There but for the grace of God …
Note: The picture at the beginning isn’t from this story. It’s just to make a point, that …
There but for the grace of God …
I was thinking recently about what had to be the strangest minute of my entire life.
It was nearly the last one.
It happened in the early afternoon of December 12th, 1990, the day after my 41st birthday. I had moved from Reno to Los Angeles nearly eight months earlier, and had been staying with friends until I worked things out as to where I wanted to live. I had rented an apartment in Orange County and had brought most of my stuff down from northern Nevada in a U-haul.
On this particular day, I was taking the last to my stuff down with me in my two-seater coupe, a 1987 Pontiac Fiero. My friend was following me in his car and we were heading south on I-5 through east Los Angeles.
Everything was fine until it wasn’t, and for that minute or so, the question of life or death was in real doubt.
Two roads were merging into one, and my small car was apparently invisible to a guy driving a big rig. He began moving into my lane exactly at the place my car occupied. All of a sudden his vehicle was scraping against mine, and my car broke away and began spinning.
There was one thing incredibly odd about it.
Even though there was nothing I could do, and there was no way to gain control of my vehicle, I felt no fear at all. One thought went through my mind.
“I wonder how many vehicles will hit me.”
After all, I was in the middle of midday traffic on the busiest north-south route in California.
I loved that little car. It was the first one I ever bought myself and it’s the only car I ever owned that I drove from one coast to the other, although not all on the same trip.I had put more than 100,000 miles on it in less than four years, but I had reached the last mile of its life while I was spinning.
As I spun to the right, I came into contact with another big rig in what could have been the worst possible way except for maybe being t-boned. The spin brought me into contact about halfway back on the trailer. My small car went directly under the middle of the trailer.
There was where I had some luck. The truck was heading south on I-5 and my vehicle was pointed west at the moment of impact. Apparently the trailer was relatively empty, so as the left rear tires hit me and began crushing my car, I spun back out. No one else hit me and my mortally damaged Fiero slammed into the guard rail on the right shoulder and came to a stop.
It had all happened in less than one minute.
I looked to my right, and about six inches away, the roof of my car had been crushed to where it was flat against the passenger seat. There had been a portable television on the seat but it had been completely pulverized.
As for a bizarre conclusion to it all, I unfastened my seat belt, opened the driver’s side door and stepped out of the car.
A few minutes later, a highway patrol officer looked at my vehicle and told me it was pretty much a miracle that I had survived. Not only survived, but did it with relatively minor injuries. I had the ugliest bruise I had ever seen, covering the left side of my leg from the top all the way down to the knee.
I had a slightly dislocated pelvis that a chiropractor eventually fixed, and a couple of nights of bad dreams, including the first time in my life I ever dreamed I was dead.
That was definitely creepy.
I had a little bit of PTSD for a while, mostly in the. form of finding myself very tense when there was a big rig on my left on the freeway, but that eventually went away.
As for “there but for the grace of God,” that was a catch phrase my friend Bill and I used to use back in the ’70s. Both of us were constantly struggling with our weight, and it was what we would half-jokingly say to each other when we saw someone who was morbidly obese.
In this story, the picture at the beginning is of a car that was totally crushed by an 18-wheeler, and amazingly, the woman who was driving managed to escape through the driver’s side window before she would have been squashed.
There but for the grace of God indeed.