The 1998 tornado in Peachtree Corners, GA. I was in the closet under the stairwell of my townhome and the whole house was shaking on the foundation. I was clinging to the stairs and having an intense conversation with God. Fortunately I only lost the roof, privacy fence and storage shed. And yes it sounds just like a freight train.
A former co-worker has a much more interesting story. He was in Alaska scheduled to ride a very small shuttle plane. He was asked to bump his seat for another and just hop on the next shuttle 30 minutes later. The plane he was bumped from went down in a lake-— no survivors. How’s that for a twist of fate.
Too many to count. Still kickin’ though, despite my fair share of stupidity.
A distant relative who was a local politician was building a weekender house perched on a 200’ quartzite cliff atop the mountain behind my folks’ place when I was a young teen. My dad and I got in his truck to ride up and take a look at it, the mountain road was gravel at the time. It was an overcast, damp Saturday. The dogs had a fit to go along so we loaded them in the bed and drove up.
To make a long story short, one of the dogs ran out onto the cliff ledge and froze, just laying there whimpering. We’d been all over those rocks, the dogs and I had, it was odd. I wasn’t afraid of them and neither were they.
I got impatient and went to retrieve him. That was how I found out why he froze. Slick lichen, damp from mist and fog. My feet flew out from under me and I slid fifty feet, right to the edge. Managed to grab a mountain laurel branch that didn’t break off, that’s all that stopped me. I can still hear my dad yelling my name, it almost echoes.
Seriously. So many. All embarrassingly prosaic.
I was driving up to Vermont for a New Year’s Eve party.
There was a snowstorm, and a two hour drive turned into a six hour drive. Traffic was completely stopped for about an hour on an interstate. While we were stopped, I had to take a piss, so I went to climb over a snowbank.
When I got to the top, I realized I was standing on an overpass up to my knees in the unstable snow overhang. I could have dropped right through and plummeted to my death.
I was frozen, didn’t want to move for fear the ledge would give way, but I knew I had to, so I slowly began backing up.
I consider myself pretty lucky that is the closest brush I have ever had.
My closest brush came in mid-January 2001 when I held a bottle of antidepressants in my hand for — hours?? — until I finally convinced myself not to swallow all of them. It was a very frightening time.
She saw him at about that time and screamed for me to run. We went barreling out the back door, tripped running away from the house. I remember him saying "Don't worry, I'm not gonna hurt you". We ran into a restaurant that was close by, my mother in hysterics begging for the staff to call the police.
He was well gone by the time the police arrived. He was however picked up hitch-hiking a few miles down the interstate and brought to the station for us to ID him.
He was wanted for murder in California.
The next morning the redness has spread up and down my leg. I was standing at the sink shaving and passed out. I had our teenage daughter call my wife at work, who in turn called our doctor. He told her to get me to the ER immediately.
I had one of those often-deadly staph infections. I had a 104-degree fever for a week. I got septicemia, blood poisoning. I got pneumonia. They told my wife I came close to dying. (They didn't tell me.)
After a week, I was on so much antibiotics, I developed an allergic reaction and got a rash all over my body. I now am allergic to all forms of penicillin.
I was in the hospital 13 days. I lost 15 pounds in that time. (I call it the near-death diet.) When I came out, I could not walk and had zero range of motion in my right ankle. Physical therapy for several weeks thereafter fixed that.
That was my near-death experience.
Barely survived a plane crash.
German measles age eleven. Coma for a week.
Anaphylactic shock. Minutes away from dead.
For aviation enthusiasts...
More than fifteen yers ago, flying a Piper Arrow IFR, entered some freezing rain and started to get ice on the airframe rather quickly. Got clearance to land at Trenton Mercer County airport about ten miles away. I found the pitot tube heater kept tripping the circuit breaker, then finally failed completely. The static instruments froze, no airspeed, no rate of climb....
I recalled with basic flight training and kept a constant power setting and the aircraft level, descended with known pitch and power settings, and added a little more power because I could see ice on the wings. After seemingly an eternity, I landed with about 1/2” ice visible on the airframe, didnt know how much had melted off already. Just sat in the plane for almost twenty minutes in front of the FBO, finally letting go of the yoke, thanking The Lord and my flight instructor and cursing myself for getting into that situation.
Jeez...I wouldn’t know where to start!
Lung full of N2O4 at about 3PPM.
I was driving home after dark one night, a long dark road. Suddenly this voice inside my head told me I was about to die. I wasn’t afraid, didn’t panic, but I did slow down. When I reached the point around a curve that dropped sharply toward the river, a car was speeding across a two-lane bridge in my lane passing slow cars. If I’d not slowed down when I heard that “small still voice” I would have been close, or on, that bridge and probably would have met that car head on in my lane.
I did have another experience when I was about nine. Back in the sixties, my family lived in Yokosuka Japan, and the terrain was honeycombed with lots of tunnels from WWII. Even though they had been sealed, kids can be inventive, and my brother and I figured out how to get into one of those tunnels.
My dad had a large battery you could sling over your shoulder, and a handheld spotlight you could plug into it. It was brighter than hell. So we went into this tunnel, and closed how we got in so nobody could notice we were in there.
We explored really far into this tunnel, and weren’t really keeping track of the twists and turns, but I suppose we could have figured it out on the return.
So here we are, deep into this tunnel, and all of a sudden my brother drops the spotlight and it goes out.
And it doesn’t come back on. We sat there for about ten minutes in the pitch black, completely and totally blind trying to figure out why the light wouldn’t come on. I distinctly remember my panic level beginning to rise when the light didn’t come back on immediately.
We didn’t have a backup light, and we didn’t even have any matches. I remember my heart starting to pound, as the panic began to rise in our speech, the realization of the situation we had put ourselves in.
Eventually, we realized the problem wasn’t with the light, but with the cigarette lighter power connecter on the shoulder slung battery. We had to pull it out and reseat it a few times, and eventually the light came on.
We both knew that we would have never been found in time. I suppose some kind of huge search of the base would have taken place, but we were sneaky enough going in and covering our tracks we might have sealed our own fate.
I have a tiny scar on my upper arm from the time my brother dropped an eight-foot 2x8 from his treehouse twenty feet up. I was standing underneath the tree talking to Mom, and the plank just barely scraped me.