As I walked out of Cafe Argento, where I was working for a while this afternoon, a screech of tires and rattle of metal attracted exclamations from a few people on the sidewalk in front of the cafe.

I walked by them, on my way to Caffe Vita to keep working, and looked down the street to see what they were exclaiming about. My eye caught a white van accellerating down the empty street toward the reservoir park and playfield at the end of the block.

As I watched, it careened through the intersection and plowed through a chain-link fence surrounding a stone wall in the process of being constructed. As the van hit the wall, it slewed sideways and came to rest in a cloud of dust.

Absurdly, with my new cell phone in my hand, I called out to the knot of onlookers at the cafe to call an ambulance, and proceeded toward the wreck. Someone who passed me noticed my phone and told me to call 911, which gave me pause. Later, I asked my friend Sabrina how that works, and she assured me that any call to 911 placed from a handset is now legally obligated to connect to geographically-local emergency services operators.

The park had been crowded with people, and many of them were drifting cautiously nearer to the van, evidently fearful of the sight awaiting them. I heard someone say, “Was there anyone in the van?”

“Someone was driving it,” I said as I walked closer to the van, stepping over the shattered remnants of the low stone wall. As I did so I thought for the first time about what I might be just about to see and the fact that my phone was also a camera.

As I paused, a somewhat unkempt man wearing a blue plaid shirt and a Caffe Vita cap emerged shakily from the other side of the van. “Are you the driver?” I asked. He was not able to speak, but did not appear physically hurt, just very badly shaken. His left hand remained at his side while his right was lifted to his chest in the universal gesture of relief.

“You are a very lucky man,” I told him. Other onlookers began to draw closer, including one woman who gestured to her car, stopped in the middle of the road. She expressed relief as well; had she been a few feet further into the intersection the speeding van would have T-boned her on the driver’s side.

I was torn between staying and moving on, because I got a late start today and have a ton of work to do. In the end I settled for snapping a few photos and moving on.

Once I was a block down the street, I became aware that I was shaking with adrenaline. I sat down and called Sabrina and Viv.