This January, after the biggest ice storm I’ve ever witnessed, I stepped out of my building onto a small set of steps that were covered in slick ice. In what were probably the most graceful* three seconds of my life, I slipped off the first step, landed on my feet on the second step, slid off that, repeated the process on the third step, and landed on my feet on the sheet of ice covering the sidewalk so that I could gingerly shuffle to class.
*in result only. In reality, I experienced that “Oh, shit!” slipping feeling four times and probably accompanied it with the requisite jerking and flailing about. But I didn’t notice that. Because I was busy not falling.
I was on a friend’s trampoline in their back yard. I decided to jump realll high, and dontcha know I went flying off the thing-must have been 8 feet in the air at my apex. The martial arts I took as a kid long ago must have kicked in, or I copied a move from a movie or something, because I rolled with the impact, stood up, and brushed myself up. My sister’s boyfriend incredulously asked me if I was okay, and I was. Not even the slightest little sprain or bruise.
I was riding my bike home from my very last final exam of my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin. I was cruising down the road and saw a car approaching with his left turn signal on. Just as I reached the intersection, the driver without hesitating turned left right in front of me. I locked the brakes and went into a skid sideways. The car ran right over my right foot and crushed the back half of my bike. I had tire treadmarks all over my right shoe.
It didn’t hurt a bit. One half second later and I would have been dead or at least seriously injured. I ended up getting paid almost the original cost of my bike and sold the components to a bike shop for another sum that I forget. I also didn’t have to pay to ship the bike home with me.
I know the person who invented the ceramic for those fancy microwaves…and it was created by an accident too. And nobody was hurt in the process… I have a piece of that stuff.
When I was 20 I was in a hurry on Christmas Eve to flee the boring family routine to go to a bon voyage party for my two very closest friends who were launching a trip to Florida. I finally found my window of ‘escape’ and jumped in my Ford Torino to dash off the the party that was already underway. Just outside of our subdivision the road crossed over a canal. This is Michigan in December and the road over the water was iced over. I was “gunning it” in my rush, not going super speedy fast but when I hit the ice it did not matter, I was doing 360’s over and over again. All I could think was…I am going in the water! There was no way to gain control over the vehicle on pure black ice. But as soon as I thought this, it was as if my car was just a matchbox car in the hands of a higher power, it was stopped instantly and in the right direction in the perfect location on the lane I should be in. It was very freaky! Then I ‘heard’ the voice in my head, much smarter and wiser than I ever was at that age, tell me very clearly…Slow Down!!! I answered out loud, ok, I promise. Set me straight in a hurry! Literally!
I was finishing up a morning’s work at the barn. A very placid, gentle, and rather large horse was standing in the aisle, and I, as was my wont, was standing in the door of the feed room, well out of striking distance, chatting with the horseshoer.
Horse suddenly and for no reason spooked violently, lept towards me, and kicked out. He nailed me solid on the muscled part of my thigh with the full force of his hind leg. It hurt like hell for 1/2 and hour, and I had a bruise the exact shape of a horseshoe that took a month to heal, but that was it.
It was a really lucky shot… I’m only 5’2" – a few inches different and I would have no knee at all left. In fact, if the horse had connected anywhere other than the biggest muscle covering the strongest bone in the human body, I’d have had a serious injury. Vets call the area within reach of the hind legs, “the kill zone.”
I was taking beginners riding lessons for college credit. It was an offsite place that the college had contracted and had not ‘checked’ in a while. The owner was having a hard time, her horses were being put out to pasture. The horse I started on was named “patience” and she was so sweet…but was retired 3 weeks in to my course to a place that helped autistic children connect with animals. Ok so the owner brings in a brand new horse, huge!!! I am a total novice. I discover he is my horse now. I arrive at class as the horse is finishing up with someone else, a fellow student who is advanced and competes, who has ridden him for over an hour. My instructor tells me, this is your horse. The fellow student looks at her like she is nuts. She knows the horse now and knows my skill level. The horse just wants to take a break and is heading for the stall very strong willed. The instructor yells at me and says, take him firmly and get out there and ride him. So I have a ‘pow wow’ with this incredible beast, totally respecting the power he has. I said to him, whatever happens, don’t hurt me! Then I climb on and we begin to trot around the rink…we are learning English Riding. We are fine going away from the open gate but the minute he sees the gate he takes off into a gallup! I have never done a gallup before and hold on for dear life, trying to apply what I have learned in the few weeks I have had class. The instructor comes into the rink yelling at me and closes the gate. The horse goes past and the next time around, sees the gate after clearing the far corner and makes another wild dash. He is really angry now because it is closed. He headed straight for the fence to the left where, if he wanted to, he could have easily tossed me off of him and into the river that was below the fence! I felt all the momentum going in that direction and then…he stopped and calmed down. I spoke to the horse first…I said, I am done, I am off, and you are done too. The instructor came over to us and yelled at me. I told her that she was responsible for my safety, that I was a novice but if she couldn’t see the danger in that situation I would surely take care of myself and I walked out of class that day. I reported her to the college and withdrew from the class. Unfortunately another student was seriously injured before they took my report seriously and investigated and removed their contract with her.
I was on my way home from work about 2:00 am on New Year’s Day. I was a bit tipsy (not surprising as I worked in a bar). There had been an ice-storm followed by several inches of snow the previous night, but by the time I drove to work that day the roads had been dry. Nonetheless, I was driving home very slowly in case of black ice.
I was making a right turn from one country road to another at under 10 mph when, about halfway through the turn, I started sliding diagonally in extreme slo-mo. Straight towards the ditch on the left side of the road that I was turning onto. I hoped to hit a patch of dry pavement before I got off the road, but it wasn’t to be.
As soon as I knew for sure that I was going in the ditch I floored it. I didn’t get much traction in the especially deep snow (covering a layer of ice) in the ditch, but it was enough that I got a little bit of control. The ditch was about twice as wide as my car so my wheels were well up each side, and the slightest steering movements were magnified making it very hard to keep from going up one side or the other. I kept it floored because I was only getting about 30 mph as it was and letting off would have surely got me bogged in. At that speed, with so little traction, and with the steepness of the sides of the ditch I felt that I wouldn’t be able to get back up to the road.
About a quarter of a mile down the road, it and the ditch made a slight left turn. I, somehow, threaded the needle all that way. When I got there I kept it floored and steered straight until the last micro-second and then turned slightly left and didn’t touch the pedals at all.
I popped back up onto the road going about 5 mph in the middle of my lane and in control. Five minutes later I was at home chugging a beer with a shaky hand and feeling much more sober than I wanted to be.
My tracks in the ditch were clearly visible in the slowly melting snow for two weeks.
I was in a three car accident, in which I was smashed in the driver’s side rear quarter by one car and then, as I veered into the other lane, struck by another car right in the middle of the passenger’s side. I walked away completely unhurt, and the car suffered only cosmetic damage.
[ul]
[li]One college freshman.[/li][li]One girlfriend.[/li][li]Lots of alcohol.[/li][li]One 1982 Camaro.[/li][li]One bad breakup.[/li][/ul]
Take one college freshman and girlfriend, add alcohol, put the couple in the Camaro for the drive back to her dorm. Have girlfriend dump the freshman upon arrival.
Have the freshman decide to drive to his dorm on the back roads as he’s drunk and doesn’t want to bump into the campus police. Have the freshman decide that it would be interesting to see if he could hit 60 mph on Curlicue Road. It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with the attributes that contributed to the road’s name.
This recipie usually ends up with a crashed car, a dead or injured freshman, upset parents, stronger alcohol policies at institutions of higher learning, perhaps a new park bench in the deceased freshman’s memory, and other things.
I must have forgotten to preheat the oven because none of the above happened. I braked lightly when I started to drift, lost control of the car, nearly sprained my foot pushing HARD on the brake pedal, and remember screeching tires, spinning in circles, and waiting for the crash and the pain and the blood and maybe the white light.
I wound up in the middle of the road but facing the edge of the roadway almost exactly 90 degrees away from the way I had been driving. It was as if the car had been held in place by some force outside the laws of physics. One two-point turn later I was headed to my dorm at a much slower rate of speed. Not a scratch on me or on the car.
I avoided Curlicue Road for a long time as I didn’t want to see the skid marks and find out exactly how close I came to oblivion. I quit driving while drunk as well.
In 4th grade we were playing football on a friends icy driveway while waiting for the schoolbus. My friend slid on the ice, out into the street, and got struck by a car driving by that threw him about 15 feet into a snowbank.
He could walk and had no pain but said he felt shook up so he stayed home for the day. I assume his mother took him to the doc to make sure everything was fine. He was back at the bus stop the next day.
In grade school, I was hanging out with a friend at her parents’ farm. No being especially bright, we were leaning on an electric fence. It was off at the time of course. Then her dad (not knowing we were leaning on it) turned it on. I have no idea what the voltage was. I know one second we were leaning against the fence, the next we were laying on the ground. The weird thing was that neither of us felt any pain. It actually took us a few minutes to figure out what the hell happened. Even if we blacked out for the actual shock, you’d think there’d be some soreness or something afterwards.
I was the victim of random violence, where 7 or 8 people I had never seen before and had no connection to jumped out of the back of a truck and beat me mercilessly. I walked home with footprints all over my head and back and arms.
I examined my injuries in the shower. I had a little trickle of blood coming from my nose and my legs were a little tired from the walk. My knuckles were sore on the right hand, and there was a little blood that I’m pretty sure wasn’t mine on the shoulder of my shirt. After all that trouble, I probably hurt them with a lucky wild swing than they hurt me.
I guess I’ll post, even though I was the potential hurter, not the hurtee.
I was sixteen, driving too fast on an icy two-lane Montana road. Stupidly, I pulled out to pass a slow-moving pickup truck. I lost control on the ice and the back end of my (well, my dad’s) Bronco fishtailed around and slammed into the back quarter-panel of the pickup. This skewed me off to the left, and I was then headed towards the guardrail on the other side of the road, and the cliff beyond it. I pulled the Bronco back to the right as hard as I could, smashed into the front quarter-panel of the pickup truck, and followed it down into the ditch.
I totalled that pickup truck. Front and back quarterpanels smashed to hell, both axles bent. If I’d hit the driver’s door, I’m 100% certain I would have killed him.
Anyone familiar with the Pasadena Freeway in LA will appreciate this. There are several onramps along that stretch of the 110 where you must come to a full stop and wait before merging onto the freeway, and you have a VERY short distance in which to merge. I was doing this one morning during a light drizzle, and as soon as I got a gap in traffic, I floored my little Peugeot. And promptly spun the car so that I was facing oncoming traffic. Despite the panic in my head, my body had the good sense to accelerate going the wrong way far enough that I could make a U-turn before traffic got to me.
The other one happened just last week, and I have no idea if I was in a lot of danger or none at all. We’d just finished having our bathroom painted, and the bathroom has one of those in-wall old-fashioned coil heaters. I’d removed the screws and sat the heater down on the floor during the painting process, never giving any thought to the fact that the exposed wires behind it and still connected were live. Well, when I went to re-mount the heater, I just shoved it back in the enclave I’d pulled it out of, and according to my father-in-law, pushed some live wires up against each other. I screamed something obscene as everything sparked and flamed, and I managed to leave a scorch mark on the bathroom wall, but the electricity never touched me.
When I was six I decided it would be great fun to ride down the steep, rickety wooden basement stairs in a big cardboard box. Of course the box tipped forward on the third or fourth step and spilled me out, but somehow I managed to roll the rest of the way and come to a stop inches away from the heating unit at the bottom of the stairs. I wasn’t even bruised, but I didn’t do it again, as it really wasn’t great - or any - fun at all.
Hit a really bad patch of ice on I95 in NC back in 81. We started to slide at about 50 mph after seeing the car in front of us rear end the car in front of him. The truck we were in did a 360 3 TIMES! When it came to rest in the right lane facing the right direction we had threaded through 6 accidents including an 18 wheeler that hit 3 other cars. It was amazing, everytime we were about to hit someone, someone else would hit them first and bump them out of our path. It was the worst pile-up I’ve ever seen up close and we were able to just drive away.
When I was about 13, I ran into a stop sign at the bottom of a long hill, on my bicycle. I knocked the sign out of the pavement, flew over the handle bars and scraped my knees. I’m lucky that I haven’t been on an IV diet for the last 33 years.