I Shouldn't Be Alive

I recently watched a ridiculous show called “I shouldn’t be alive”. Without being exact, it went something like this: “My friend and I decided to paddle to thru the Bering Strait in our canoe in December. We lost a paddle and were soon stranded on a rocky island. We lived on seabird eggs and got hypothermic until we were able to build a fire. The fire signaled the cast and crew of a passing crab fishing vessel filming “Deadliest Catch”. Luckily, they rescued us although we lost all our limbs in the incident”.

It made me think of other near-death experiences in my life.

In the 1980’s while working at Eastman Kodak, I worked with a guy who was on Eastern Airlines flight 232. This was the flight that lost all hydraulic pressure and cart-wheeled down a runway in Iowa killing 111 of its passengers and crew. He was one of the 194 people that lived through the crash. He walked away physically unscathed and the very next week, he came to work.

I’ve never had quite such a harrowing experience but I’ve come near to death a couple times in my life.

During one of those brilliant moments that can only happen when you are 16 years old, I was riding, with no helmet, on the back of my friend’s motorcycle, trying to make some insignificant date at 115 mph. I remember seeing him move his head slightly to one side and very quickly. Just then a giant moth hit me dead-center in the forehead. As my feet came off the pegs of the motorcycle, I simultaneously began falling backwards off the machine while reaching for the jacket of my mate. I caught his jacket and survived to pick moth out of my hair and eye lashes for the next week.

Years later, I moved to Kansas City to go to college. One day, one of my friends approached me for a ride. The previous weekend, he’d gotten rather inebriated and had “lost his car”. Whilst on the drive down to the impound lot we got lost. I went to u-turn the 1972 Toyota Corolla around and the last thing I remember was a Mac Truck emblem about to smash into me. At 55 mph, the truck hit the driver side pillar and ripped the engine from the frame. The remains of the car spun 720 degrees. Other than a broken shoulder and many bruises, we came out unscathed.

Years later while living in Hong Kong, we used to take the HK Ferry from HK island over to Kowloon. One day, we were de-ferrying on the Kowloon side. The metal walkway descended to the pier and three of us were standing on the platform when a giant, rouge wave hit the ferry, pitching it violently into the pier. We were all thrown violently and the lady with us on the platform was thrown into the bay. She was crushed between the 1000 person ferry and the pier while we were only thrown backward onto the boat.

We made the Hong Kong newspaper the day after the rouge wave hit us, but to date, I haven’t received any offers the appear on stupid television programs.