"bearsbuddy" wrote in message
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"riverman" wrote in message
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Great idea for a thread! I've been tossing around the idea of a
collection of short vignettes of every time I've almost died...either
from being hammered and not quite getting across the threshold, or taking
a random left turn when later I discover that a right turn would have
been fatal. Why not start a new thread, tell us your 'times I almost
died' tale, and lets hear some skin crawlers from folks.

--riverman
You go first, I'll be right on your tail :-)

I can only recall one time in my life when I actually thought I was gonna
die.

I was perfectly sober, met a girl at a bar. We went out side to talk.
After we had decided that I would pick her up on a Sat. and go ridin' on
my Harley, some girl came up and began arguing with the girl I had just
met. Next thing I know there are these drunk and drugged out fellas
talkin' **** to me? Well, being young, dumb, and you know the rest. I
began talking **** back. Me and this one guy get to tusslin' about, when
one of his buddies shoves a hawk-bill knife up against my throat and says,
"I'll cut your ass mother****er!" The only words that came out of my
mouth were, "this ain't necessary." Real macho, I know. The only thing I
could think of at the time was me wakin' up dead in the morgue and him
soberin' up in jail sayin', "I did what?"

Thankfully, the girls went to fightin' and the guyz turn their attentions
to a catfight. I helped break the girls up, while the other guyz went
after some other poor fella. I got the girl for one night and decided to
never see her again after that.

And here I am, girless, but alive.


Wow. Well, that certainly qualifies!

I guess I'm a bigger risk-taker than you (or else I have a heavier sense of
the dramatic) as I can think of a few times right off the top of my head.

1) I was hiking in the Grand Canyon with my friend Roger (now
deceased.....damn cancer!) and we went up into Tapeats Cave above Thunder
River. If anyone else has climbed into it, they know that you do a
switchback walkup to about 100 feet above the river, then move out onto an
exposed ledge that's about 6 inches wide, and upclimb about 10 feet to the
mouth of the cave. Its not all that hard, as long as you don't look down on
the upclimb (which has really bombproof handholds, like climbing a ladder).
When we finished exploring the cave, we came out at the entrance, which is
like a narrow doorstep, and had to bend over to get our hands down at the
lip of the mouth, turn in place, and get our feet on the face to downclimb
to the ledge. Sort of like stepping off a roof onto a ladder that ends right
at the edge, so there's no handhold. When I bent over to put my hands down
by my feet, my butt hit the wall behind me and launched me forwards, right
at this 100 foot dropoff. I grabbed the lip at my toes with my fingers over
the lip, and had just enough strength in my hands to push hard with my
fingers and catch myself before I teetered off. Roger, standing a ways
behind me, wisely said "Nice move, now you better downclimb real fast before
the adrenaline hits you and your hands get all sweaty and your knees start
to shake." Later I was almost in tears.

2) I was once hitchhiking down route 128 outside Boston (back in College),
and as I was getting no rides, I started walking along the breakdown lane to
the next exit. As I approached the giant green sign saying 'exit ahead', I
noticed that my shadow on the sign had an interesting behavior (it was
night, and the car headlights cast a shadow) It would start small, at the
bottom of the sign, then start to get large as the cars approached me, then
suddenly would sweep sideways, accelerating off the sign as the car passed
me. There also were multiple shadows moving at the same time, as the busy
traffic roared by. Suddenly, I noticed one shadew grow larger than the rest
and not sweep sideways. I leaped off the side of the breakdown lane just as
this little sports car shot by, missing me by fractions of a foot. I mean,
it was really close. He was driving like a lunatic, doing fighter passes
in the breakdown lane, and he never even saw me. If I hadn't noticed the
shadow thing, I would have been run down. To this day, that particular one
still scares the bejesus out of me.

3) On a river trip I was leading in Canada (I posted about this one here
years back) I was going around a bend and the river split in two around a
tall gravel island. On instict alone, I took the inside channel, motioning
for all the client boats to follow me. Normally, you take the outer channel
as the inside track often gets shallow. Once we got below the island, we
eddied out and hiked back upstream along the outside channel, and there was
a huge strainer right across the river. The banks were all large
cobblestones with no eddys, and there was absolutely no way to stop. IF we
had taken the outside channel, we would have all been swept into the
strainer and definately drowned. To this day I have no idea why I took the
inside channel...just a vague instinct that it was a spring trip, and 'if'
there had been any strainers they would have been swept to the outside
channel. Turns out, that this was exactly what happened.

--riverman