I was working as a janitor in a textile sweatshop during my college years and used the company truck to get supplies and a quick bite to eat. Driving south on CA 227 on clear sunny day, I noticed a transparent, glitter like substance in the air about a 100 feet in front of me. I had absolutely no idea what it was until I hit the cloud, and realized it was a swarm of insects. Both windows were open, and for about a second I wondered what kind of insects they were. Well, they had some sort of stinging mechanism (d’oh!). Tiny parts of my back, right arm, and neck were being envenomated by some angry bees. I swerved off the road onto the shoulder, slamming the brakes with my right foot and stamping the floor with my left foot trying to stymie a second possbile wave of those flying scorpions. I then jumped out of the truck, ripping my shirt off to try to scratch out the stingers, while dancing trying to make sure non of those honey-making bastards weren’t following me out of the vehicle. I didn’t suffer any allegic reaction, but I now brake for swarms… 
I have two, but I couldn’t pick because they are scary in different ways.
The first was kind of… well, eerie I guess. I was driving in a fog at night on a country road that I knew from lots of experience almost never had traffic. And I was going at normal speeds (probably should have been going slower because of the fog, but I had a friend in college who did drive slower in fog once and got rear ended AND ticketed for driving too slowly, believe it or not) and spot something on the road, for like a split second. Looked like a mouse or some other tiny animal rushing across to the other side. I hit the brake a little, not really knowing what I saw but not wanting to hit some poor animal. And then maybe a mile or two later something else dashes across the road, except larger. I was thinking farm cat or something at this stage. I seem to remember seeing yet another one that looked slightly too large for a farm cat, but that may have been added as I told the story to people later, I don’t know. But by this point I slowed down quite a lot. I was actually fairly weirded out that I’d see a couple of animals doing their best to be road kill in such a short distance. Probably at that point I was down to 10 mph, and being very cautious. And then, pow, what should I see come out of the fog, but a deer trotting right down the middle of the lane directly for me! So I slammed the brakes, came to a complete stop and stared right at the deer at it looked at me and then walked around me and dashed off. And although I normally don’t have a superstitious bone in my body, I really don’t know why progressively larger animals all happened to be in my path that night. I do know that the remaining distance I had to drive took a lot longer than normal because my nerves were shot and I half expected something else to jump in front of me.
The second was driving on a three of four lane highway in the evening… I was in the far left lane, casually trying to pass a clump of cars in the lanes to the right but without going excessively over the limit (those lanes were probably going five mph over or something, I was probably not that much more at that point). Then I looked up ahead to where a bridge crossed over the highway and saw a car completely stopped in the far left lane under the bridge. No lights or flares to let anyone see them, in the gloom underneath a bridge, in the fast lane. My lane. So I look to the right and see in front of me that there’s nothing in the lanes ahead of this clump of cars. I gun it, pull ahead and then dip into the next lane over, putting a fair amount of distance between me and the cars in the right lanes behind me. OK, so I’m all good, right, I can breathe easy, and other people in the lane should be able to see ahead and do what they need to do to not hit the car. But what I didn’t count on was some idiot thinking that he was going to drag race me or something! He comes barreling up from the left lane, zooming along and passing my already quite excessive speed (though I probably slowed down some as soon as I was out of the left lane, I don’t know). In the meantime I’m thinking, Oh my god, what’s he doing? He had plenty of clearance to get behind me into this lane, didn’t he?. I immediately pulled over to the right another lane or two to try to give him room, thinking he was going to swerve out of his lane and probably in front of me. But he wasn’t trying to get ahead of me to get into my lane quick. This guy… he just… never even slows down… or tries to get out of the lane… at all. I don’t know if he was looking at me when he passed to try to see who he outraced or if he was just going so fast that he didn’t have the reaction time he needed or what. He plows right into the back end of the parked car. Worst thing I think I ever saw live in person. Pieces of his car are flying everywhere… so much so that they become an immediate road hazard. Ahead of me. So my already white knuckles grasp even firmer on the wheel and get ready to swerve some bits of wreckage. Luckily all I got in my lane at that moment was his rearview mirror (passenger side presumably), and I watched as it came at me and then bounced off the side of my car. Behind me were the sound of probably dozens of screeching tires. Nobody else was involved in the crash, because at the very least this collision let everyone behind me who might not have otherwise seen the parked car now see that something very, very bad was going on. And even though I wasn’t trying to race anyone and was just trying to find the most efficient way to get clear to save my hide, and I wasn’t charged for anything and nobody had a bad word to say about how I handled it, it’s still disturbing to think about. I never asked the cops or watched the news to see if the guy survived, because I just can’t imagine how anyone could have lived through that. I don’t want to know I watched someone get crushed. I also purposeffully avoided finding out if the parked car was abandoned, or if it was some prior accident or vehicle breakdown of some sort with people nearby. I didn’t see anyone else. I hope nobody else was there. Either way, what the heck were they doing stopped under a bridge with lights off in the fast lane?? Gah.
12 years ago, Papa Zappa and I were on our way out to dinner to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Special occasion place (l’Auberge Chez Francois, for DC-area folks) where we had to make reservations 2 weeks in advance.
Windy country road to get there. Oh, and did I mention it had rained earlier that evening so the roads were a tiny bit slick?
A car coming the other way around a curve lost control and hit us - head on. We were seatbelted in so fortunately uninjured. I don’t precisely remember the impact - more a vague impression of brakes squealing, large thing Coming At Us, and screaming. Once we realized we were in fact alive, we jumped out of the car, made sure the kids in the other car (19-year-olds, in a convertible Chrysler LeBaron) were also alive, I started laughing hysterically.
Needless to say, we didn’t make our dinner reservation and in fact wound up eating Domino’s pizza when we finally made it home.
Spooky side note: the passenger in the other car had not been seatbelted - until about a mile earlier, when it occurred to him that they were getting to a windy bit of road and maybe he’d better buckle up. I’m thinking he would not have walked away from that accident otherwise.
Funny side note: The policeman was not in a jovial mood. So perhaps it was not wise of me to say to Papa Zappa, loud enough for everyone to hear, “How on earth are you going to explain this to your wife???”. The officer looked shocked and peeved and in a ticket-writin’ mood so we quickly assured him that in fact I was the wife in question.
Are you sure you’re in Arkansas? 'Cause that’s not where my little sister lives…
I got my driver’s license on my 16th birthday, as a Sophomore in high school, and my parents offered to let me use a '67 VW bug as “my” car when they didn’t need it (which was most of the time). Pretty soon after that, my little sister (a year behind me) and I decided that it made more sense for me to drive us to school than to have to get up at the break of dawn for the bus, since that gave us at least another 30 extra minutes in the morning (me for sleeping, and her for primping).
The first icy morning, though, was a fun one. The normal route I took to drop her off at school involved a rather steep on-ramp to the expressway. The roads were fine until I reached that ramp. On my way up it, I realized it was coated in ice, and my first reaction was to hit the brakes to slow down. We spun a couple of times, and I was sure that we would either roll off the edge of the ramp, or that someone else would hit us. Fortunately, traffic was very light, and what little traffic there was involved adults who were avoiding the icy ramp. When we stopped spinning, we were pointed down the ramp, in the wrong direction, but I just took it as a sign from above that we weren’t supposed to get on the expressway that morning. So down I drove, and we took surface streets the rest of the way.
Fast forward a year. We had moved to a different city, but I was still driving the two of us to school most mornings, so we wouldn’t have to take the bus. It was either early fall or spring, so the weather was good. However, a moth got into the car, and kept flying around my face. I’m driving along at 45mph (the speed limit) while trying to shoo it out an open window. I then looked up to see that the car ahead of me had stopped. I couldn’t stop, but did manage to slow down quite a bit before hitting the other car. Fortunately, our father had ingrained in us the necessity of wearing seatbelts since before either of us could walk, so no one was hurt at all. The front of my Beetle was completely caved in, but since the spare tire was in the passenger seat (instead of under the hood where it was supposed to live), but car we hit had not even a scratch. (The woman driving the other car was extremely nice to us, especially after she saw that my car had literally received all of the damage.)
Fast forward a couple more years. I’ve gone off to a different city to go to college, and no longer have to chauffeur my sister to school. However, I have a boyfriend at a different college. I have a car (my trusty VW), and he does not, so about once a month, I drive over to visit him.
One visit I made was pretty much spur of the moment. I had just found out that a good friend of ours from high school had died, so I hopped in the car to visit him, without telling anyone I was going. It was March, and a bit cold outside, but otherwise completely dry despite a light snow the night before. One part of the trip involved a short drive on a two-lane road that connected two interstates. The road curved around under a bunch of trees, and as I rounded the curve, I realized that the road was covered in black ice in the shade. Stupid me hits the brakes, and I go spinning again. But this time, I’m practically in the middle of nowhere, all alone, with no one who knows where I am, and there is a VERY large drop on the shoulder at the side of the road. I stop spinning with the rear axle of the car up on the guard rail at the top of a 20-foot ditch, and the front end of the car pointed into the road at the end of this blind curve. Since the rear end of the car is lifted off the ground, and the car is rear-wheel drive, I have no traction to get moving again. I get out of the car in part to try to see what I can do to get the car going again (this is LONG before cell phones), and in part because I’m afraid that another car is going to careem into me coming out of the curve. I’m starting to set up the jack to see if I can use it to lift the car off the guard rail, when a van full of men pulls up next to me. I explain the dilemma, and four of them simply picked up the car–one at each corner–and set it back on the road for me. The rear axle was slightly bent, but otherwise, there was no damage to anything or anyone.
I have since learned to ignore bugs in the car unless I can come to a full stop, and I no longer have the instinct to hit the brakes when I run into ice on the road.
Actually I had forgotten the single scariest incident that has happened to me. My son and I were vsiiting my brother’s farm. His son was arriving back from a trip at the bus station in town and I offered to pick him up. As I was driving, alone in the car, along a dark country road someone suddenly lunged at me from the floor on the passenger side. I swerved to the wrong side of the road before it registered that the “human head” was a balloon that my son had left in the car.
Many years ago my brother and I were recruited to help a cousin move. We hopped in my crappy 64 Mercury Comet and drove to his house in a little town called McKenna. He had a buddy there too and it took only a few hours to load the U-Haul truck. My cousin’s wife left in the U-Haul, my cousin, his friend, my brother and I had a few beers then left to go unload the truck at my cousin’s new house. My cousin at the time had a Dodge Challenger with a 440 and 6 pack carb set up. He took off down a straight but hilly road and I tried to keep up in my Comet. I was about 200 feet behind my cousin doing 80 mph when I saw his brake lights come on. I started braking but the brakes in my car were not all that swell. At about 30 mph I crested a hill, only maybe 50 feet away was a stop sign and a busy 4 lane road. I slammed on my brakes and came sliding to a stop just past the stop line. Right at that moment a tractor/trailer rig went flying by, just missing my car by about a foot. When I looked across the street, my cousin’s car was sitting just backed into a ditch with 4 black skid marks leading up to it. Needless to say we obeyed the speed limit the rest of the drive to his new house. My cousin later said he just missed broadsiding a logging truck when he slid across the street, he said he was doing about 90 when he saw the stop sign.
A couple of close calls on company business:
Mid-70’s, when I was working as a yard clerk for the local steel plant railroad, and driving a company pickup. It was the middle of the night, foggy as hell and darker than the inside of a cow. I was on the plant property. I approached an unsignalled railroad crossing, frankly unable to see a more than a few yards. Just as I start to cross, a huge black shape looms up out the murk to my right; one of the night crews just pulling away from the nearby yard office. Their headlight was on but I swear I didn’t see till I was on the crossing. Bit hard to tell with the fog and all, but to me it looked as though I’d just missed getting smeared all over the front of the locomotive. On the truck’s two-way radio I heard the engineer call the yardmaster complaining about some idiot who’d run through the crossing right in front of him, but it was so foggy he apparently couldn’t see who it was.
Sometime back around '83 I’d come off duty from my shift out at some godforsaken oil well site about forty miles of dirt road south of Wamsutter, Wyoming. It was dark but the road was mostly flat and empty so I was bombing the Toyota pickup along at about sixty. I saw the headlights of a large truck approaching at a similar rate, but thought little of it as the road on that stretch was wide enough for us to pass. When we got within a few hundred yards of each other, though, I realized that I was rapidly approaching a cattle grid that was only one lane wide, and we were going to meet at that exact spot.
There wasn’t nearly enough space to stop, and going off the road would mean going into a ditch at high speed, and probably through the fence line to boot, so I did the only thing I could: I floored it. I think I made it through with about two car lengths to spare, no doubt scaring the bejeezus out of the truck driver. I can tell you I practically soiled myself on that one.
This man has the rare combination of fast reflexes and clear-thinking boardering on crazy. Are you sure he wasn’t a superhero?
Glad everyone walked away.
That’s good to know… 
but how was your rear axle bent? I understand that the VW beetle doesn’t have a solid rear axle, which is why the rear wheels hang crokkedly when the car is on a lift.
I have a couple more:
I was driving in a residential area, and a dog suddenly darted in front of me. WHAM! I hit him solidly. I parked and got out–and then the dog was nowhere to be seen. Must have been a really robust critter.
In 1979 I rented a car in San Francisco. They were out of economy cars, so I got one the next grade up–a sporty Camaro, the kind Rockford (James Garner) drove on his show–but the one I got was candy-apple red. I was driving on the main street, Market Street, In San Francisco, and approaching an intersection. The light was red. I prepared to stop–anbd I couldn’t find the brake pedal! There were pedestrians crossing Market in front of me. At the very last moment I found the brake pedal and stopped. Who knows where I might be now if I hadn’t. 
Umm… :smack: Replace the word “axle” with the word “fender” in the above story. When the car stopped spinning, the rear fender was on top of the guard rail, so the rear wheels were only about four inches off the ground. This is why it wasn’t really that unreasonable to think that I could jack the car up enough to lift the fender off the guard rail, then nudge the car forward a little bit. (I did know how to use the jack, and had actually had to change a tire on the car once all by myself in the middle of nowhere.)
However, in the long run, it’s a VERY good thing that the men in the van showed up before I could actually get very far into the plan.
However, about a year later, I did actually have axle problems with the car. I was pulling out of a gas station right after having the annual, mandated “safety” inspection completed, and as I pulled out into the main street, one of the front axles just collapsed. This was not that scary, though, since it was a very quiet little town, with more foot traffic than car traffic, and the guys in the service station came running out to help me.
Front axle, eh? I bet something went wrong with your steering mechanism… :eek:
Nope, some part of the axle just rusted through. It was a '67 Beetle, and this was in 1982 or so, with something close to 150K on the odometer. We lived in an area of the country that sees enough snow and ice in the winter that you can count on at least three doses of salt every year. I had it towed to a local Beetle specialty shop that put a salvaged axle on it, and it lived another five years or so.
Good idea. Better you should give the car another five years.
San Francisco figured in another such incident–which could have been more scary than it was.
In September 1981 I took my 1970 VW Squareback to the Sears Auto Center in the Del Amo Mall in Torrance. As it turned out, this was on the 26th of the month–so in the waiting room I watched Nolan Ryan, then with Houston, pitching his one NL no-hitter–against the Dodgers!
Anyway, they had to replace some worn parts, including a rotor or two. The brakes worked fine for years after that.
The following January (1982), I drove to San Francisco on a Sunday. Seventy miles south of The City, in San Jose, it started to rain; it was shortly after dark. I drove for ten miles on wet freeway, and saw cars’ brake lights going on, hundreds of yards up ahead. So I gently pushed mine–and nothing happened at first! :eek:
I realized it was because of the wet roadway; shortly after I touched the pedal the surfaces on the brakes dried from the friction, and I stopped well within the distance remaining behind the cars up ahead. I remembered the work Sears did, at that point–had I not had the brakes serviced I could have spent the last 24 years in a pine box.
Three words: Wolf Creek Pass.
Forever more shall I remember that name, and the night I foolishly braved the Pass and won.
The story: I was visiting my folks in Cortez, Colorado. That’s in the southwest corner, near the Four Corners. My girlfriend at the time (we’re married now) was going to be in Colorado, too. She rode up with her folks to visit her brother in Colorado Springs. That’s way on the east side of the state. So, we had to figure some way to get together. I proposed that her folks drop her off at Fort Garland, which was a somewhat-reasonable halfway point that would have taken them about 45 minutes out of their way on their route home to Clovis, New Mexico. Her stepdad doesn’t want to do it, however, so I am forced to drive to Walsenburg to get her. This means I drive about 270 miles to get her, and they drive maybe 50 feet out of their way to drop her off. Thanks a million, pal.
The night before I’m supposed to pick her up, it starts snowing. And snowing. Colorado snow is not to be taken lightly, oh my brothers; it falls heavy and thick, and the roads are twisty and mountainous. The snow is still falling when I wake (without an alarm) at 5:45 AM to go pick her up. Clearly, I will need a 4WD vehicle. I borrow the folks’ Explorer.
The roads are bad. Not Biblical bad, but they slow me down a lot. I stop and call from as many of the towns as I can to let the folks know that I’m still on the road.
Late that morning, I hit the Pass. Wolf Creek Pass is a steep, narrow road up through the Colorado mountains. It hits its plateau at 10,856 feet. When you’re headed east, the road drops off on your right, sometimes for several hundred feet. The air is thin, and when it snows, the snow tends to hang around a while, what with the thin, chilly air and sparse traffic. When I hit the Pass, there was ice and snow on the ground. It was drivable, but pretty dicey. The first wave of snow had been and gone. But, the storm I’d just driven through was headed east, and I did not want to meet it again.
So I make it to Walsenburg about 2 hours early, because I’d started out planning for extra time in event I ran into serious trouble. I find the meeting point, a Pizza Hut, and wait. Finally, at about 2:45 PM, she gets there. I say a hasty hello and goodbye, because I know we have to get moving. I’d rather have them think me rude than die on the mountain.
The weather, as we drive, was quite nice starting out. The sun had broken through the clouds on the east side of the mountain. We head on back, through Fort Garland, through South Fork. We start up the mountain. Much to my surprise, Wolf Creek Pass isn’t so bad. A light dust of snow is falling, but it’s not enough to cause concern.
And then we hit the summit.
The storm that I’d driven through that morning had blown east and slammed up against the west side of the mountain. With nowhere to go, it boiled on top of itself and dropped its entire snowy load onto the western slope of Wolf Creek Pass. And we had to drive down it.
There was no turning back; there was no way to turn back. I put the Explorer into 4 Low and eased down. The road was completely invisible. Snow was falling so fast that tire tracks from the car in front of us vanished before we reached them. Visibility was down to perhaps two feet in front of the bumper, which itself was utterly buried in snow. As we crept down that mountain at 5 MPH, we passed trucks and cars that had pulled off to the side and stopped. That, we knew, was no option; if we did that, we’d either get slammed by some fool driver coming down the narrow mountain road too fast, or we’d be buried alive by morning. We pressed on, through the blinding snow, past the runaway truck peeloff lanes, alongside the cliff that promised every second it would swallow us whole. I spent every moment on edge for close to an hour, knowing that the slightest screw-up could be fatal. She was in tears from fear.
But sweet guinea pig of Winnipeg, we made it. It took about 40 minutes to go 5 miles, but we made it down the mountain. That day, I drove for 12 hours, through 500 miles of misery and 40 miles of pure hell. But I beat that damn mountain.
I guess after that she had no choice but to marry me, eh?