To Be or Not to Be? (it can be only a matter of a few seconds or feet)
Most of us who have had the privilege to live many decades have had a brush or two with death. Yesterday, I had perhaps my closest encounter. As is often the case it happened quickly and unexpectedly and I had little say in the outcome.
This past year my first cousin, a world class skier and skiing coach, was killed tragically when a snowboarder lost control and slammed into him at full speed from behind. Even as a professional skier he had no chance – he never even saw him coming. One minute he is outside relishing his lifelong passion, perhaps thinking about the beautiful day or his wonderful wife and daughter or a magestic mountain he would like to explore or simply some mundane chores or errands he planned to do later in the day. The next moment he is no more. Had he been 5 seconds later to that spot (taken just a little longer or shorter time putting on his ski boots or extended or shortened a conversation) or had he been three feet to the left or right he likely would never have been struck. Such is the marginal line between life and all of its great accoutrements and the finality of death.
My moment yesterday happened in a far more common scenario, engaged in the most common risk most of us face as citizens – driving a car. Over 5 million car accidents happen every year and even with great advances in airbag and crunch zone technology, over 35,000 die each year while on the road. And yet few of us give any thought to that as we step into our vehicles each day or have the least bit of trepidation about doing so. Ironically, many of these same folks have severe anxiety about flying in a plane due to the risk of crashing, despite the fact there there hasn’t been a single death from commercial air travel in the U.S. in years out of the more than 10 Million flights per year. Who says humans are rational beings?
So it’s midday on a clear and sunny day- no particular reason when I got in the car to be concerned that driving would portend a hazard or certainly that this might be my last journey. I was driving along on Interstate 270 East (a 6-lane highway with 3 lanes on each side). The right lane was blocked for miles by orange cones for construction (none of which was actually occurring). Because of the lane closure traffic was a little more than would ordinarily be expected at that time of day but cars were still moving reasonably briskly in the two open lanes. I was in the left lane driving more conservatively than usual at around 60 mph with the next car perhaps 60-70 feet in front of me. I wasn’t texting, tweeting or talking on the phone. Nor was I distracted (though during hockey playoff season my wife might say that I’m always a little distracted).
The other “middle” lane was occupied near me by a long commercial truck from Kansas containing an enormous load of hay. (For buffs of useless trivia, Kansas produces the 4th most hay in the country behind Texas, Missouri and South Dakota – over 6 million tons of the stuff.) The truck measured over 100 feet (perhaps 30 feet of which was ahead of me and 70 feet behind me). It weighed, I learned later, over 80,000 pounds. From all accounts it was being driven appropriately; fully within its lane, and driving at or near the 60 mph speed limit.
Suddenly, however, without any warning or indication the truck pulled into my left lane. The truck driver, a lifelong owner-operator with apparently no meaningful prior accident history, later told me that there was a van in front of him that had abruptly applied its brakes and that he was not going to be able to stop in time. Out of instinct and to avoid crashing into the van he immediately pulled his truck into the left lane. (That was likely a life saver for the van occupants; I once defended a trucking company whose driver killed a young woman in a horrific fire-engulfing accident when he couldn’t stop in time on a highway when traffic stopped abruptly. Ironically, that tragedy occurred on this same highway.)
But the van occupants’ good fortune here was my bad luck. While I saw the truck come over into my lane a fraction of a second before impact I couldn’t do anything to avoid it. Indeed, that would have been true even if I had had a lot more time to contemplate: Despite the impressive acceleration of a Tesla I couldn’t speed up sufficiently to avoid the truck (as the tractor head was ahead of me by probably 30 feet); I couldn’t avoid him by stopping abruptly (since the truck length was at least 10 cars) and I had a car behind me; I naturally couldn’t turn right where the truck was coming from; and I couldn’t go left – unless I wanted an unwelcome date with a concrete barrier. In short, I was landlocked with no options; I could only watch and wait to see what was in store for me and my future.
Sure enough, the side of this massive truck crashed hard into my right passenger side and began to push me toward the concrete barrier separating the east and west lanes of the highway. There was perhaps a 5 foot shoulder between the edge of the left lane and the concrete barrier. Was the truck about to run me straight into the barrier? Penetrate my vehicle all the way to the driver’s side and split me open, literally? Jack knife and tip over and then crush me? Somehow, miraculously, none of these.
Almost immediately upon impact the experienced truck driver quickly realized what he had done (even though the impact with my car was mid-truck and over 30 feet from his line of vision) and he was able to steer his truck back into the middle lane. Though my car had been penetrated and pushed toward the concrete barrier, it fell short of it (barely) before I was dislodged from the weight of its grip and I was able to regain control of my car and quickly correct its path in the direction toward living. And equally fortunately, the truck and/or its considerable contents did not tip over on top of my car.
The calamity was over in a matter of seconds. My car (though badly damaged) was somehow drivable and able to continue down the road until we could find a place to pull over, or I might have been barreled in to by the car behind me. Even more miraculously I emerged from the vehicle relatively unscathed (sans some minor soreness in my back and neck).
Not to be too dramatic here but absent a miraculous confluence of several factors you would be reading my obituary now rather than another blog posting today. If the driver had not immediately appreciated the predicament and had not promptly steered his truck back into the middle lane before the momentum had unavoidably pushed me into the barrier; had I been another 10 feet forward or 10 feet back and not happened to have been hit by the portion of his truck where the intermediary tires were stationed, rather than the bulk of the 80,000 pound vehicle, and had there been only a couple of feet of separation between the left lane and the concrete barrier at that spot rather than the estimated 5 feet, it likely would have been c’est la vie. At minimum, I would have been facing a major medical crisis with lots of broken bones, internal hemorrhaging and possible paralysis.
An event like this one sure gets you thinking. I’m still not sure how I managed to survive this ordeal, much less with all my major body parts intact. Why am I still here but not my cousin? Was the woman upstairs looking out for me? (If there is a God I refuse to believe he’s a man given our gender’s performance at looking after this world over the past several centuries.) Alternatively, was it my wife’s great karma and supernatural tendencies- her crystals, homsas, dragonflies and the like – that saved my ass? Or was it pure unadulterated blind luck?
My book “Searching for the Dragonfly” explored this topic in great detail and I now feel like a character in my own fiction book : https://www.amazon.com/Searching-Dragonfly-Mark-Sophir/dp/1718863500/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3MGUA4YA8KGCT&keywords=mark+sophir&qid=1652213936&sprefix=mark+sophir%2Caps%2C70&sr=8-4 I know, it’s a shameless plug but I’ve been through quite an ordeal!
As Sgt. Phil Esterhaus routinely said on the classic TV cop show from the 80’s, Hill Street Blues, “Let’s be careful out there!” But even if you do, it’s not a bad idea to think and plan as if today may be your last.
