Stories of Survival

[Bel-Cam Jos]

I'm sure many of you out there have had some tough times, and by that, I don't mean that it took you almost 6 months to find an Ephont Man. Maybe you did slide down an exhaust shaft, only to end up dangling on a weather vane. Or perhaps got stuck in a garbage masher. Even got sentenced to death by plunging into a pit, only to be saved by your friends in bikinis and costumes. I'm really talking about true instances where your safety, health, sanity, or life was in doubt, but you "made it through the rain" (sorry for the Barry Manilow reference, but if you could survive that without boycotting SSG forever, than now you have a story to tell, too ). Care to share?

I recently literally walked away (okay, crawled away) from a hit-from-behind-at-25+MPH-faster-than-I-was-going accident that flipped and spun my car into the embankment. Totaled my car; other guy unhurt. All I ended up with were cuts on my hands from crawling out and catching glass shards. It's been a weird week (in fact, it took place almost one week exactly to the hour and minute of this post), reliving the "action" and pondering my mortality. I know many, too many, people are nowhere near as fortunate as I was (am). Yes, I have the inconvenience of no car (the rental car is only for a little while), and the hassle of insurance companies, but that's nothing compared to what could've been.

There's also a story of me sliding down a trail in the Grand Canyon, but I'll save it.

You have anything you want to let us know about?

[2-1B]

Sorry to hear about that BCJ - I'm glad you made it through in one piece. I've lost a few friends to car wrecks, as I'm sure most everybody here has, and it really sucks.

Nov 1998, it was getting dark one Sunday as I left my friend's house after watching the Packers beat the Cowboys @ Lambeau Field. So I was clipping down the highway, minding my business and I never noticed the deer cruising across a field (remember it was getting dark) and she was timed just perfectly to BAM! into my driver's side door. It all happened so fast but it seemed like time froze as I saw that thing's head within my car because as its torso hit the door, the head came through the glass. I took a blast of the glass but it is safety glass so it had that spider effect which results in dull edges of glass.

I didn't have a cell phone at that time but a nice lady called the police for me to get my report and also to clear off the carcass which was laying in the opposite lane. Being dark, we didn't want anyone to run over it so the lady pulled to the other lane and turned on her emergency lights as I did on the other side.

So, in a 55mph zone you would think people might slow down when it's dark and there are flashers on both sides of the higway, right ? WRONG. People kept whizzing by, narrowly missing the corpsed deer at the last moment as they swerved, and then finally somebody in a mini-van or SUV rode over it foolishly and dragged the deer for awhile. Left quite a smear as I could tell the next time I was there in the daylight.

Well an officer finally arrived and asked where the deer was, I told him it WAS right here near my car until somebody dragged it how-many-feet down the road. I couldn't even see it. The cop drove ahead a bit and in the dark I could not see but I did hear the sound of his shovel scraping entrails off to the side of the road.

No injury to me, some comestic damage to my car door (the steel frame held up nicely, just had to replace the outer shell, and a shattered window. I was just glad nobody got hurt. Had that deer not been a doe but rather a big buck with a nice rack of antlers, I might have taken a poke to the head and none of you would had the pleasure of reading my brilliant and thought provoking posts.

On a serious note though, I know what you mean about the mortality thing. I was pretty shaken up that evening but life goes on. Sometimes I wonder why I was lucky to survive that encounter while other people are not.

[Ji'dai]

Last summer I was tooling around in my brother's four-wheel go-cart (really large enough to be called a dune buggy) and I took a turn a little too quickly. The rear tire caught a tuft of grass and the buggy flipped over on the driver side and rolled. Though not quite a complete revolution, the buggy came to rest on the passenger side and I crawled out the top. The buggy has a roll cage so that most likely saved my neck.

Being summer, I was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts so I ended up bruising/scraping my thighs on the steering wheel/column and I scraped my left arm on the ground as the buggy rolled over. Stupidly, I wasn't wearing the safety belt/harness either so I was fortunate I wasn't more seriously injured.

After I crawled out I felt kinda shaky but since I wasn't badly hurt I righted the buggy and was able to restart it and drive it back to the garage. I haven't driven it since

[dr_evazan22]

Way back when....

In elementary school I had this friend Jimmy. Every weekend we hung out, taking turns at who's house we were over at. We would get on our bikes and ride all over. We biked to this one park that had a rock cliff wall. We had to go climbing on it. We ended up right around the middle and we stopped to rest. The pathway was only as wide as our feet. There was some sand/ loose gravel under my feet and I slipped - very all of a sudden - right off the side. There was a small tree growing out of the side that I mananged to wrap my hands around. As I struggled to get back up I asked for help from Jimmy, but he was too busy laughing at me.

Going back to the same park now, that spot doesn't seem as far up as it did that day, but I could still have gotten seriously hurt.

More recently, in March, I was heading home from work on I-95 and was behind a vehicle that was swerving back and forth. I was in the process of deciding if I should call 911 about it. All of a sudden I became aware of *a commotion* ahead and swerved to the right, following the swerving car. Eased up on the brakes enough to not hit the right side barrier. The car I followed ended up getting damaged in the accident. There were 4 or 5 cars total, 1 SUV flipped and landed on the roof, another doing a 180. No serious injuries for anyone.