I nearly bit the biscuit
Thursday, August 9th, 2007
This week’s question:
The world is effin’ scary lately—what was your near-death experience?
Next week’s question:
Scientists have identified 237 reasons people have sex. What’s the strangest reason you’ve ever had for hanky panky?
I was four years old, driving with my mom. We were stopped at a red light. For some reason I decided to climb out of my booster seat. It felt like the right thing to do. I was on my knees looking out the rear window. My mom kept saying, “Get back in your seat,” but I wouldn’t. Seconds later we were hit by an 18-wheeler. The driver was drunk, asleep and had run a red light. I remember being thrown forward. Then everything went black. Years later they told me that point of impact had been my booster seat.
I almost drowned at my friend’s birthday party at the lake. Even though I told my pals I couldn’t swim, they insisted I try. By jumping across the lake floor, one giant leap after the other, I pretty much moon leapt across until I reached my friends on a platform far out. It was grueling, but I made it. The only problem was getting back. Attempting the same stunt again, I jumped into the lake, but when I tried to leap back up, kerplunk, I couldn’t make it. I was stranded at the bottom. Trapped, and feeling the life energy draining out of me, I stared up at the wiggling sun before I passed out completely. When I woke up, I was back on the sand. My best friend had saved my life.
Every August, migrant workers arrived to pick crops. During a weekend fight, a migrant was knifed. Immediately word spread that they were rioting and planning to kill the farmers. People were terrified. I decided to take advantage of the fear and scare my family by sneaking outside one night and banging on the windows. Then I ran and hid in the bushes. Dad came out shouting, “I have a gun!” I moaned eerily. “I am going to shoot,” he hissed and the fear in his voice cut through my stupidity. “It’s just me,” I called. “Only me.”
In 2002 I worked a New Orleans-area comic shop’s retail booth at ComiCon. On our way home and halfway through Texas, I guided our twenty-four-foot rental truck, loaded with ephemera, down a hill at the insisted-upon-by-the-rental-company speed of 70 mph when our front driver’s-side tire exploded. We careened across the median, avoided oncoming traffic, jumped a sidewall of rock and landed 20 feet away from a steep cliff’s edge — while my riding partner, now awake, screamed, “Shiiiiiiit!” The next day — bruised, sore and in brutal heat — we loaded a new truck and inched our way home.
Some friends rafted Cataract Canyon. The fourth day, we hit the most dangerous rapids: Big Drop One and Two. Guide Andrew, a housemate, now an anesthesiologist, instructed us to paddle hard over the “haystack” (a waterfall in reverse) that starts One. The last thing I saw still dry: the guy in the front of the boat, directly above my head. Now on the side of the river with no bank, I tried swimming to the other before getting carried into Two. Which is hard when your lungs are full of water. Seeing a big rock on the far side, realizing if I didn’t get out in time I was going into that rock, I stayed in the middle of the river. I catapulted over another haystack, and my back slammed into the rock. I eddied out at the end of Two, was pulled from the water, vomited, and passed out, in shock. When I awoke, Andrew kneeled above me, my paddle beside him.
Mid-morning fog hung low over the beach at Fort Canby where the jetty marks the mouth of the Columbia River. A white-hot disk of sun burned through the fog. In rubber clamming boots, I chased the foamy lace trimming the tide. I was six? seven? It was the undertow that took me—water like a sheet of fancy imported glass coursing over my face, flecked with bubbles, shelf fragments, sand. A length of wiggling kelp, sucked back by the sea, took me in its elastic tendrils. Then, blackness. Then, my parents’ heads hovered above me, blocking the sun’s seering gaze.
Who needs a seatbelt when you’re in the backseat? Uh, in hindsight, I did. I was coming home with four friends in a Jetta from a July 4th party on a twisting country road when we were hit head-on by a 17-year-old driver who’d has her license for, oh, 10 minutes. My right femur was shattered and I broke three ribs; the firemen had to cut us out of the car. I threw a blood clot in my right lung two weeks later, landing me back in the hospital I’d just left. The oddest feeling… I felt like I’d been unplugged. My white cell count kept plummeting; the doctors at the sleepy country hospital were clueless. I called a friend whose brother was a doctor in Salt Lake City and said, “Don’t let me die in here.” Luckily for me, she didn’t: She called her brother, he took charge long-distance, and basically saved my life.
Marriage.