Audio By Carbonatix
Eight simple white crosses, made of PVC pipe, rattle slightly in the wind along a stretch of road north of Flagstaff, just past milepost 440 on Highway 89. They mark the eight who died here, killed in the same spot in two separate accidents last year.
The first accident killed three Navajos; their pickup collided with a fuel tanker last March. Three weeks later, a family of three crashed head-on into a couple driving in the opposite lane.
Bill Velie saw the lights and heard the sirens from his house, also on Highway 89. As he’d done more than a hundred times before, Velie pieced together the white crosses and pounded them into the hard dirt beside the road.
Today, more than a year later, he drives the highway and points out the white crosses standing in a row.
“Looks like a damned cornfield,” Velie says, shaking his head.
In the past year, Bill Velie has built and placed more than 150 crosses on the road from Flagstaff to Page to remember the dead and remind the living. Each cross signifies a traffic fatality. Each one, Velie hopes, keeps other drivers from adding to the numbers.
Velie has never been paid for the 300-plus hours he’s spent on the project. He’s never lost a relative in any of these crashes. He’s not even particularly attached to the cross as a symbol, except that it gets people’s attention.
“I didn’t do it because of any religious reason,” he explains. “I just did it because it works.”
The Arizona Department of Transportation disagrees, and thinks that the crosses are an illegal distraction. But the agency hasn’t stopped Velie. Yet.
For now, he continues driving, steadily if slowly, down Highway 89. The crosses he’s planted flank him on both sides.
Bill Velie does not, repeat not, have any talent for home decoration. The cowboy-and-Indian antiques, the tasteful furniture and color-coordinated interior of his Flagstaff home are entirely his wife Polly’s doing, he’s quick to point out.
Velie’s more comfortable with building homes than furnishing them. He built this place next to the highway himself, a kind of retreat he made from a high-pressure, high-paying job as a field supervisor for a large construction company. He had the whole nine yards, he recalls: “Big house, big boat in front of the house, nice car–and it was killing me. I worked in 12 states and lived in seven. I just got tired of that.”
He now runs a business which provides information to construction firms. He also runs a 135-ton bulldozer in the early hours of the morning for a local pumice mine, mostly for the fun of it and the chance to use the dozer on home projects, like the berm he’s building to block out noise from the road.
“It’s going to look like a golf course when I’m done,” he says.
Velie has spent most of his life outdoors, working construction, and everything about him suggests a weathered toughness, from the gravelly quality of his voice to the deep lines in his face.
Velie grew up in western New York, on the Seneca Indian reservation. He played hockey. “We’d start out best friends and, an hour later, we’d be beating the hell out of each other,” he remembers.
Today, at 57, Velie is still a take-no-prisoners kind of guy; diehard conservative, plain-spoken, bluntly honest.
But, despite that toughness, something in Velie responds to the pain of others.
Last year, he began to notice the frequent sirens passing by his home, signaling yet another wreck. So he decided to do something about it.
He’d been down this road before. In 1991, while working construction on Highway 93 near Wickieup, he decided to mark the sites of the frequent auto crashes on that road.
Route 93 is “a meat grinder,” Velie says. “It can take an ambulance an hour and a half to get you to a hospital. If you wreck up there, you’re toast.”
Velie put 146 crosses up on 93 during the next two years in hopes that they’d remind people to pay attention and slow down. He figured the crosses might help along Highway 89 as well.
Velie went to Don Howard, the chief of the Timberline-Fernwood Fire District, to get some of the numbers and locations of fatal accidents.
At first, Howard wasn’t sure why Velie would want the information, but when Velie indicated he wanted to put up crosses, the chief’s interest was piqued.
Timberline-Fernwood is a combination volunteer-professional fire district. Mainly, it is the same people who go out every time to deal with the accidents along 89 and their aftermath. At times, it can get pretty grim.
“It’s had an impact on our guys, no question,” Howard says. “We’d try about anything to get the number down.”
Highway 89, the chief explains, is a narrow, twisting and often dangerous road. The tourist trade draws millions to northern Arizona, and many of them use Highway 89. There is a local bumper sticker: PRAY FOR ME AND MINE, I DRIVE HIGHWAY 89.
“Four million people a year go to Page; five million a year go to the Grand Canyon,” Howard says. “This road was built a long time ago. It’s just a little, two-lane highway. It’s not made for that kind of traffic.”
The number-one cause of accidents, Howard says, is inattention.
“It’s not alcohol,” he says. “Only 9 percent of the accidents in the last 20 months were alcohol-related. A lot of people think it’s ‘drunken Indians,’ because the reservation is up here–that’s not the case. More often, it’s the people playing at Lake Powell. After a few days of fun and sun, they can be a little tired.”
Velie’s crosses are meant to snap people back to attention. “You’re driving along, you’re doing about 65, 75,” Velie says. “Then you see one of these crosses. You might slow down a little. Then you see a couple more. Well, you might slow down to 70 or 60. Then when you see about 10 in a row, you’re going to slow down to 55.”
Velie takes an obvious pride in his work. He keeps neatly marked charts of where he’s placed his crosses, his tight script penciling in corrections when a cross is lost to theft or damage. He explains that there are deficiencies in his count; state and local agencies don’t keep track of those people who die from their injuries after a highway accident. “At that point, they’re some insurance man’s problem,” he says.
Velie also keeps records of those people who’ve donated supplies to him: local hardware stores, plumbing suppliers and lumber yards. They give him the PVC pipe, reflective tape and rebar he uses to make the crosses.
Some people, however, don’t want to give Velie any credit, much less any help.
Dan Dorman, the ADOT district engineer in Flagstaff, thinks the crosses present a problem.
“In many cases, it is a distraction for drivers,” he says. “We would really like drivers to watch where they’re going and pay attention to what they’re doing.”
Dorman questions whether the crosses should be allowed on the road at all.
“Unless someone goes through proper channels and acquires a permit for something, it shouldn’t be there,” he says. “There probably is a question as to whether they’re legal. But because of what they’re doing and the way they’re doing it, we’ve chosen not to make a big deal of it at this time. But it is questionable as to whether it meets our requirements.”
For his part, Velie doesn’t have many warm feelings for ADOT. He says it stonewalled his attempts to find out how many people died on Highway 89.
“They said they didn’t keep those kind of records,” he recalls. “Finally, I had to write to ADOT’s risk management. Got a computer print-out. Cost me five bucks.”
Dorman says ADOT hasn’t tried to discourage Velie. But ADOT might be a little sensitive to safety issues in the area because efforts to widen the road have been stalled for several years.
Howard and local residents have complained, and work has finally started on a project to place a median strip in the highway along an eight-mile stretch known–appropriately or not–as “Deadman Flat Wapatki.”
Despite ADOT’s misgivings, Howard believes the crosses do work. In 1996, there were 19 fatalities, out of nearly 100 incidents, along the road near Flagstaff. In 1997, there have been three, a drop Howard attributes directly to Velie’s crosses.
“I think it sets in people’s minds that this is a dangerous stretch of road,” Howard says. “We’re sure glad he’s doing it.”
ADOT remains unconvinced, even by the numbers.
“I can’t tell you that it’s any safer,” Dorman says. “It’s very, very difficult to define safety. You can’t predict when or what causes many of the accidents. They go in spurts. Doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have disaster at any minute.”
Dorman suggests that traffic safety should be left to the pros, not just some guy with PVC pipe.
“If we thought that we could eliminate fatalities by putting up plastic crosses everywhere, we’d be out there doing it ourselves,” Dorman says.
Chief Howard says that Velie is the kind who’ll fight to get things done.
“When he sets his mind to do something, he’s going to do it, come hell or high water,” Howard says. “He’s very strong-willed, and if he feels he can make a difference, he’s going to do it.”
The question still arises–why does Velie bother? Why does he go plunking down reminders of sudden tragedies along the road like an acupuncturist does pins?
It might be because Velie is hoping to strike something home with each cross he plants.
In a voice just a bit quieter than his usual hearty tone, Velie will tell you that he lost his first wife to cancer several years ago. “It started with just a little chunk on her gum,” he recalls.
Two years ago, his son committed suicide, for reasons Velie still doesn’t completely comprehend.
After that, Velie made a marker of his own, not far from his house. Up a hill, behind a stand of pine trees, he carved his son’s name into a boulder and spread his ashes around it. “I like to think he’s got something nice up here,” he says, as he shows the site to a visitor. “I tell him, ‘This is so you can have a nice view.'”
The deaths of his wife and son have made Velie understand something he didn’t before: Every death diminishes.
“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?’
