On a miserable morning in 1947, Jim's family was driving
through the desert of New Mexico outside Santa Fe. Suddenly his father veered off
the road to avoid the head-on collision ahead between a car and a
pickup driven by Indians. Their bodies were "scattered on dawn's highway
bleeding." The anguished voice of a woman was heard wailing hysterically. When the
young Jim tried to get out of the car with his father and grandfather to see
what was happening, his mother stopped him, though he pressed his face to the
window.
Years
later, in a dark recording studio in West Hollywood, Morrison said, "Ya know, the first time I discovered death - Me and my
mother and father, and I'm not sure if my sister was there or whether she was
alive or not, and my grandmother and grandfather, were driving through the
desert at dawn...and a truckload of Indian workers had either hit another car
or I don't know what happened, but there were Indians scattered all over the
highway; bleeding to death.
"And that was my first reaction to death, and I don't know whether I'm
crazy or what, but I had the feeling when that happened, like I didn't want to
look back. I'm just this little - like a child is a flower, man, whose head is
just floating in the breeze, man. But the reaction I get now thinking back,
looking back, is that possibly, the soul of one of those Indians, maybe several
of them, just ran over and jumped into my brain." (Jim's account of the story is quite different from his family's; nonetheless the incident left quite an impression on the five year old, causing what today may be diagnosed as childhood depression that included both anxiety and bed-wetting.)
