The first time I didn’t die was at Camp Matrena. I was a candy-loving little boy, sucking on a butterscotch ball. Still love butterscotch. My mother told me that it had gotten caught in my throat, that I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe. I was turning blue. A counselor picked me up by my legs and held me upside down while he smacked me across the back. Butterscotch ball flew out. From that point on, my mother would strike the balls through the paper with a blunt instrument, breaking the candy into small pieces.
The second time I didn’t die is one that I remember. I was on my bike, crossing Ridge Avenue near the Montgomery Road traffic light. Cars were stopped for the light, so I darted out on my bike in between two waiting cars and into the left turn lane. A driver pulling up to make that turn slammed on her brakes, stopping just in time. I didn’t see her because, well, I don’t think I even looked. “You stupid shit!” I screamed to myself.
The third time I didn’t die was when I held up the Pleasant Ridge Post Office with my Mattell Burp Gun, which held roll caps. I opened one door, began firing, then ran to the other door, still blasting away. I proudly told my brother Jack about my criminal episode, and he replied, “You dumb shit! They could have killed you!”
The fourth time I didn’t die* was during my freshman year in college. Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington is about eight hundred miles north of Millbrae, where I was living with my parents. A Bay Area student arranged a charter flight back to San Francisco for Thanksgiving on a Vance International Airways plane, a DC-3. (According to Wikipedia, “As of April 1967, the company's fleet was itemized as one Douglas DC-3 (N57131),[3] one Douglas DC-7, and one Curtiss C-46, with two DC-7s on order.” It was my first time on an airplane.
Here’s a photo of a DC-3.
The difference between this DC-3, and good old N57131 is that this one’s engines are both working, both propellers are turning.
The flight from Walla Walla to SFO was uneventful. According to Apple Maps the distance takes about 11 hours to drive. The flight took a couple of hours less. I remember flying over a freeway, thinking that we were in an unsponsored race with a Volkswagen we followed. I could make it out down below.
We boarded the return flight to Walla Walla at dusk, took off over the Bay when I, sitting on the left side of the plane in one of the first seats, noticed that the propeller was spinning so quickly that it looked as if it wasn’t moving at all. I looked more closely. It wasn’t an illusion. I mentioned to the one flight attendant that this was a piece of information I thought the pilot should have, and she looked, too, apparently agreeing, then entered the cockpit. The plane banked steeply to the left, leaving us sideways and vertical. At the end of the wing I could see the water of San Francisco Bay, the darkened waves, the whitecaps. We were returning to SFO, flying on one engine. As we landed I noticed the many fire engines lining both sides of the runway.
We spent the night in the airport while the lone DC-7 was summoned to pick us up. A much larger plane, it gave us whole rows to stretch out in on the shorter flight back. When we landed in Walla Walla there were no portable ramps that could reach the passenger door of the DC-7, so we shinnied down poles attached to luggage carts that could almost reach the door.
The Fifth Time I didn’t die was shortly after Jadyne and I were married. I had accepted a temporary position with a college friend who was opening a wholesale furniture store. I could sell furniture. Jadyne would pursue a Master’s Degree. I would work on bolstering a virtually non-existent photography portfolio that the Rhode Island School of Design might look favorably enough on to grant me an admission the next fall.
We rented a U-Haul van (we had no car), and filled it with next-to-nothing—a wooden rocking chair, some clothes, a couple of guitars, and some other miscellaneous gifts and stuff that were generously given us, as we had only begun our lives together a month or two earlier.
Our first night found us at a motel in Wendover, Nevada. The next morning we headed down the grade and began the forty mile straight-as-an-arrow drive past the Bonneville Salt Flats and into Utah. I was driving 70 mph.
Looking west. Wendover is tucked into the mountains about ten miles from where this image was taken.
Jadyne was talking. Suddenly we both realized that although we hadn’t slowed a bit we were now facing perpendicularly to the highway. The road had a sheen of moisture on it, the result of either humidity or a brief shower the previous night. Jadyne stopped talking. I took my foot off the accelerator and began turning in the opposite direction, into the skid. The van swung around 180 degrees. I turned the wheel the other way. Again the swing. We were slowing down. This continued until we came to a stop, still upright, off the road on the shoulder, facing the highway. In the moments that followed we both remember the face of a man who had been behind us on the highway, as he turned and scowled at us as he passed.
It looked like this. The engine was in the front between the two seats. There was little weight in the back, so as Ralph Nader might have said, it was “unsafe at any speed.”
We were both okay. We spent that night in Rawlins, Wyoming, and we both offered prayers for our safety. We remembered the occasion by naming our first pet, a basset hound, Rawlins, Wyoming.
For many years after that I didn’t die. Jadyne almost did when she failed to realize that Rawlins, Wyoming (the dog) had fallen ninety feet off a cliff onto a sandy beach. Jay didn’t realize that we were only a few feet away from the cliff, which was disguised by a row of trees at the edge. She grabbed a tree at the same time she discovered the cliff, holding on so she wouldn’t follow Rawlins. We took a trail down, found a dog with just a broken rib, and sat down, breathing deeply, counting blessings.
Jadyne was sitting about ten feet away from me. At her feet was a coiled snake, perhaps a rattler, as they are common in the area. She hadn’t seen the snake. I said to her in a calm, level voice. “Listen to me. Do exactly as I say. Stand up slowly, turn, and walk over to me.” She did, a puzzled look on her face. I pointed to the snake. She broke down, tears, yes, but she didn’t die.
The sixth time I didn’t die was near the Appling cottage at Kennedy Meadows. Situated on the side of the Stanislaus river, the cottage that the Applings owned came through a sweetheart deal, costing 1$ a year for the right to be in a private secluded spot high in the mountains at the bottom of Sonora Pass. We honeymooned there.
A padlocked gate barred the riff-raff from crossing a bridge to the side of the river where the Applings’ cottage sat. Household garbage had to be carried out. I had the bag. Instead of unlocking the padlock and opening the gate, it was customary to grab one of the poles that held the gate, then swing around over the river and step to the other side. I did that, except I lost my grip on the pole and fell backwards towards the boulders below that lined the edge of the river. A kindly tree reached out and intercepted my falling body and held me suspended two or three feet below the bridge and ten feet above the rocks. I was okay. I dropped the garbage.
The seventh time I didn’t die was a year or two after we moved to Santa Rosa. Jadyne and I were sound asleep when two stoned card dealers, coming home from the Pastime Bar tried to light a joint in their car as they rounded a curve by out house. They hit a mound of dirt in front of my neighbor Duffy’s house, were thrown out of the car, which continued, its accelerator stuck, into our house, stopping while the rear wheels spun into the lawn by the front door, the racing engine belching smoke. I ran to the car. “Turn the engine off!” I screamed. Nothing. I opened the driver’s door. No driver. I fumbled in the darkness for the keys. No luck. I thought that the car was going to explode. I went back inside, grabbed a flashlight, ran back to the car, all the time expecting an explosion. I turned the engine off, turned and looked across the yard, finding one body on the lawn and another on Brush Creek Road.
When the ambulance arrived for the two card dealers the firemen wanted to take me to the hospital. Jay knew that I was in a state of shock, otherwise okay. That was the beginning of my sleep issues. Not fatal, not this time. And the card dealers? Survived.
The eighth time I didn’t die took place on the Rogue River, (John remembers that it was the Upper Klamath) this time with my whole family. The thrilling rafting adventure we were promised in Ashland understated what we were to go through. The size of the rapids along the river is determined by the outflow from a reservoir above. Too much water and the rapids are smaller. Too little, and they go from threes to fours, or in the case of the first rapid, four to five. We were in the last boat among four or five as we stared down the first rapid.
The raft hit a rock, and I can see Jason flying out backwards into the river. Moments later the boat flipped, and we were all thrown into the water at the top of a lengthy, raging Class Four (perhaps five?) rapid. Although wearing a helmet and a life jacket I suffered a concussion. As I struggled against the current I remember thinking that someone in my family was likely going to die. Jason and Jennifer managed okay. . Jadyne was bobbing up and down, searching for John, who was young, a poor swimmer. John’s face was bloodied. He was hysterical, but okay. And me? I was drowning, and I knew it. A strange sense of acceptance swept over me. Moments later someone from the first boats plucked us out. I didn’t die then only because it takes a little more time to drown, and I wasn’t in long enough to finish the job. I had a concussion and severe headaches for several months.
The ninth, and possibly the most recent time I didn’t die, took place on Grizzly Peak Road in Berkeley. I was riding my bike just south of Euclid when a lady turned into her driveway right in front of me. My bike hit her right front tire, I flew over the handlebars, my head smashing into her windshield. I bounced off the hood and onto the street. I moved my fingers, toes, took inventory, realized that I wasn’t badly hurt. “I didn’t see you,” she said. Duh.
A little plastic surgery, that’s all. When cyclists and cars meet in motion the cyclist usually loses. But I didn’t die.
There were probably other times I didn’t die in these last seventy-seven and a half years, when head-on collisions took place moments after I drove by, when lightning struck trees, not me, when through chance, luck, fate, genetics, or some other unforeseeable reason I’ve managed to stay alive. I have countless reasons to be grateful. Countless.
*I was reminded about these multiple escapes while reading Cutting for Stone, a novel by Abraham Verghese. In it is this passage:
“But just at the moment she was thinking these thoughts, anticipating her arrival in Addis Ababa…she found herself suddenly invoking Lord Shiva’s name: the plane, the DC-3, the trustworthy camel of the frontier sky, was shuddering as if mortally wounded. She looked out. The propeller on her side fluttered to a stop, and a puff of smoke came out of the beefy engine cowling.”
Been there. Done that.