A Charmed Life

In my last post, I detailed an adventure in which, while though I didn’t exactly confront it head-on, death was close enough so that I could feel it lurking. To talk about my life so far in any meaningful way it is necessary to mention the compendium of near-death and ‘almost near-death’ experiences I’ve survived. There is a plethora of them and they have affected how I see life profoundly.

There have been so many narrow escapes over the years I could almost write a book about them. To name just a few:

♦ come within a few feet of being broadsided by a speeding tractor-trailer truck that I couldn’t see coming around a curve (my vehicle’s engine hesitated, inexplicable because it was an almost-new rental that didn’t hesitate at all before or after the incident during the entirety of a two week trip)

♦ nearly froze to death in the winter desert (this and the experience above happened the same day!)

♦ skidded to a halt within inches of plowing off a cliff with my truck and trailer in a snowstorm while driving through mountains.

♦ climbed an extremely steep cliff until I was 300 or 400 feet off the ground before realizing that I couldn’t go up any further (blocked by a protruding rock shelf) and that trying to go back down was almost sure suicide.

♦ been held up by a knife-wielding drug-crazed man.

♦ almost froze to death in a northest forest.

♦ been caught underneath a pounding waterfall, not able to tell which way was up and almost losing consciousness.

♦ been in a plane that was both struck by lightning and hit by wind shear as the pilots tried to land it (they couldn’t, we finally had to land at another airport 100 miles way)

♦ realized I was slowly, but steadily being surrounded by 2,000 degree lava pushing its way inexorably down a mountain side in Hawaii and jumping over it at the last minute.

♦ and so on...

Then there was the incident this very morning. I pulled out of my driveway just before dawn to head up to Williamsville to deliver some books. It was a dark and stormy morning; pillowy gray clouds with angry black-bottoms were scuttling across the soggy sky. Rain pelted down and wind gusts heaved me from side to side. As I entered a particularly wide-open stretch of the New York State Thruway, a tractor-trailer truck, suddenly caught broadside by an extreme gust of wind, lost control. The truck jackknifed and careened slowly and smoothly like it was on ice from one side of the road to the other, crashing into both barriers in explosions of sparks before finally winding up sideways in the middle of the highway. All this seemed to happen in slow motion. I hit my brakes and skidded to a halt some twenty feet away; had I been following any closer, well - I’d rather not think about it. Good thing it was early on Saturday morning and traffic was sparse – I wasn’t rear-ended and no one else hit the truck either. I shudder to think about the results if this had happened during rush hour.

This is why I’m convinced I’ve lived a charmed life - so far anyway. These experiences have opened my eyes, ironically allowing me to see life’s magnificence (especially in nature) through coming so close to death. These incidents also inspire me to share what I see and feel through my writing and photography.

And nowhere do I feel the beauty of life more than in old growth forests. Just recently, I have started on a mission to explore what’s left of old-growth forest near my home and eventually in the rest of the Northeast.

Next: Primeval Perceptions