It was hilarious.

My mom was driving me back down to campus when we got stuck behind this truck stacked with hay. Who knows how long that truck had been driving or how many cars had been stuck behind it, but the hay decided then would be the perfect time to break its formation and tumble onto the highway below.

My mom had just started passing it on the left (the same side the hay was falling)—we couldn't avoid it. My mom gripped the wheel and braced herself for the onset of…hay. We probably ran over five or six bricks of it. Fortunately she didn't lose control and the windshield didn't get covered with…hay.

She insists it wasn't funny. (It was.) True—it could have been pretty bad. But it wasn't; it was funny instead. Just thinking about my near fatal accident with hay makes me laugh. And I really don't think it's a nervous laugh. I mean—seriously—it's hay.

But before the hay-related accident, there was another one on the other side of the highway a few miles back. By the time we passed ground zero, it looks like most of it had been cleared—at least I couldn't see anything—and a helicopter was just leaving. Cars were backed up for a few miles. Engines were turned off, people were socializing outside—it actually looked pretty fun. Little parties going down, people taking walks up and down the rows of cars—I would have joined them.