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ANOTHER PRETTY BROKEN THING
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"It was a dark and stormy night..."
I've always wanted to start a story off with those seven words. That particular introduction is so old and used that it's become quite cliché, even comical and I never expected that those seven words would ever be the actual beginning of a personal story that would last over five years and still be going strong after that. It was a dark and stormy night late in October, 1997, when this strange journey began, and like most simple travelers who embark on a long, strange journey, it wasn't by choice. But then again, Fate never was much into asking permission of those she weaves into her designs.
The 12 month period from October 1997 to October 1998 will go down in my diary and everyone else close to me memory as being the "Year of Living Dangerously". To me, it was the year of "Another Pretty Broken Thing" in that I lost every single toy that I owned and loved in a twelve month, horribly tortuous process. The best place to start any story is at the very beginning. Here we go.
October 13, 1997. The picture above demonstrates what happens when you are going around one of Marion County's worst curves, at 11:45pm at night, it is raining, and you have two simultaneous blow outs on the same side (driver's) in a right hand turn. I was going into the curve at 35mph, 5th gear, I knew the curve would be slick, so I never touched the brakes or downshifted. The road has a speed limit of 45mph (faster when no one is looking), and the curve was safety rated at 40mph. I knew I was in trouble when the speedometer fell to 30mph, I turned the wheel to coast through the turn without applying the gas, and the rear end started to slide. The panoramic view in front of me changed as it panned across my direction of travel. I turned into the slide but the car wouldn't respond, it was like it was being dragged off the road by a winch! I tried to compensate for the slide, and applied minimum force to my brake pedal, downshifted, nothing worked. And then I heard it, the bump as the car exited a paved surface and the sound of wild growth sliding along the bottom side of the car. I knew that I was going to flip and roll as the side of the road was a steep embankment, so I leaned over into the passenger seat and grabbed hold of the seat cushion there, making myself as small as possible in the already compact car. The car exited the road backwards, flipped, and rolled twice before coming to a stop forty feet down an embankment, just outside of a group of really big trees. The whole thing seemed like it took four years to stop, but it really only took about fifteen seconds.
It felt strange to be my death, it didn’t feel right. My own frustration was that my death didn’t fit, it was the wrong size, too small, and I refused to wear it. I would have loved to have gotten it all on camera to watch the various angles and impact energies play out, it would have been an interesting exercise in elemental physics, mathematical equations made manifest, structural integrity compromised under the relentless pressure of stark impact energies.
Once everything stopped moving and the car slid to a stop, upside down, I looked around the orange instrument glow-lit interior and tried to reorient myself. I wasn't scared. Really. I'm one of those rare people that adrenaline only seems to make them more calm. Everything right then was moving really, really slow and I think it was still the adrenaline overload / shock. I took in my situation calmly. I was upside down and trapped in a car that was in all probability nothing more than a twatted up work of modern expressionism art. Now, Hollywood would like you to think that every car that crashes or goes off a cliff explodes like some huge bomb.
That just isn't true.
Very few cars catch on fire, there are too many safety features built in by the various manufacturers to guard against that and I've never seen a car explode in a wreck, personally. I turned in my seatbelt and sniffed the air for any trace of leaking fuel. Nothing but fresh wet dirt and the smell of broken vegetation, everything sharp and crisp. No gas smell and the engine was dead, according to the clocks in the dash. Zero speed, zero RPM, running on auxiliary with the key still turned to the ON position. Never the less, I wasn't exactly fond of wanting to 'hang around' the rest of the night, so I looked around and got myself oriented and started to extricate (that's a big educated word that means 'get out of') myself from the wreckage that had become like a new metal womb instead of a cold, twisted tomb.
The car was upside down, and pointing back the way that I had just come. All lights were still on, the tires were still slowly spinning, and Def Leppard was blaring from the stereo ("Another Hit and Run", how appropriate). There I hung, upside down in my seat belt, looking around the dust and dirt choked interior, strangely illuminated in shades of red like some funeral home. A lot of people don't like to wear seatbelts, but I never go anywhere without my seatbelt on, ever. This wreck was proof that you need to wear your seatbelt. If I had not been wearing my seatbelt, I could have been thrown around the interior of the car, or even out through the ripped off sunroof. Having a RX-7 roll over on me, light as the small cars are, while I lay on the ground, ejected from the wreckage, or being thrown out of a car and head first into a pine tree are two of the things I can assure you are simply NOT on my list of things I want to experience in this life. The seatbelt, Mazda's superior engineering of the RX-7, and most importantly, God; the only three things I can account for the almost zero injuries I sustained in that wreck. I was there, hanging upside down in my seat belt, staring at the wreckage and scrap metal around me.
Most importantly I knew it was God.
I did everything I knew how to in order to regain control of the car and save myself from the slide, but I couldn't. When I left the road, I was in God's hands, no doubt of that. Once I left the road, it was all up to trajectory, velocity, and impact vectors, oh and that nasty little law of gravity which has a tendency to do bad things when falling objects encounter hard surfaces.
I calmly reached forward, upside down, and turned the stereo off. I could still hear the whirring of the generator, the engine was dead (no fuel feed upside down), and the blower motor was still going. I spit out dirt and dust, and noticed that both of my arms were working. I ran my hands over my face, no bleeding. I worked my jaw, felt for loose teeth, cut scalp, nothing. Not a spot of blood, no pain. In a moment of hangman's humor, I turned the key off in the ignition, then reached up to the center console and jacked back the parking brake. All while hanging upside down in a totally destroyed car. I think I laughed to myself at that move, the words of my driver's ed instructor coming back to me "Always apply the parking brake when you intend to exit the vehicle".
Old habits die hard.
Hey, I thought. If I'm cool enough to flip and roll an '84 RX-7 GSL and then to still have my bizarre sense of humor about me when I get through, well then I must be all right.
And then I saw my legs, trapped under the crushed down steering wheel.
OK, I thought, hand still in my hair/scalp, musing on this new sight, hanging upside down, and looking 'up' at my legs. Are they broken? Is the steering wheel so compressed that it's keeping the flow of nerve information from my brain? Are they bleeding? I reached down and poked each one. I felt both of them. That was good. I gritted my teeth and prepared to move each one in a test, if my scream exceeded 80 decibels, I would know something was seriously wrong with them. I slowly moved the right leg, then the left.
Both of my legs were fine, if a little uncomfortable and tight under the compressed dash and steering column. Huh? I thought, go figure that one. I had just flipped and rolled my car, I was hanging upside down in the drivers seat trapped in the seat belt, facing back the way that I had come, the car was totally demolished, and I wasn't hurt. Not a bit. I wasn't even sore. That would probably come later though. I'm sure I was thrown about in ways that the human body wasn't meant to move normally.
Mazda really knew how to build the RX-7.
That and God was looking out for me because you see, God loves me, yes He does. It must be because I make Him laugh so much and I'm always critical of His handiwork in certain members of the human species... He and I are going to have a lot to talk about in eternity.
OK, I've just flipped and rolled my pristine car, so am I scared and screaming like some Hollywood low budget car chase victim? Not at all. I'm not scared. I'm not hurt. I'm mad! That's right, mad! I had spent fourteen months traveling three states looking for the cleanest, smoothest, and best 1st Generation Mazda RX-7 GSL and here it was, upside down at the bottom of a ditch, twatted up like a empty soda can. You bet I was mad! I had bought the car fourteen months before, and I really, really enjoyed driving the little car, and now it was scrap! Oooooooooh! I was so! Fucking! Mad! At myself. At the rain. At the tires. At everything. But then I was calm at the same time. My heart wasn't even racing! I took a deep breath and sighed, letting my head hang back down and I turned it side to side. No pain, but my neck was starting to get a little stiff, so I knew that I had probably pulled a shoulder or neck muscle.
How to get out?
That was the next order of business. I mean, I didn't want to spend the night upside down in a wrecked car in a ditch, so logically, my mind started to work on how to extricate myself from the wreckage. I sat there for a few seconds pondering that. When you are upside down, your whole perspective changes. Everything was now opposite of what I knew it to be. Up was down, down was up, left was right, right was left. When you drive a car for fourteen months, you start learning how to do things without even looking at them, like changing the station on the stereo, shifting, etc. Now, every time I went to touch something, I found myself going in the wrong direction. I felt like Luke Skywalker in the Wampa's cave in "The Empire Strikes Back."
I had to spend double the mental effort to do simple little things, like look over my shoulder because now instead of looking to my right, I was having to look to my left, and trust me, it was a weird feeling.
How could I get out of this twisted wreck?
I calmly wiped some dirt from my face, and found that I had safety glass all over me. I looked up / down and found that the factory sunroof was gone, torn off during the roll and that a lot of surface soil had been bulldozed into the interior of the car by the lip on the sunroof. Not going out the top because looking down/up, I was staring at the freshly plowed up wet ground! OK, what about through the front windshield and over the dash / hood? The front windshield was useless to try to escape from because the car was laying at such an angle that the shattered remains of the windshield was almost flat against the ground, and the roof had compressed so much that my head actually lay against the ground when I tried to sit upright in the seat. If I hadn't leaned over and grabbed hold of the passenger seat during my wreck, I probably would have sustained massive head injuries. The roof line was now lower than my forehead by a good inch. My head stuck out of the sunroof now! This was OK, though because I had landed over the top of a huge tractor tire rut from long ago, one that had never filled in, so where my head lay out beyond the sunroof, it was actually below the ground level, down in the tractor tire rut that was about five inches deep and two feet long. Don't ask me about all the ways that I could have been killed in this wreck, instead ponder the ways and the extreme countermeasures that God took to guide my destroyed car exactly into a position where I couldn't possibly have been hurt.
I looked behind me, blood starting to pound in my head, you know, from being upside down, and I saw that I couldn't get out through the rear hatchback either. The roof had compressed so much, that it had molded itself over the two seat tops, and the passenger side seat would never raise forward again, which prevented me from lifting a seat forward and crawling out backwards out of the car. That idea was a negative as well because the rear of the car was in similar position as the front hood. What was left of the rear hatchback window was scattered all over the ground and the inside of the car, twinkling in the moon light like so many spilled diamonds. So, that's where all the safety glass came from, I thought. Anyway, with both seats pinned into the wreckage of the roof, I could not have squeezed between them (the space was the size of the center console armrest) to get to the back of the car. As it was, the back of the car was inescapable as well, twisted and warped.
What about the passenger side? I looked over to my right, and saw the passenger side was completely twisted shut. No way was I ever going to get that door open without a crowbar! The seat had been torn off of two of its mounting bolts, and I realized that if my wife had been with me, she would have been seriously injured if not killed outright. Thank God she wasn't along for the ride! So, the front, rear, roof, and passenger side were all crushed so that I could not get out that way. I sighed, wiggled some in my seatbelt, and shook more dirt and safety glass off of me. It was still raining outside, I could hear the rain drops hitting the bottom belly pan of the car. I listened for a few more seconds, breathing, and thinking the situation out.
So, I turned to the only exit left: the driver's side door. I traced the roof line in the semi-dark with my fingers and found that the car was laying at an odd angle. I reached 'down' to the roof and tried the overhead map light. It still worked fine, but it cast eerie shadows and gave only some illumination in all the dust and debris still floating through the moist air. My fingers outlined the door frame in the dark, and it didn't seem to be warped. I reached over, upside down, and pulled on the door lock. It clicked and seemed to operate normally. Then I grabbed the door handle and tried it. Nothing. OK, the frame looked fine, but the door could be jammed below the window, outside, or resting against something. I might have to smash the window and crawl out that way. Great, more glass in my future! Anyway, I couldn't do anything while I was strapped in upside down, so I finally decided that it was time to undo the seatbelt.
I tried the seat belt release and it didn't work. Great. I always carry a lock blade knife with me (very, very sharp) just in case I ever go off a bridge and into water, or I'm trapped in a car in my seatbelt and can't get out. Weird huh? It's part of trying to be prepared for any possibility in life, at least the more unpleasant ones. Well tonight that preparation was going to pay off. I started to reach around my belt for my Gerber EZ Out folder in order to cut my way out of the seatbelt when the rational side of me remembered that all seat belts are inertia reel units and they lock on hard impact. Well, I had just experienced a very hard impact, so my mind started to think again. Did I really have to cut the seatbelt? How did an inertia reel work? I took a few deep breaths. How to get my weight off the unit and unlock the inertia reel? I glanced up at my legs under the steering wheel and locked them tight. I used my legs to pull me upwards, back into the seat, and take my weight off of the seatbelt. I reached down, and the release snapped open. I carefully tried to lower myself down to the roof of the car, but I lost gripping on the wet steering wheel, and fell the last four inches. I landed on my side, on the roof of the car / ground, and looking around the interior of my demolished car.
Everything had changed again, my semi-familiar world of a few minutes ago was now completely different again. Time to get oriented and get out of this dead Mazda.
I was disoriented. I knew what the interior of my car looked like, but this was nothing like what I remembered. Everything was smashed, the angles were wrong, everything was upside down. I felt really trapped, almost claustrophobic for a few seconds. You can get that way when you have over a ton of twisted metal wrapped around you and hanging over you.
It took me a few more seconds to get my bearings, worm around and be in a position to try to open the driver's side door. I tried the handle again. Nothing. OK, I said, let's play rough. It's a game I'm good at when I have to be. I reached over, bent in two, and opened the door handle. At the same time, I kicked out with my foot as hard as I could. The door didn't even budge. Come on, this was the only way I was going to get out of this junk heap short of someone cutting me out and I didn't fancy waiting around for the jaws of life to start rending metal around me.
I tried again.
The door budged a little, creaking and groaning as the light metal deformed under the impact. That's more like it, I thought and then I put my back against the passenger side and got rough.
With each kick I muttered a single word.
"I."
Kick, metal groans, the door budges a little.
"Want."
Kick, metal groans, the door budges a little.
"Out."
Kick, metal groans, the door budges a little.
"Of."
Kick, metal groans, the door budges a little.
"Here."
My fifth hard blow kicked the door so hard, that it flew open, took the bark off of a tree growing right next to the final resting place of the RX-7, and tried to swing closed again. However, I had shoved it open so hard, that it had clipped and pushed aside the small pine tree, and before the door could come back on its hinge, the tree had moved back into its path, and now the tree was holding the door open for me. I sat there, staring, rubbed my jaw, and probably did my best "Well, look at that!" scowl. I crab crawled forwards out of the wrecked car, supporting myself on my hands and feet, twisted around, and crawled under the propped open door on my hands and knees, clearing the door and slowly standing up erect.
I waited for the blood spots to clear from my eyes, residual effects from being upside down for so long. Once I had my feet under me and they were steady, I walked about fifteen feet away, to the start of the rise out of the gully where the car lay before I looked back at what was left of my toy. It had once been my favorite car, now it was nothing but a one ton paperweight.
I looked up the gully to the curve where I had left the road. The RX-7 had plowed a huge tract of land where it had slid on its roof. There was a good fifteen foot or more gap in the tract, and that's where I knew that the car had flipped in the air. The rut that the RX-7 plowed was a fresh black scar of contrasting shiny black wet dirt and smashed green vegetation. The rain had turned to a mist, and a light one at that as I stood there, looking at the two hundred foot plus field of debris leading back up the gully and onto the road. I started to walk to the top of the gully, somewhere along the way, I stepped over the remains of a barb wire fence that the RX-7 had smashed flat. Stepping over the fence, my jeans were caught on one of the barbs and I ripped the knee out of my jeans, scratching myself in the process, so you see, I walked away with just a little scratch, so you can't say that I walked away without a scratch.
You almost can, but technically, you can't.
I usually carry my cell phone in my hip pack, but something told me different that night. I decided to wear it inside my leather jacket. When the car had flipped and rolled, it had scattered everything inside of it all over the impact area, most of it thrown out into the woods and into utter darkness. It wasn't until the next morning that I found my hip pack hanging from a branch in a tree, ten feet off the ground, and fifteen feet from the impact site. Not kidding. Since the pack is jet black, finding it at night would have been a major effort. Anyway, that little voice had told me to carry my cell phone in my leather jacket, and that's what I had done. That's the one reason that I had it to contact emergency services and my wife when I exited the wreck.
I climbed to the top of the gully, looked down at the smashed RX-7, then looked up to Heaven. The clouds parted at that exact moment and the rain stopped. The whole area seemed to be lit up by the light of the moon through the break in the clouds and I looked up as high as I could and I said "Thank You!" as loud as I could. Not kidding. I know where my good luck comes from and I give credit where credit is due. God was definitely my co-pilot that night.
I calmly reached into my leather jacket and used my cell phone to call my wife. The accident had happened only six miles from our house.
To make a long story just a little bit shorter, the Marion County Deputy Sheriff arrived and investigated the wreck. His first expression was priceless as he looked at the twatted up RX-7 and shook his head. He turned to me with a professional calm and said:
"I'm not going to find a body down there still in that wreck, am I?"
"No, sir." I replied. "It was only me driving."
He looked down at the car again.
"Ain't no way anyone came out of THAT wreck alive, son." he muttered. "That's the worst I've seen in five years."
"Only me." I replied. "And God."
He started to fill out an accident report. He and I went down to the car and he used his flashlight to look around the interior. What we saw amazed us both and really strengthened my religion. From what we could see of the interior, there was no way anyone should have lived through the impact! There wasn't any space to be compressed into inside the car! How I managed to move around the interior (all 5'12" of me) is today still amazing, but when I was kicking open the driver's side door, it felt like I had a studio apartment to move around in.
Oh, the other thing that really weirded us out was the fact that where my head had been, there were a handful of six inch wooden stubs sticking out of the ground, sheared off, and partially sharpened into impromptu stakes by the sliding RX-7. My car had come to rest right on top of them, and my head had been one inch from being impaled by two or three inch thick hastily made wooden stakes. Luck? I don't think so! Another inch in either direction from the point of impact and I would have been mental shish-ka-bob. Think of diving head first into pungi spikes and you get the idea. They were just little trees, an inch or so in diameter, sheared off by the RX-7, but they would have been lethal if my head had come to rest on top of them, driven down with force by the weight of the RX-7, for they poked up into the car a good four inches or more. Funny, I hadn't noticed them after the accident, but they were there, illuminated in the flashlight of the deputy, and we both were kind of silent at the dark thoughts of how it all might have turned out.
Also, God had wisely helped me to leave the road at the exact spot where the RX-7 would come to rest right in front of a major grove of trees. A few more feet on down the road before I left the paved surface, and I would have been wrapped around a pine tree or two. Ten more feet down the road, and I would have missed the gully completely. Instead, my RX-7 would have landed upside down in a four foot deep concrete box culvert and ditch, now swollen with fresh brown rain water! Imagine being trapped upside down, in a smashed RX-7, under four feet of water.
Shivers went up my spine at how all this could have gone wrong, and how it all had worked out almost perfectly.
The deputy sheriff looked at the spiked off trees sticking up into the car and shook his head.
"Someone up high is looking out for you, son!" he told me.
I agreed with him.
A wrecker came and pulled what was left of the RX-7 out of the gully and towed it off. Cindy drove me to Forrest General hospital in Hattiesburg, 30 miles away, where we met my parents and I walked into under my own power and checked myself into the Emergency Room. Several X-rays, a neck brace, and a cat scan later, I was pronounced to have one minor scratch on my leg (Band-Aid) and a pulled collar muscle. I was given some prescription pain killers and muscle relaxers and sent home.
I took the next day off from work.
These pictures below were taken 12 hours after the crash. As you can tell by my expression, the drugs were doing pretty well in my system. Yes, the jacket is the same one I was wearing 12 hours earlier.
My insurance agent was amazed, we talked about God's plan for me and she said that she was going to keep a watch on me, because God wanted me here for a reason. God wasn't through in my life yet. I agreed. Want more proof that I'm here for a reason? Check the link below. You think the RX-7 wreck was bad? You won't believe what I did 9 months later. I told you earlier, if they were going to make a movie out of my life, I would get to play the part of me. Why? Because I know the part the best, and I do my own stunts.
It was eight months later that I got the last little sliver of safety glass out of the pockets and interior lining of the jacket.
But wait! There's more! Read about my 70mph collision with a full grown deer on my '95 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R, and incidents leading up to that accident which pretty much sum up the "Year Of Living Dangerously".