I was in a strange conversation the other day about close calls. You know situation where you could have kicked the bucket. I’ve had a good number of close call over the years. From people pulling guns on me,an attempted drowning, guys trying to run me over,people letting pit bulls lose on me. I even had a situation where a woman lied on me and tried to get some local drug dealers to kill me. This is just the tip of the ice berg honestly.
I was wondering what close calls other people have been in over the years. Am I unique in this way or are there multiple situation where you could have been like Norman Greenbaum going up to the spirit in the sky.
I’ve never had anything close to those experiences. I’ve been in a few car crashes, but have never been injured. When we were about 10 yo, my friend and I went ice fishing with her dad. We brought our sleds and went roaming around in the woods (alone!). She brought a hatchet because she wanted to cut down a Christmas tree (What parent would allow any of this today!??). She had ice/snow coated mittens on. When she swung the hatchet, it slid out of her hands and went whizzing by my face. That was a close call. We still talk about that incident - we’re 60.
Heh. Just a week or so ago a guy texted me that he was going to come kick my ass! Boy was he pissed off. He and his girlfriend had just purchased my pontoon boat. In the notary parking lot his gf had paid me with bundles of hundred dollar bills. The following day I was thinking about what to do with the cash.
I sat unbundling the bills and was surprised to find that one of the bundles was two short (only $800). On the paper strap around that bundle someone had written **2. I was a little pissed off, but then I remembered I’d never returned the $100 bill they’d given for me to hold the boat, so I was really only shorted $100 and I could live with that.
Later, the guy sends me a text telling me I’d never returned his $100 deposit. I replied, telling him that actually his payment was $200 short; the $100 deposit made that only $100 short, but I was cool with that. He replied calling me a Mother Fucking Con Man (which was kinda cool) and threatening that he was going to hunt me down and kick my lying ass.
I was thinking about what to do next, when I got a very nice text message from the girlfriend, apologizing for her error. She’d pulled two hundreds from one of the bundles in case she needed it for notary fees. She said she marked the bundle but was so happy and excited about the boat that it entirely slipped her mind.
I forwarded the texts her boyfriend had sent, complete with his threats. She apologized and offered to drop off the $100 she owed, I told her to put it toward anger management classes for her guy. Can’t wait to run into them at the marina.
I rolled my car after spinning out on the freeway (I got run off the road by a driver not checking their blind spot). The roll wasn’t scary; I had come to a stop but flipped over gently into the roadside drainage ditch. The near-death part was when I had spun 180° and was face to face with a Jeep. I thought I was toast, but instead kept spinning out of the way.
I’m also a cancer survivor, so my wife told me to stop tempting death.
I got caught in a riptide at the beach about 20 years ago. I was in college on spring break with friends. It brought me something like a mile down the beach, and since I was gone for an hour, my friends assumed I’d drowned. My lungs hurt for a week afterwards, and I had nightmares of drowning for years (still do, very occasionally). If there’s a multiverse, I probably died in most of the other versions of that event.
Slightly less life threatening - I survived an at sea collision on a Navy submarine. We were physically stuck to the freighter that hit us for at least an hour, and if it had started to sink it would have taken us down too (and we weren’t at all rigged for diving).
And even less - I was attacked by three Honduran youths in the town of Copan in 2007. They were trying to rob me late at night. Lucky for me, they had no weapons worse than broken bottles, and I fought them off. I still wonder why they targeted me - they were skinny little guys and I’m 6’ tall and over 200 lbs, even 3 on 1 they weren’t much of a threat.
Didn’t realize how bad it was until I saw the videos. I remember thinking “oh my god, I’m gonna roll over” and then thinking “calm down, you’re over reacting, just hold on and ride it out, can’t do anything about it”, while it was happening. Then when I saw the videos, I realized, I did actually almost roll over, I had two wheels off the ground.
Luckily I walked away unscathed, but it could have been a whole lot worse and can you imagine if someone was walking on the sidewalk right there.
At least I got a lot of mileage out of the phrase “and I got hit by a fucking bus last week/month, anyone can suddenly be dead” every time my dad would say something about being 65 and how he ‘might not be here tomorrow’.
TLDR if you don’t want to watch the video. I got rear ended by a bus, it pushed me for about a block, up a curb and into a small retaining/garden wall.
I’ve had a few “should not still be here” incidents (blacking out from hypothermia when I was on the ice in the middle of lake and a storm came up, having my tiny old sporty-car T-boned by an 18-wheeler at full speed)…
… and I consider every day since then “Bonus Time”.
Or maybe it’s like Stoppage Time in soccer matches. (Omigosh, I just did the math, and I was only 26 then. I’ve had more Bonus Time since then, than I did before that. Woo-hoo!)
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ETA: Wow, Joey_P! Glad you’re still here. (Why didn’t anyone get video of me vs. semi? Oh, it was before iPhones or dashcams…)
When I was 10, my cousins and I went on a family outing to a lake. I could not swim, but I waded out as far as I physically could–not as far as I should, but as far as I could. If the water had been perfectly flat, it would have been about half-way between my chin and my lower lip. But it wasn’t flat–there was a little chop from the wind.
So that meant that whenever a little wave would come by, I would have to jump in order to keep my mouth above the water. It worked just fine, until the time when I slipped and lost my footing, and went under.
Just two I can think of.
Lived alone in a flat across the street from the ocean for several years and had an (unwise) habit of swimming alone when the waves were nice and big. Went out past the breakers on an unfortunate day when the currents were just right and couldn’t get back to shore. Fought like mad against the rip currents on a last ditch effort after multiple unsuccessful attempts and finally made it back dead exhausted lying in the sand for a good long time.
Another time I was driving in the dead of night on an interstate in the middle of nowhere where it was common for people to be cruising along at 90. Came over a rise and had to stop rather abruptly for stopped up traffic. Another car came over the rise shortly after me and was late on stopping, and locked up his brakes fishtailing towards me at well over 60. I had nowhere to go and just braced myself watching him approach in the rearview mirror. At the last moment he careened past my left and down into the ditch roostertailing dirt and debris behind him.
I suppose mine is very similar to this, although not nearly as serious. I was riding my bike back to work after running some errand over lunch. I was at a red light in the lane going straight ahead. To my right, in the right turn only lane, was an old lady driving an early 1980s F150. When the light turned green I started riding straight ahead across the intersection, towards the bike lane that started on the other side. The old lady on my right also drove straight ahead, as she hadn’t realized she was in a right turn only lane, and didn’t see me right in front of her, and drove right into the back of my bike. Thankfully, she was driving very slowly, as she was, well, driving like an old lady. My injuries were no worse than if I’d simply taken a bad spill. In retrospect, I really should have realized she might try to go straight when she just sat there in the right turn lane without making any attempt to turn right on red.
A witness called the police. An officer came and took an accident report. He cited the old lady and started the process of possibly revoking her drivers license as he believed she may have been no longer fit to drive at her age (she was in her late 80s). He said I could possibly be called as a witness at her hearing, but I was never contacted, so I have no idea how it ultimately turned out.
I was driving up a steep slope leading to the parking lot of our apartment building in a tiny hatchback (Toyota Tercel) with an idiot right up on my tail.
As I got to the top a huge garbage truck starts backing toward me. I had nowhere to go. I blared the horn but the truck kept coming. As it picked up the front of my car, I bailed out after engaging the parking brake.
Somehow the angle of the car and the shape of the back of the truck caused the car to be wedged under the truck and crushed like a soda can before the driver realized what he was doing. The steering wheel was pressing into the passenger seat by that time.
Literally a fraction of a second after I jumped out the door would not have opened, I’m sure.
The City paid out $350 for the car. It was 9 years old with 170k miles. Even in 1991 it would cost me at least $1200 to replace it from a used car lot. I was too poor to fight it. You couldn’t take a municipality to small claims court apparently.
Omigosh, I’d forgotten how adventurous (stupid) I was as a kid. Our family would rent a cottage on Lake Michigan, which would get some huge waves during a storm. Of course, a friend and I would … (spoilered due to sheer idiocy) …
Dive in as deep as we could and try to get the rip tide to carry us “out to sea”. We’d have to hold our breath for a minute or two til the current let go of us. We’d hoot and holler at how far out we were… and spend the next hour trying to get back to shore. (Oh, I see Lake Michigan now has periodic official rip tide warnings, and a documentary.)
When I was around 8 or so, I lost control of my bike and rolled from the sidewalk down a small slope to the road below, but fortunately there were no oncoming cars and I was able to pull myself off the road in time.
When I was a teenager, I was attacked by a Great Dane while jogging at night. The owner was present and called off his dog, which was probably the only reason I survived. Turned out the leash was really long, which is why the owner didn’t notice my presence before his dog jumped me. I had to get my mouth stitched up, and to this day I still have loss of sensation in the area that was bitten.
I have had a harrowing car accident and made a poor choice in climbing once, but the closest to death I have been was when I was in college and investigated some loud noises while walking back from class. Turns out it was a shooter who had already killed one person and only barely missed killing three more due to a poor job of leading the targets (that were a hundred yards away or so). I was about 20 feet from her when I came around the bushes and saw her.
After the couple seconds it took to realize what was happening I charged forward and she leveled the rifle at my chest and pulled the trigger… and nothing happened. She had forgotten to close the bolt when reloading. I grabbed the rifle and then had to dodge a few stabs with a hunting knife before she followed swung too hard on one stab and buried the knife in her own leg by accident. Haven’t thought about that one in quite a while.