Upstairs in her room, her parents had taped to the walls pictures of Sarah the athlete, the boisterous classmate, the RCMP officer-for-a-day, the daughter and sister. They'd also taped up her favourite movie posters, pictures she'd painted, and a poem she wrote, to make it clear to the people who now bathe her, feed her, roll her over, that this drooling, clenched, and thinning body is a person, someone named Sarah, who once questioned her mother over everything, let her teachers take nothing for granted, was a lifeguard, a partier, a girlfriend, a sixteen-year-old girl.

Then in July everything changed. She and her boyfriend and another boy took her parents' car while they were at a concert, drove to Regina and picked up another girl, then headed back north. Sarah let the other girl drive, a girl with a three-month-old learner's permit, and they all had some beers along the road. Sarah's boyfriend says they woke up in the back seat to find the girl driving 170 km/hr. and jerking the wheel back and forth. They got her to slow down, then fell back asleep. The RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] estimate by the skid marks that the car was doing about 170 when it tried to stop, then rolled, flinging Sarah and her boyfriend out. He landed in the ditch, picked himself up, and ran and found Sarah where she'd landed face first on the highway. He rolled her over and cleared her air passage to get her breathing again.

The boy in the front seat hit the windshield post, and, like Sarah, knocked himself into a coma. The girl driving had her legs crushed below the knees. The boy came out of his coma after a few days and was at Sarah's birthday party two months later, still groggy, still not quite sure of his bearings. This girl driving refused to see Sarah or anyone else connected with the accident and went home, where she's confined to a wheelchair, suffers from depression, and has quit school. Sarah's boyfriend visits her when he can, though it must be hard, as they'd only been going together two weeks before the accident. And Sarah is still in a coma, at times as profoundly indifferent to touch or talk as a chair or a jacket, at others, squeezing a finger or moving a foot in response to a command, gives wildly, maddeningly hopeful signs that Sarah is inside this wasted and damaged body, hears her parents and brother call to her, hears the 10,000 Maniacs CDs they play her, hears everything, and is unable to respond as her slammed into the asphalt brain learns, if it can, to reroute its responses.

That's what the neurologist told Sarah's parents when he explained the damage to them. The brain, wondrous mechanism that it is, would try to find new ways to process information, to go around the damaged material, or somehow through it, like running roads through a city after it's been carpet-bombed. And to him it must seem like a war: a war against a tradition of ignorance and stupidity. He talked of two other young teenagers come into the hospital that week with head injuries sustained while drinking and driving. In the next week there were two more. Then more after that. For us, visiting Sarah and hearing the statistics, it became the summer of head injuries.

For Sarah's parents there is only Sarah, and the chiding need to remember they have a son, with his own turmoils, and a marriage, and lives of their own, which they tend to forget. Someone takes them out for breakfast and they are hugely grateful. They'd forgotten about breakfast and conversation over second cups of coffee. To them it was just eating. Someone puts up a curtain rod for them in Sarah's new room and their gratitude is almost embarrassing. Sure they could have put it up themselves, but when? When would they have thought of it? Sarah's mother has taken a leave of absence from her nursing job and now nurses her daughter almost full time. It's a luxury, or sometimes they think a lunacy, they can afford. Sarah's father has understanding employers and he gets all his work done in three days and nights, then drives into the city for a four-day weekend.

It's a small town they come from and the town has rallied around the family, providing what it can, though Sarah's brother was furious when he learned that scant days after the accident Sarah's friends were all out at their usual party spot, getting pissed and driving home. I think back to my uprising in small town Saskatchewan and cannot convince myself that my friends and I would have done otherwise. We have a long and resolute tradition of independence in this province, and seemingly everywhere else, when it comes to drinking and driving. When it comes time to drive home, no matter how drunk we are, no one has the right to take away those keys.

The Government of Saskatchewan has been trying for years to change that attitude, and some statistics prove its campaign is working. In the latest round of graphic television ads and broadsides blasted across billboards come the pithy words: "If you drink then drive, you're a bloody idiot." I can't imagine mouthing those words twenty years ago in my hometown where one local farmer climbed out of the bar and in behind the wheel of his brand new Ranger XLT, totaled it half-way home, bought a new truck the next day and a week later totaled that one, and this time himself, and the townspeople all shook their heads at the waste of good vehicles.

I asked my freshman university English class in Prince Albert if things had changed; if all these blunt and brutal ads had done anything to alter their perception of driving drunk. A young woman at the back looked me square in the eye and said: "Nobody cares." There was a lot of rumbling in the room, but no one disputed her claim. One young man added that he'd heard a comedian at a local club deriding the whole mindset that would take away the right to drink and drive: "He had the whole place fired up, swearing at the government and the cops for trying to stop us doing what we want." Needless to say, everyone there was drinking, and that's how the club makes its money and pays the comedian. Funny guy.

Now Sarah's in a long-term care home because she wasn't making enough progress to warrant her a place in hospital. Her parents have fixed up the new room in such a way that you'd think it couldn't help but coax the injured psyche, or soul, to come out of its shell. We sit on the edge of Sarah's bed with her in her wheelchair and talk. Her parents say they get angry every so often. Angry at Sarah for taking the car, for drinking, for handing the vehicle over to a girl who was drinking and didn't know how to drive; at the girl for never coming to see Sarah, to acknowledge what she's done; at themselves, at drinking, at the way their lives will never be the same. Angry like the neurologist who said he'd like to take every damn teenager in the province and, as part of their schooling, force them to work in his ward for a semester so they could see their own wreckage; the consequences.

That's probably why Sarah's mother had the birthday party and invited all Sarah's friends to drive in and attend. Sure she said she wanted to treat the birthday as if it were a celebration -- take pictures so she could show Sarah that life went on while she was asleep, that no one forgot about her. But she was likely taking a leaf out of the neurologist's book, laughing and greeting us all as if this was the finest event of the season, her wild hope and her acid despair cudgeled down behind a mask of lively entertainment, greeting us and taking us to meet the birthday girl. And there she was, the athlete and rabble-rouser, sprawled in a wheelchair, stick legs splayed beneath her jumper, hands clenched inwards like lobster claws, head lolled to the side, spit drooling down her bib, eyes vacant as windows in a bombed-out building.

Off to the side her brother smiled and nodded, one of the old group, now different, perhaps wondering if Sarah's friends would drive back home and spend that Saturday night getting smashed, trying to put the new Sarah as far from them as they could.