Track 06 - My Hit and Run

07 Nov 2005

“Always think we get more time Now flying through the air Maybe living maybe dying In this motor crash it's you who comes to mind Don't we always wish we had more time”

I don't know if those few moments between when you think you're going to die and then you either live or die are the same for everyone or not. I know for me it didn't go quite as expected. Of course the only accounts you tend to get from people are the ones that when embellished have the most dramatic effect.

The three times that I almost died I saw flashes of the faces of all of the people that I love. One at a time, just quick flashes. A half millisecond delay on the ones who apparently are the most important to me. The very most important person seeming to always flash last oddly enough. After that, nothing. It was just me and time, which dilates amazingly in a situation like this, and my brain screaming “Holy Shit!” in the back of my head. Before the situation was resolved even that scream in the back of my head faded into nothing and there was just silence.

It is true that we always think we get more time. It is also true that you will live your life completely differently after a near death experience. At least, you will live your life completely differently for a while. Some things will eventually fade back to the way that they used to be.

It will certainly punctuate the importance of the moment. It has a way of decreasing your level of hesitancy in various situations. It makes you realize how important family and friends really are if you didn't already now. It definitely shows you both how fragile and how strong you are.

I won't bore you with the details of all of my encounters. Simply the oddest one. Well, now that I think about it this isn't one of the three I was even thinking of before. So, okay, random near death experience number four.

I don't normally think of this one because it took place in the water. I don't fear the water. The water is actually the place that I feel the safest. It has always been like that since before I was even aware of what water was.

So it was the May long weekend. Which of course means we were all out on a canoe trip. Remember how in a previous entry I said that they all didn't go well? Well this was one of those times.

It has been a hard day. A couple of what we called Tupperware canoes (Coleman plastic/resin canoes) had already been wrapped around log jams. We had to pull them out and kick them back in to shape. We had lost enough beer down the river that if anyone had ever fished it out they could have pretended to start a brewery of their own. side note: we always called beer brown trout.

I can't even imagine how much other stuff we lost down the river that year. Sleeping bags, clothes, food, portable stoves, tents, coolers, you name it, we lost it. Everyone rolled their canoes in the rapids multiple times. Two canoes got pretty much destroyed. Ours included.

It is the destruction of our canoe where things got deathly. There was a huge log jam across the width of the river. The current was so strong that we couldn't paddle away from it to the bank. We got sucked right up to it and the canoe went sideways against it.

The rushing current started to pull the side against the logs down into the water. As the canoe tipped I was trying to climb out of it. The mix of it going down and my going up left me exactly where I was. My legs where under the water and canoe was jammed against the small of my back. I could hear the wood and fiberglass start to crack due to the force of the water. I knew that my little fleshy body wouldn't stand up to that force once it got past the thick part of the canoe.

The log jam was some 20 odd feet along the length of the river. When I looked behind me I saw that my father was no where to be found. He had been pulled under the water.

Even at that point I wasn't afraid for myself yet. I was worried about my father because he was nowhere to be seen and I had no idea how long he had been under water. I also didn't know if it was possible to go under the log jam so I thought he might be trapped.

At that moment my sister's boyfriend grabbed me and that pulled me from my thoughts. We wedged his feet against the canoe and pushed as hard as his adrenaline powered legs could push and he pulled me up onto the logs away from the torrent. Right after that the canoe gave and with a horrible crunching sound the entire bottom of it buckled.

I climbed up over the log jam and was incredibly relieved to see my father bobbing along in the current behind it. Also of interesting not here, my father hated my sister's boyfriend at that time. Actually, hate isn't even a strong enough word to describe it. However, after he saved me that day, my father was always tolerant of him. Although I'm sure he was still happy when they eventually broke up.

We probably lost close to 400 cans/bottles of beer that trip. No doubt there were some very happy 12 year-olds staying at their cottages further down the river that found them.

The log jam was the destruction of everything. All of the canoes were lost to it. We had to hike through the forest. Everything was soaked. There was nothing dry enough anywhere to make a fire. We were cold. We managed to salvage a few of our pails of goods further down the river.

We trudged through the forest. There was still snow on the ground in some places. The footing was treacherous. Sometimes your next footfall would be on something solid and sometimes you would wind up with your leg buried in mud or leaf covered water up to your hip.

My father and I are fairly outdoorsy people. He's a trained forest ranger and hunting guide. I'm sure you could drop us with a helicopter in the forest a hundred miles from nowhere with nothing but knives and we would be walking out of that forest in a few days time. Heck, I'd like to try it sometime. I'm sure he would too.

On this day, none of that helped. We had about 15 other people with us on that trip if I remember correctly (it was over 10 years ago). There were too many people to worry about who needed to get dry and warm. We all pushed on until we found a road. We collapsed there and opened up the few containers we had managed to salvage.

Luckily my father and I found our sleeping bags. The odds of the two pails we found being sleeping bags must be very slim. They were still nice and dry because the pails were water tight. So we wrapped ourselves up in them. Someone else had some clothes in a pail so they passed around dry clothes to as many as they could. We huddled up on the road and waited for a car.

We were very fortunate that a car did indeed show up within the hour. They took a few people to the ranger station and to get more help. Eventually we all made it to the ranger station. There we were, all of us huddled around the one wooden stove at the station. Hands almost touching the searing hot cast iron and we were still shivering.

Somewhere the rangers found some packs of cheese sticks. We only got one each, but we devoured them like the greatest meal ever made. Eventually our families showed up and took us back to my Uncle's camp.

When we arrived they were barbecuing for us. None of us had eaten anything but that one cheese stick in almost 24 hours. They threw those burgers on the grill and barely seared each side before we took them away and gobbled them down. That was probably a very bad thing to do, but I don't think I can really explain how hungry we were. I abhor the though of rare meat. I hate the taste of it. That night though. Oh my God did those ever taste good!

Shortly after that we all unceremoniously passed out where ever there was a chunk of floor and slept until noon the next day.

And that is the story of how I almost got ripped in half.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's entry “Misfits”