You see them along every highway in America, the sad sweet shrines to lives lost on the road. There’s one on a treacherous stretch of twisty two-lane blacktop in rural Wheeler County, in the long empty reach between Dayville and Mitchell, that may have caught your eye as you drove past.

The shrine consists of a simple cross, just a couple pieces of weathered wood tacked together, mounted on top of a rockpile covered in creeping vines. At the base of the cross are some sun-faded plastic flowers. On the crosspiece is a printed sign that reads, “We will always love you.”

Here are the numbers for 2021, courtesy of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety:

Nationwide, there were 39,508 fatal crashes resulting in 42,939 deaths, or 12.9 deaths per 100,000 population. In Oregon that year, 552 crashes claimed 599 lives, or 14.1 per 100,000 population. Of those deaths, 57% occurred on rural highways.

That last number surprised me: You might think that, with most of the state’s population concentrated in the urban centers of Western Oregon, which are strung together on Interstate 5, that’s where most of the fatal crashes would take place.

But that’s not the case. Instead, more than half of all traffic fatalities in Oregon happen on rural highways, like the ones that stitch together the far-flung communities of Grant County and connect us with the outside world.

Here are some other numbers to consider, from TRIP, a nonprofit transportation research group. Using data from 2020, the group calculated that Oregon had the second-highest fatality rate on rural roads of any state in the country. According to TRIP, Oregon had 272 traffic deaths on rural, non-interstate roads in 2020, or 3.12 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, more than three times the state’s rate of 1 fatality per 100 million vehicle miles traveled on all other kinds of roads.

But when you think about it, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that rural highways tend to be deadlier than city streets or interstate freeways.

“Rural roads are more likely to have narrow lanes, limited shoulders, sharp curves, exposed hazards, pavement drop-offs, steep slopes and limited clear zones along roadsides,” TRIP noted in a news release announcing its research. “Rural Americans are more reliant on the quality of their transportation system than their urban counterparts, with vehicle travel in rural communities averaging approximately 50% higher than in urban communities.”

For most of us, driving (or riding as a passenger in a motor vehicle) is something we do on a daily basis. It’s such a commonplace act that we take it for granted.

We shouldn’t.

All it takes is a moment’s inattention, a tiny miscalculation or a random piece of sheer bad luck to turn us into another grim statistic, another sad, sweet roadside shrine — especially on the kinds of lonesome rural highways we drive all the time here in Grant County.

Please: Be careful out there.