Rebel Out With a Cross

"Going through losing my wife and my son taught me that losing one person isn't just losing one person," he says. "When one tourist dies in a car crash, it trashes hundreds of people.

"I never realized my son, when he died, how many friends he had. And my wife--I knew how many she had. Hundreds."

The marker Velie made for his son will probably be the only one left in a few years. Attrition has already caught up with the crosses he set on Highway 93: Theft, cars and weather have undone most of Velie's work there. On 89, the construction that will make the highway safer will eventually pave over his other crosses. Velie hopes construction crews will save the crosses so that he can put them up again. But he knows that's not too likely.

Velie knows it's a losing battle. But he's still fighting it. Few tragedies are avoidable, and traffic accidents seem like the most sadly preventable, one of the few times when our lives really are in our own hands.

Circumstances have brought Velie to this place in his life where he has made himself guardian of this particular stretch of highway. He takes every loss personally. Each cross he puts in the ground is, in the end, not a mark for death on the scorecard. To him, it's one more shot at evening the odds.

"One guy was taking them down, he runs a trading post down the road," Velie says. "He said they were bad for business. I said, 'Hey, wouldn't it be better for business if your customers showed up alive?'