when the ambulances have gone.

It's an eerie place, the edge of a state highway.

It's a place littered with McDonald's cups and split rubbish bags and beer bottles, with broken tarseal and wild blackberry and possum carcasses. It's a place not often tread by human feet; certainly not by the leather-bound feet of myself, armed with camera and notebook.

Today I stood on the edge of State Highway 27, calmly swapping my wide-angle camera lens for a zoom so I could get a better shot of the carnage spread across the road.

It's the silence and stillness that haunted me first. The 100kph buzz of cars and trucks had been diverted down another road. All that remained on that stretch of highway was sirens in the distance, flashing red and blue lights and a wrecked car covered with a tarpaulin.

It wasn't until later, as I picked my way back over the roadside rubbish (I remember a yellowing phonebook and a glossy packet of cigarettes) that one of the officers told me someone had died.

An eerie, empty feeling.

Oddly, it was my morbid curiosity for these situations as a kid that is in part to blame for where I was today. I grew up on a farm on the same highway and, whenever cars ploughed through our front fence (fairly regularly in the winter) I'd dig out the binoculars and jump on my BMX and go for a gawk.

Perhaps I was a weird, morbid kid.

But, shocking as today's fatal was - and as any accident is - we still want to know about it.

These days, I go as a reporter, not a rubber-necker; I get in and get out again as soon as possible. Most of the time, there's nothing major to report. A mishap with a power pole, a scrape in the car park, a bumper-to-bumper.

It's still news, even if the cars usually suffer more than the people.

Other than the purposes of satisfying our (shared) curiosity for the morbid side of life, I'd like to think there's some good in my having to stand on the roadside today.

Driving back to Tirau down that same highway tonight, with the image of that orange tarpaulin over crumpled metal still fresh in my mind, I found myself holding back from over-taking the slow truck ahead of me. A few hours earlier I wouldn't have thought twice about it.

And, as I watched a sleek sedan defy an oncoming truck to pass six cars in a row, I hoped the driver would be reading the newspaper.