveway near the house and down to the pond. I wasn’t supposed to cross the highway or even get near it, not ever. I figured I could do it without anyone seeing me.
My first trip to the mailbox was uneventful, and no one saw me do it. I remember the wind in my face and feeling invincible while heading down the driveway to get the mail. I felt grown-up and proud of myself, and I didn’t tell anyone—especially not my brothers, who would’ve told on me.
On this day, I remember putting together an outfit of my own design. When you’re poor and don’t have a lot of clothes, you have to be creative. For Easter, Granny had given me a cute little pink-and-white shorts outfit. I decided the top would be even cuter with some cutoff denim shorts that my mom had made for me. And then I put on my new white Nike tennis shoes that I had also gotten for Easter. These were all such valuable items, as I knew it would be months before I got something else new. Much later, that outfit would come home from the hospital in a bag, covered in blood.
Once I reached the end of the driveway, I got off my motorcycle, stood by the highway, and waited. I looked to the left, looked to the right, and saw no cars. I did hear a car in the distance, but I thought I could make it across the road before it got to me. The last thing I remember was seeing a flash of blue to my left.
I woke up in a cold sterile room and then came the pain, just pain.
I was terrified and had no idea where I was or what had happened to me. Both of my legs were in casts, and my arms were bound. Outside the window, it was dark. I immediately started screaming and crying.
A nurse ran in to try to comfort me and calm me down. She asked, “Sara, do you remember what happened to you?”
“No,” I said.
“You were hit by a car.”
It didn’t make sense, and I just kept asking for my mommy. “Where’s my mom, I want my mommy!!!”
The nurse told me that my mom had just left to go shower and get some rest at Granny’s house. I never wanted anything so much in all my life as I wanted my mother at that moment. The most shocking part of this story is that they wouldn’t call her. I suppose the nurse thought I’d fall back to sleep or that my mother needed some rest, but that was a horrible decision on her part. For the next several hours, I stared out the window in agony, waiting for the sun to come up, because that’s when they said she’d come back. My mom’s younger brother, Uncle Dale, was in the cafeteria when I woke up. They called him in, so at least I had someone I knew, but all I wanted was my mom.
The next time I woke up, my mom was there. She looked like she’d been through hell and back. She began to tell me what had happened.
* * *
Highway 89 is the road that runs in front of our farm. It’s hilly and treacherous. There have been many accidents on that highway, some fatal. Years later, at almost the same spot where I got hit, we witnessed a horrible wreck and the death of someone we knew well. Our driveway was at the bottom of two big hills. The woman who hit me was going seventy-five miles an hour. When she came over the hill, I was standing in the road and she couldn’t stop. The only thing I can guess is that once I reached the middle of the highway and saw the car, I froze in panic and it was too late for her to do anything other than hit me.
When the car struck me, I was thrown onto the hood. There was a huge dent where my head hit the hood of her car. When she slammed on her brakes, I was thrown off the car and into the air before I landed eighty feet off the road in a ditch with tall grass.
The woman lived in the area, and her son who was in the car was in the same grade as my brother. They immediately turned around and drove back to our driveway. The son got out and ran beside the car yelling, “We hit Sara! We hit Sara!”
When my mom heard them shouting, she kicked off her flip-flops and ran barefoot down our gravel driveway to get to me. Have you ever run barefoot on gravel? It hurts like hell. I didn’t get that part fully until I became a mother, and now it’s one of my favorite parts of the story. Like her, I would run barefoot across broken glass if my child needed me.
At first, no one could find me. The grass was high along the roadside, and no one expected that I’d be eighty feet off the road. When they found me, I was curled up in a ball with my left leg mangled and twisted and almost severed in two. They all thought I was dead.