Dying young in a small town

I don't know why my radar works the way it does. I don't think anyone does.

As with everyone some things ping mine, and some things don't. Some are things everyone in the nation knows about, and some are things that only break hearts in a small corner of that nation.

The small corner today is LaGrange, In., in LaGrange County. 

It pinged my radar because two young men died in a car crash up there the other day, and it was all over the local news and Facebook and the Magic Twitter Thingy. This is partly because Tyler and Chace Curtis were both high school athletes, baseball and wrestling, and there is nothing more poignant than an athlete dying young, as A.E. Housman told us. And if high school athletes are the lords of creation in their world almost everywhere, that is nowhere more true than in a small school in a small town.

Tyler and Chace Curtis were high school athletes at Prairie Heights, which sits on a stretch of two-lane blacktop just south of U.S. 20, east of LaGrange and west of Angola. Just 414 students go there in four grades, which means there's a good chance pretty much everyone knew Tyler, 16, and Chace, 14.

Both young men were thrown from the car Tyler was driving when it breasted a hill on a county road in neighboring Steuben County, left the highway and hit a tree almost head-on. The impact tore the car in two; Tyler died at the scene and Chace died in the hospital a day later.

The accident happened shortly before 5:30 on Thursday afternoon, one of those late February days when the mercury breaches 40 and the sun shines at a particular angle that whispers of approaching spring. By Friday afternoon, there were flowers at the base of the tree on C.R. 675W, and the brothers' baseball jerseys -- 8 and 27 -- were on display, covered with a hieroglyphic scrawl of teammates' signatures.

In the photos one of the local news websites ran with the story, Tyler is turning hard on a pitch at the plate. Chace is standing on the Prairie Heights football field with a blue Homecoming court sash across his chest, rocking a righteous throwback mullet. They look like exactly what they were, two high school kids with spring and baseball and their whole lives spread luxuriously before them.

I can't tell you why all of this hit me so hard. I haven't been a full-time working sportswriter in these parts in almost seven years, and in my 28 years at The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette I don't think I ever covered a sporting event at Prairie Heights. I don't think I ever talked to any coach or athlete or administrator there. So their pain right now is not something I can connect with on a molecular level. 

But I have written about other high school athletes dying young in other small towns. I've listened to coaches and teammates and administrators struggle to put the loss into words.

I've seen the hole that loss leaves, and the ways those left behind try to fill it: The jerseys covered in heartbroken signatures, the uniform numbers painted on the grass of a football field, the flowers and other tokens left outside an athletic facility or a scarred tree on a county road, the February fields beyond still frosted with retreating snow.

Thankfully, I haven't had to write about those things often, as those things go. But once is enough. 

No one knows that better right now, I suspect, than the community of a certain small school in a certain small town, hard by a stretch of two-lane blacktop.