What might have been?

If somebody is missing a box spring from the back of a pickup that they were hauling on Saturday, the Adams family of Schriever has a few words for you.

Such as why you never checked to see if they were OK.

They are. But the call was a close one. The kind that makes you hug your children that much harder. This is precisely what Cassandra Adams did when it was all over.

She hugged 8-year-old Cameron. She hugged her husband, Jamie, who works so hard over at Bollinger and who came so close to something really bad happening.

And it was all at the end of what had been a very special day for them all.

The specialness had to do with the realization of a dream, the purchase of a boat that the Adams’ put into the water for the very first tie Saturday.

“My husband has been wanting a boat for 20 years, and we had chosen a boat but were waiting for the paperwork,” Cassandra explained.

One of these days the boat might be used for fishing, but on Saturday it was all about the newness of it all. So they began in the canals near Vacherie and ended up in Lake Des Allemands, the motor on the green john-boat purring like it should, and Cameron amazed at everything he saw while, as required, wearing his life jacket.

It’s just one of those kind of boats you see every day in these parts, but for the Adams family of Schriever it might as well have been a yacht.

The trip didn’t last all that long, because Saturday was a sparkling but iffy day for all this.

The winds started getting heavy and Jamie, who believes in putting safety before everything else, wasn’t taking any chances. If you are at all familiar with Lake Des Allemands, it can actually become a bit treacherous, and the winds always tend to blow a little harder. The decision was therefore a good one.

So it was back to the launch and up with the boat, and there was this picture-perfect family heading home from a picture-perfect day they would all remember well.

Except now they are remembering it for other reasons.

Jamie was traveling at a moderate rate of speed, maybe 45 miles-per-hour at most, as they passed the canals on either side of La. 20 in the northernmost portions of Lafourche Parish.

Cameron chattered up a storm and said “Mom did you have the best time ever?”

Rattled by the wind and recalling other things that were far more to her liking, Cassandra frowned and said she didn’t have fun.

“Mom you have to be crazy I you didn’t have fun,” the overjoyed boy said.

And that’s when Cassandra’s eye caught sight of it, there on La. 20 just past the turn-off for Kraemer, right by the dollar store, after they rounded the curve.

The box spring was in the back of a dark gray or black pickup that wasn’t necessarily traveling fast – certainly the Adams’ were not – and Cassandra realized that it was standing straight up, like a sail, which meant the wind must have caught it and then the box spring was hurtling toward the family’s pickup before anyone could even say “look out.”

The box spring’s wooden frame had splintered and a big shard of wood came through the windshield, landing on the floor by Cassandra’s feet.

On Jamie’s side of the windshield a long shard of wood came through like a stake, sticking through the glass, missing him by inches.

Jamie, somehow, guided the truck to safety on the side of the road and the police were called. The Lafourche Parish deputy came and took the report.

There was crying and there were prayers for thanks and suddenly life was that much more precious, the lives of those we love so much and see every day and don’t always realize can be gone in a second because somebody didn’t tie something right to the back of a truck or didn’t check well enough.

“It gives me a whole new perspective,” said Cassandra, who as a former addiction counselor is well aware of life’s fragile nature. “It gives perspective to what you haven’t done and what you need to do and how we have today but tomoeeow is not promised.”

The spiritual damage is overwhelming, and Cassandra hopes that someone who knows something about this will come forward, just because doing so would be right.

“Somebody knows they are missing a box spring or that someone they know is,” Cassandra said. “What bothers me most is that someone would not stop to see if someone was OK. I would be a mess.”