Assignment 2.1: Simone

Friday March 2, 2010 a bus traveling from Bluffton, Ohio to Florida carrying a boys baseball team drove through a guard rail and ended up on its side on Interstate 75. The crash happened early Friday morning before the sun was rising and the driver mistook the HOV exit ramp for Northside Drive, shown in the last two pictures, for an actual lane on the Interstate. As a result the driver went through the stop sign and over the bridge and its guard rail, landing back on Interstate 75. The bus driver and his wife, as well as 4 of the boys on the bus were killed in this fetal accident. Now the guard rail has been fixed and the only evidence of the crash is the flowers and baseball that family members have attached to the new fence on the guard rail, shown in the first picture. Through the flowers and baseball the memory of this fetal crash and its victims are remembered. The harshness of the chain link fence is softened by the gestures of love ones and invoke mourning and memory to the bridge over the Interstate. The chain link fence that is an extension of the guard rail is an example of a third space because as Crawford explains it's "neither the material space that we experience nor a representation of space". The third space may not be a representation of space, however it is a space where representations can be expressed and the families and loved ones of the bus accidents victims express remembrance and celebration of life through the expression of their flowers and baseball. This space is open to new meanings activated through social action and imagination, because before the accident, it was just a guard rail and now it is comparable to a grave site. For information and images from the day of the accident click here for the article in the New York Times.