|
|
 |
Saturday
March 20, 2010 Since 1922 |
Close calls
By Jane Howard Lee
Contributor Published November 19, 2009 The trip home from the office a couple days ago almost cost me my life.
I had one of those really close calls, the kind that take your breath away, leave you gasping, shaking and knowing that you almost met your maker.
I'm sure a lot of you have had some of those close calls.
I've had quite a few. I've had so many, in fact, that I developed pretty early on in my life a certainty that the good Lord must have plans for me, to have let me escape what seemed certain death so many times.
It started early for me.
I had illnesses as a baby and toddler that doctors did not think I would survive.
Survive, I did.
When I was about four years old, a little friend and I were running around a park on the California coastline. The park was on a cliff and looked out over the Pacific. I'm sure that now there is a sturdy guardrail or fence of some kind there but in those days there was nothing like that, just land and then suddenly no land. Anyway, we were running towards the edge when our parents screamed for us to stop.
I did.
She didn't.
My little friend died that day.
I survived.
Another time I remember was in my high school days. My friend Sherry and I were in her tiny little Opel Kadett with a sun roof that water poured through when it rained and a hole in the floorboard where things tended to disappear if you dropped them. It was the kind of car that could be in a head-on collision with a German Shepherd and come out second best.
We were on an unauthorized road trip to visit her father and brother in another state, traveling without the knowledge of my parents and Sherry's mother. We were supposed to be on a school trip, I think.
Anyway, we were driving very late at night and somehow got lost in some kind of railroad yard and no matter how we tried we just couldn't seem to find a way out. There were trains coming at us from all directions, it seemed. We crossed track after track, many of them with trains sitting still on them, then we'd come out from behind a stopped train to find one heading right at us, blinding us with those big single headlights.
It was terrifying. We really thought we were going to get smashed and killed by a train that night but we finally found a way out. Sounds silly, I know, but believe me, it didn't feel silly. It was truly terrifying. If Stephen King had written a book about killer trains, that incident could have been a perfect scene for it, but obviously we survived.
When I was in college I traveled to visit my folks who lived in Indonesia for several years while my father worked there and on one trip had an experience at a remote airport with some people who no doubt called themselves freedom fighters..
It was an extremely hairy situation, made worse by a fellow traveler who kept muttering "we're all going to die" again and again and again and again.
We were stuck there for hours while our hosts made a lot of phone calls from the tiny little airport where this took place, then they suddenly just melted away into the jungle and left us there wondering "what was that all about?"
Just a couple of weeks later another group of travelers found themselves in the same situation at another small airport in that country, possibly with the same freedom fighters. A government force stepped in, a gun battle ensued and many of the travelers died during the rescue.
That could have been me and my group, but we survived.
Once again that feeling of impending doom was replaced by the sudden realization that life was going to go on after all.
When you've had a few of those experiences - when a sure sense of impending doom is suddenly replaced by the realization that life is going to go on after all, you can't help but wonder why.
I figure if it is part of a plan, then we don't get to know details like that any time soon, but maybe there is something that we are supposed to do. It probably isn't going to be finding a cure for cancer or establishing world peace, but maybe some little thing I do will somehow lead to someone else doing something important.
Or maybe I'm just lucky.
There have been lots more incidents, but those are the most dramatic and unusual ... so far.
A couple of days ago I was behind a truck pulling a trailer loaded with three of those big round bales of hay when it pulled onto a right turn lane on FM 565. As I caught up to it, I started to just go on by but then something made me wonder if maybe, just maybe someone else was on that other road and about to pull out in front of me ... someone who thought they could see enough and didn't realize that my itty-bitty car was in what was a blind spot to that other driver.
I hit the brakes, slowing down quite a bit.
As my car pulled up next to the front of the turning truck, an SUV shot out from that intersecting road, heavy on the gas.
I slammed on my brakes then and since I had already slowed down, was able to stop in time.
If I hadn't slowed down, there would have been one heck of a wreck and I don't think I would have come out of it in good shape.
So was that just good instincts or maybe something more? Did a Divine Hand or Guardian Angel or lucky charm get me through that and the other situations unscathed? Did it happen because I still have something I'm supposed to do in life? Did I do that thing (whatever it was) in the days since that near collision so that now my luck or protection or whatever is cancelled and the next incident won't be a near miss?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Jane Howard Lee is a reporter for the Baytown Sun.
Contributor Published November 19, 2009 The trip home from the office a couple days ago almost cost me my life.
I had one of those really close calls, the kind that take your breath away, leave you gasping, shaking and knowing that you almost met your maker.
I'm sure a lot of you have had some of those close calls.
I've had quite a few. I've had so many, in fact, that I developed pretty early on in my life a certainty that the good Lord must have plans for me, to have let me escape what seemed certain death so many times.
It started early for me.
I had illnesses as a baby and toddler that doctors did not think I would survive.
Survive, I did.
When I was about four years old, a little friend and I were running around a park on the California coastline. The park was on a cliff and looked out over the Pacific. I'm sure that now there is a sturdy guardrail or fence of some kind there but in those days there was nothing like that, just land and then suddenly no land. Anyway, we were running towards the edge when our parents screamed for us to stop.
I did.
She didn't.
My little friend died that day.
I survived.
Another time I remember was in my high school days. My friend Sherry and I were in her tiny little Opel Kadett with a sun roof that water poured through when it rained and a hole in the floorboard where things tended to disappear if you dropped them. It was the kind of car that could be in a head-on collision with a German Shepherd and come out second best.
We were on an unauthorized road trip to visit her father and brother in another state, traveling without the knowledge of my parents and Sherry's mother. We were supposed to be on a school trip, I think.
Anyway, we were driving very late at night and somehow got lost in some kind of railroad yard and no matter how we tried we just couldn't seem to find a way out. There were trains coming at us from all directions, it seemed. We crossed track after track, many of them with trains sitting still on them, then we'd come out from behind a stopped train to find one heading right at us, blinding us with those big single headlights.
It was terrifying. We really thought we were going to get smashed and killed by a train that night but we finally found a way out. Sounds silly, I know, but believe me, it didn't feel silly. It was truly terrifying. If Stephen King had written a book about killer trains, that incident could have been a perfect scene for it, but obviously we survived.
When I was in college I traveled to visit my folks who lived in Indonesia for several years while my father worked there and on one trip had an experience at a remote airport with some people who no doubt called themselves freedom fighters..
It was an extremely hairy situation, made worse by a fellow traveler who kept muttering "we're all going to die" again and again and again and again.
We were stuck there for hours while our hosts made a lot of phone calls from the tiny little airport where this took place, then they suddenly just melted away into the jungle and left us there wondering "what was that all about?"
Just a couple of weeks later another group of travelers found themselves in the same situation at another small airport in that country, possibly with the same freedom fighters. A government force stepped in, a gun battle ensued and many of the travelers died during the rescue.
That could have been me and my group, but we survived.
Once again that feeling of impending doom was replaced by the sudden realization that life was going to go on after all.
When you've had a few of those experiences - when a sure sense of impending doom is suddenly replaced by the realization that life is going to go on after all, you can't help but wonder why.
I figure if it is part of a plan, then we don't get to know details like that any time soon, but maybe there is something that we are supposed to do. It probably isn't going to be finding a cure for cancer or establishing world peace, but maybe some little thing I do will somehow lead to someone else doing something important.
Or maybe I'm just lucky.
There have been lots more incidents, but those are the most dramatic and unusual ... so far.
A couple of days ago I was behind a truck pulling a trailer loaded with three of those big round bales of hay when it pulled onto a right turn lane on FM 565. As I caught up to it, I started to just go on by but then something made me wonder if maybe, just maybe someone else was on that other road and about to pull out in front of me ... someone who thought they could see enough and didn't realize that my itty-bitty car was in what was a blind spot to that other driver.
I hit the brakes, slowing down quite a bit.
As my car pulled up next to the front of the turning truck, an SUV shot out from that intersecting road, heavy on the gas.
I slammed on my brakes then and since I had already slowed down, was able to stop in time.
If I hadn't slowed down, there would have been one heck of a wreck and I don't think I would have come out of it in good shape.
So was that just good instincts or maybe something more? Did a Divine Hand or Guardian Angel or lucky charm get me through that and the other situations unscathed? Did it happen because I still have something I'm supposed to do in life? Did I do that thing (whatever it was) in the days since that near collision so that now my luck or protection or whatever is cancelled and the next incident won't be a near miss?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Jane Howard Lee is a reporter for the Baytown Sun.