So I went to the gate because the guys from the workshop were scheduled to arrive with my repaired washing machine.
Two civilian guards, two military guards armed with G3s. I was bullshitting in mixed Arabic/English with the corporal of the guard. His buddy went into the guard shack out of my sight and began, it seems, to clean his weapon. He pulled the bolt back, and let it slide forward onto the empty chamber.
I damn near hit the deck. I turned to the corporal and yelled “Don’t ever do that!” Oddly he knew just what I meant. A bolt going forward has to be the loudest noise in the world.
We laughed. I swear adrenaline is great stuff, but kicks in just a few seconds too late.
And sometimes it is training of years ago. While in High School I got pretty good on the trampoline. About 20 years afterwards, I was up a ladder cutting a broken branch from a tree. The branch fell down, twisted on the ground and knocked the ladder out from under me. :eek:
My memory says that I hovered in mid-air, holding a running chainsaw, for about 10 seconds in a gravity-defying imitation of Wile E. Coyote. I will grudgingly agree that it was actually a millisecond, but somehow I managed to reach into the depths of my brain and find some of the trampoline training. As I started falling I threw the chainsaw away from me, figured out the best way and spot to land, managed quite a nice mid-air twist, tucked and curled to protect my neck and managed a good rolling landing on my back. I would not have believed it would have been possible to have managed all that (plus the 50 other thoughts that ran though my head during that time) and I credit it to the trampoline training from 20 years previous.
Anyway, cool story Paul, and a good reminder of how fantastic the brain can be when it wants to.
Now then, I think you should quit your day job and start a chainsaw & trampoline act! It would rake in a fortune! a fortune I tell ya… (well, either the act, or the rights to the footage of the horrible accident…)
True story: 20 years after coming back from WW2, my dad is playing golf with some buddies. A tree branch breaks with a loud CRACK!. When his 3 friends turn around from looking at the branch, they can’t see my Dad. He had jumped off the tee and was eating turf. Ironically, he was more surprised than they were, said he didn’t even realize what he was doing until afterwards. He was pretty embarrassed about it too, but his pals were totally cool about it, saying he was the only one who did the smart thing.
He and Mom both sang in the church choir. It was a very small choir, and they sat in a little raised part at the very foot of the altar. Looking up from the congregation, you had the priest’s pulpit on the right and the choir loft on the left.
One Sunday morning while the choir was singing, a lightning bolt hit the steeple. Daddy said every veteran in the Church hit the deck immediately.
Immediately after the thunderclap Dad’s voice rang out from the front: MOTHER! OF ! GAWD!!
Well, that was actually my biggest worry. OK, number two worry after the fear of being impaled on a branch. My dad was nearby. He had a stroke a few years previously (screwed up what would have been a nice retirement) and we were all pretty protective of him. One of my 50 other thoughts as I was falling was the worry that he would have another heart attack if I was injured. So, as soon as I landed I jumped up saying “I’m OK! I’m OK!”
As he walked me back to the house I tried to put his mind at ease with some small talk. The problem was that my small talk was inane babbling that did not make sense. (OK, I do that normally, but somehow this was different.) I definitely had a concussion which my mother, a retired nurse, diagnosed was mild enough not to warrant a trip to the hospital.
So, an unrelated brain-action question. Why is this 15 year old memory so clear while I have a hard time remembering what to get from the store without writing it down? No, don’t answer that. It probably has something to do with too many hits to the head and falls off ladders.
And trupa, thank you for the kind words as well. Why didn’t I think of that while I was unemployed last year? If I do try it, I assume you’ll want a cut of the accident video sales? (The act itself won’t last long. Now where’s my insurance agent’s phone number? Gotta up that policy amount so Mrs. H benefits too.)
The son of a neighbour of my parents is a Royal Marine. A short while ago he and another Royal Marine who was just back from the Middle East went to a local pub for a quiet pint. Another patron told them that somehow they had drawn the ire of a group of yobs in another corner of the pub and that the two of them would be attacked when they left. When the two of them left, the yobs were waiting for them. Big mistake: the two RMs switched into combat mode and sent the pack of them running: “I’m a Royal Marine, I’m just back from ****, and I’m going to fg rip your fg throats out.” (I imagine the language was rather more colourful). And then they just walked home. They said that their training just kicked in automatically.
another and similar ww2 tale, this one told by my mother. she and dad (in the days before me) were walking down a sidewalk somewhere in downtown chicago. they were both northwestern students and dad was barely a couple of years home from the battle of the bulge, which nearly did him in (not shot in battle. he got through that hell on earth only to nearly die of frostbite).
anyway, they’re bopping along, all is fine - until a nearby car backfired. mom jumps a little, looks around, doesn’t see dad. then she looks down. he’s face down on the concrete in textbook cover your ass mode. she was embarrassed. he wasn’t.
i have a similar tale to **mycroft’s ** of my very own. this involved a ladder but no chain saw, i’m happy to say.
i have three windows in my living room that are about 10 feet high. once a year for spring cleaning i take all the window treatments down and wash and iron the whole lot, clean the windows, and then put everything back up. it’s an all day affair. this means getting up on a ladder high enough to pull down the hardware and remove the stuff, which means you have to get up ***above * ** the window line. more like 11 to 12 feet off the ground.
not long after i moved in (i live alone), i was putting UP all the window treatments. i leaned over too far and bam! i was pitching over the top of the ladder head-first. i have no real conscious memory of what i did, but the next thing i knew, i was on the other side of the ladder and right side up.
mind you, my feet were not any on the bracing strips you see on the opposite side of ladders. i was clinging mostly with my thighs. somehowwhile i was falling, i did a kind of mid-air reverse and probably saved my life and probably my ability to walk.
i had bruises on the thigh muscles you wouldn’t believe. they hurt to look at. i didn’t walk well for weeks and took a lot of epsom salt baths and consumed at least a bottle of aspirin.
the interesting thing is i was never a gymnast, i was not in particularly great shape, if only about ten pounds heavier than i should be. i used to ride horses a lot, which may be why the thighs came to my rescue. that, and my guess is the reptile part of the brain took over - the part we don’t use much that helps us survive weird stuff like that. thank heavens for it!
oh - and i don’t do that alone any more. someone is present for the taking down and the putting up. next time, i might not be so lucky.
When I was a wee Gleena, and my father was just back from Viet Nam, one fourth of July we were sitting at a friend’s pool when one of those Whistling Pete fireworks went off. You know the kind, the ones that sound like a bomb coming in but don’t go boom at the end?
The next thing I knew, my mother and I were in the pool, my father was holding us both together with his arms, and we were shoved against the edge with our heads just above the water and my dad was sort of covering us. It happened so fast, and I had bruises where I got shoved into the lip overhanging the edge of the pool.
So yeah, his training kicked in and he was using it to put himself between us and the “bomb” that was about to land, so he would die when it hit and we would be mostly safe.
I’d like to say here that I love my dad and we get along and all that, but we don’t, mostly because Viet Nam broke him badly. He’s pretty hateful and not a nice guy. But once, when I was still his little girl, he tried to give his life to save me, even though it wasn’t a real situation - although in his mind I have no doubt that it absolutely was real in the moment it was happening. So even though I don’t have my dad anymore (he’s not dead, we’re just very estranged) I’ll always have that, anyway.
My friend had a house that included a back deck/patio that overlooked a large ravine/wooded area with very large trees. We were sitting around one night drinking a few brewskis when one of these trees (or a big assed branch) decided it was going to fall over. While everyone else sat there going “Oh my, well isn’t that interesting” my brain said “OH SHIT - RUN!!!”
They said they’ve never seen someone move that fast.
ETA - it turned out that nothing even fell towards us and everyone was fine. Well, everyone but me and my dignity.
I was watching one of those Discovery documentaries about how the body works, and indeed, in moments of extreme stress, it does appear that time slows down for you. They had first-time bungee jumpers leap with a timer in their hand that digitally ticked off the seconds, normally too fast for the eye to read. All the bungee jumpers had no problem reading the seconds as they ticked off during the jump. It’s a trick your brain does, to give you “more” time to asses the situation and handle it.
A very different situation, but sticking to the “years of training kicking in” - a couple of months ago, my band had a gig. That afternoon, I collapsed in my house - this sudden, onset flu bug that had me puking for an hour, completely immobile. I’m not sure how, but I made it to the gig that night and was seemingly fine - but towards the end my body said “enough” and I collapsed again. But during the last song, my bandmates were looking at me, apparently as pale and wet as the belly of a fish, looking like I had fainted standing up - but my hands where still moving, finishing off the song. I really have no recollection of how I kept playing…just on autopilot.
ivylass, the couple of times that the time-slowing effect has happened to me it has been a stunning and thought provoking indication of what the brain/body can do when necessary. Pretty much the whole point of what Paul was getting at in the OP. Another memorable time-slowing event was when I spun out in a snowstorm on I-94 in Wisconsin. It all turned out OK (and at least did not involve chainsaws) and was ego-boosting to know that I could react like that when necessary.
Paul in Saudi, I loved the St. Peter joke! And, Gleena, thank you for sharing your story. That was incredibly touching.
Mycroft and Schuyler thanks. I’m mostly over/resigned to it. The part of my daddy that was capable of giving/receiving loving, normal relationships got left somewhere in another country in the middle of rice paddy, possibly between his two combat purple hearts. He is who he is, but I am who I am, too, and I’ve stopped trying to be someone else to please him. I have the best grandaddy ever in the whole world and a really good stepdad that inherited me as a willful teenager, and a teenage boy named for my dad that is so far showing all the best parts of my dad got passed on - which is sometimes a bit bittersweet, when my son stands a certain way or makes a face that makes him look just like my father and I go…yeah, that’s what daddy was like before he got broken.
To the OP, my own years of training kick in occasionally, too. I spent a good 10 years in marching bands. I’ve discovered that I am not allowed to walk and listen to my iPod, or I lead with my left foot and tend to begin to actually march instead of walk. I caught myself stopping at a corner by planting my right foot by rolling it heel to toe, bringing my left foot down beside it just the same way, toes at 45 degrees, and assuming a parade rest stance with one locked knee and a ramrod straight back. I stopped listening to my iPod unless I’m sitting down after that.
It was really, really, REALLY embarrassing, and made my husband giggle.
When I was a kid, I used to play in the woods, because the house was surrounded by woods. At the bottom of the hill was what we called “the brook.” There was a line of stepping-stones across the brook, some of which I think were put there deliberately for that purpose. I was fairly adept at crossing them.
One day, I was headed back up the hill. My right leg was planted on the incline ahead of me, and I was just bringing my left foot up to meet it. Except, I was eye to eye with a snake, coiled and raising its head to inspect me. I’ll never know if I really heard a rattle or if I imagined it.
For me, time did not slow down. It merely suspended. When I came to myself again, I was on the other side of the brook, legs trembling violently. But my shoes were dry, so I must have crossed the stones without ever putting a foot wrong, and then started shaking.
)