I can think of three times when I came fairly close.
The one I remember best, and which makes the best story, was the time I stared down a rattlesnake on an empty road one sunny afternoon and when I say empty, I mean neither neighbor nor animal nor random passerby would have heard me had I yelled my loudest. It was well and truly me and the snake, and the snake was already coiled and rattling.
Regarding the second time my memory is hazier. My family was in a rental van stopped at a stop sign or stoplight, and I was in the left-side (driver’s side) passenger seat when someone with neither sense nor insurance side-swiped us badly enough to tear the driver’s side rear-view mirror off completely. I know it happened, but I honestly have no memory of it beyond a few images. Maybe it’ll come back to me in a nightmare.
The third time is probably the most useful: I was in a house with my mom and our pets during the winter, and I began to feel sick to my stomach, headachy, and I just wanted to fall face-first into a nice, warm bed. The cats were inside and they would not stop meowing. The dogs had to go outside so, stomachache or not, I took them without belly-aching, and I felt better. My headache cleared. My mind cleared. My gut knotted. I remembered something, and we wound up killing a ficus due to keeping the doors and windows open in the dead of winter in Havre, Montana. It’s entirely possible my mom and I and all our pets would have died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to a blocked furnace exhaust had I not had to take the dogs out for a walk. I hope I never forget what CO poisoning feels like, but I’ll always keep a monitor by my bed, near the floor just in case.
Once while hiking in Washington’s Olympic forest, I slipped off a muddy path on a cliff about 100 feet over a glacier-fed lake. There was no shore down there, nor was there one for perhaps a quarter mile or so. I was hanging by my hands on wet muddy rocks (just like the movie trope) and my two buddies pulled me up. Then the adrenaline hit me hard.
Once while backpacking in Yosemite, we made camp and were immediately pestered by a bear. My buddies ran off, but I was really tired and stared him down. What a dumb fucking thing to do (I was about 20). He growled, and then bit my friend’s backpack, and ran away with it.
Also, on that same trip, we were blissfully hiking though a high mountain meadow, and encounted a bear cub sitting on the path. He was just cooing and looking around. We looked at him and marveled at what we had found for a few minutes, and then it sort of hit us that we should PROBABLY NOT be hanging around junior here. We took off and fortunately got away with the crime.
Hiking out of the Grand Canyon one time, I had the flu. I left my group and went back up to the top by the shortest route. It nearly killed me. It was pretty warm, and by the time I got to the parking lot, I knew heat stroke was setting in. Strangers were looking at me and commenting that I didn’t look good. I drove myself to the hospital, and my arms and hands had no feeling. I staggered into the ER, and just collapsed. I woke up about 14 hours later, in a nice bed and only my underwear. There was an IV and beeping monitor machine. They told me I was in bad shape, full on heatstroke. It took me two days before I could even drive home.
Hmmm, seems like I pushed it a few times out there in the wilderness.
The most recent was the most interesting. Last June I was on the last day of the 4 day, 105-mile Cotswold Way run (but was walking most of it). Was walking on the side of a golf course above Bath which was the final destination. Tagging along someone because I had lost my GPS. I was pretty exhausted and could only walk at a regular pace*. We were just past a dogleg when all of a sudden a golf ball whizzed past my face at around 10 feet from an unseen golfer behind me. I was so tired that I just looked up for a second and laconically stated “there’s a golf ball.”
*I had slowed almost to a crawl up hills, and the other guy’s knees hurt, so I was jogging down hills while he walked, but he caught up with me on the uphills.
I guess I could have died when I had a heart attack 52 years ago. The second time was when I had a 24 cardiogram ten years ago and the technician found gaps of up to 7 seconds that I had no heartbeat and called the cardiologist immediately (though normally it took a couple weeks to get a report) and I had a pacemaker installed in a day or so. I don’t know how close I was that time.
1952: Scarlet fever: very high fever for two weeks.
1968: Loaded gun to head by Hell’s Angels thug.
1973: Misdiagnosed ruptured appendix; botched surgery.
1998: Car teetering atop cliff on the island of Guadeloupe.
2006: Near-fatal solo hike through Horseshoe Canyon, Utah.
2008: Quadruple bypass plus aortic valve replacement surgery.
1961: Nearly fell off a railroad bridge into a river
1962: boat swamped under a large deadfall on a river. Friend managed to pull me (a non-swimmer) up on top of the log.
1964: 9.2 earthquake in Alaska
1968-1969: rocket and mortar attacks in RVN
1976: man pointing a handgun at me in a bar in Guatemala
1987: nearly run over by a large transport ship while boating on the Rein River
1997: capsized in a small boat on Lake Victoria. No danger of drowning, but hippos and crocs, ya know?
Well, let’s see now. I walked to and from school by myself about 5,000 times, sometimes at 30 below zero. I was sent outside to play unsupervised thousands of times. I rode thousands of times standing up in a car with no safety features, no car seat, no seat belts, sometimes in the bed of a pickup truck. I’ve hitchhiked thousands of miles. I’ve wandered around by myself in over a hundred countries that are classified as third-world, riding rattly old buses and eating street market food. I’ve eaten 75,000 meals without washing my hands. I’ve been outdoors in the rain, even thunder. I’ve left extension cords plugged in when not in use, scoffing at the dire warning label. I’ve been a passenger on two ships that later sank, one of them with no survivors.
Mountain climbing. There’s that helpless feeling when you hear the call of “rock” from up above as someone kicks rocks loose. I just hunkered down to make myself a small target and watched as the rocks whipped through the party. 3 people hit but only minor injuries. We were lucky.
Driving a boat on the Ohio River trying (and failing) to outrun a thunderstorm. I watched a tornado pass to the north and had lightning hit the water 50 yards from the boat. I always thought it was strange that it hit the water. We were 100 yds from a steel bridge and passing a big (steel) coal barge but the lightning didn’t hit any of us.
Climbing (well, descending after having climbed) Mount Adams many years ago with my parents. Glissading down a looong snow field, I soon found that I was sliding on a “raft” of snow that had built up underneath me, and the tree branch I had brought with me (in lieu of an ice axe) to arrest my descent could not penetrate deeply enough to dig into the stationary snow beneath. My mom, a few feet away, was having the same problem. If we didn’t get things under our control soon, the snow field would end and we would be cast at high speed into a field of large, jagged boulders, many miles from the trail head. Somehow I managed to get ahold of my mom and drag myself to the edge of the snow “raft” so that my branch could dig into solid snow and get us slowed down, but it took all of my exertion to do it; I was sore, tired, and lucky at the end of it.
Spinal Meningitis at age 3. Complicated by the fact that the doctor misdiagnosed me. Had my mother not been a nurse, and questioned the diagnosis, I’d probably be dead or severely brain damaged*. In a coma for 2 days.
*supposedly that didn’t happen, but you never know…
I had a similar experience this winter vacation but not as harrowing. I was trying to scramble down the side of Clark Gully* when I lowered myself by a branch onto what looked like a rock slide. Which was actually a mud slide covered in dry leaves which gave way when I put my weight on it. Thankfully I still held on to the branch by the back of my hand, having to hold myself as if I were dragging something heavy behind me. And then pull myself back up by it, mostly with one hand again since the tiny precipice curved away from me. I wouldn’t be able to do that again without the adrenalin.
But it wasn’t as dangerous because the downside would be that I would have slid a couple hundred feet into a gorge that I would have to find another way out of, and get extremely muddy in the process.
*which you can see can be challenging by just the topo. as a matter of fact, that’s how I found out about it, by finding it on a topo map and thinking there’d be some nice waterfalls there (there are)).
In 2008, I had double pneumonia and strep throat. At the same time. And no insurance. I struggled thru it, fever between 102-105 for a week and finally decided I HAD to go to the emergency room. They wanted to admit me, but I didn’t have anyone to take care of my dogs, so I refused to be admitted. Went home with all kinds of drugs. Took almost a month to get over it.
I was riding my horse and he was feeling chipper and gave a little buck. He came down with his front legs crossed and literally did a sommersalt. I landed first on my back, and like in slow motion, I watched 1200 lbs of horse coming down on top of me. I remember closing my eyes and thinking ‘this is going to hurt’. Instead, he twisted his body hard and landed NEXT to me. It’s the only thing that saved me.
Crazy woman opened fire at my school when I was 16. Fortunately she was a really bad shot.
Gang shoot out across the street when I was baby-sitting. 16 as well.
Crossed the tracks immediately in front of the express commuter train (I thought it was NOT the express and it was stopping). I missed the train by milliseconds. Folks were grabbing me and pulling me onto the platform.
Bear circling my tent while camping and nudging my sleeping bag repeatedly (while I was in it).
F3 tornado crossing directly over my car.
Plane I was in narrowly missed another plane in flight.
