The nine (or more) times I almost died

My college friends and I have a private mailing list where we keep in touch, and Rob sent out a link to a blog post he ran across called "The 25 times I almost died" saying it reminded him of me. I had this thing back in college where no one thought I would make it alive to 30. I couldn't come up with 25, but here's what I got:

1) I think it was 1989 and there was a hurricane parked off the North Carolina coast. I was surfing Rodanthe Pier in double overhead waves far larger than my ability to handle them. There were very few people out so I was more or less alone with nobody near me. The waves were breaking really far offshore, past the end of the pier. I took off on a wave and wiped out. I was held under water for quite some time, rolling around. When I struggled to the surface again I realized my surfboard was no longer attached to my leg leash and was nowhere in sight. I was now in the area where the waves were crashing down; the water was way too rough and I was too far out to give me any hope of making it to shore swimming. After a few minutes of struggling and making no progress and seeing no one around me I started realizing that this was probably it for me. I was going to die out there. My strength was almost gone. I had been knocked under water several times by huge waves. I knew I would not be able to struggle to the surface one more time after the next one hit me. Moments later two surfers who had noticed me finally made their way over and rescued me.

Me at Rodanthe Pier

2) When I was about 8 my dad had this beat up old chevy van with a bunk in the back. I spent many nights at the local VFW lounge/bar with him. He would sit at the bar getting drunk, I would be in the arcade room reading comic books, playing pinball, shuffle bowling or (later) video games. Eventually I would go out to the van and sleep in it, waking up when his drunk ass pulled into the driveway at home. One night my mom showed up pretty late and took me home in her car because my dad was even drunker than usual but refused to not drive home. That night he wrapped the van around a bridge railing. The bunk area in the back was completely demolished. He lived of course. There are some monsters that just can't be killed.

3) Sophomore year in college, I experimented with this interesting substance the kids called 'shrooms'. In the midst of a rich, confusing and wild experience, I freaked out when I saw the shadows of my friends hands shoot up the wall, across the ceiling and down the other wall towards me, the only thing that stopped me from jumping out the 4th story window was the fact that it was closed so I bounced off. Say no to drugs, kids.

4) Drunk driver swerved head-on into my lane when I was 17 driving a 1976 cherry red camaro full of people. I was sober and had the reflexes of a cat so we escaped with only the left rear quarter panel demolished. Later while my camaro was in the body shop, I flipped a rental car whilst whipping up the emergency brake to do 180s on a gravel road. Totaled it. I had paid an extra dollar for full insurance on the rental though, so it cost me nothing. Before I got my camarao back someone broke into the shop and stole it. They totaled it while driving drunk.

76 Camaro

5) In December of 2000 right after the beinning of the second intifada, I took an air courier gig to deliver a Microsoft DVR to Tel Aviv. While there for a few days I took a trip into Palestine and hired a guide to show me around the Bethlehem area. Things were going great until my guide found out that a public bus had just been bombed back in Tel Aviv and they were locking down the border. On the way into Palestine I had gone through a checkpoint on a paved road in a taxi. My guide told me it was best to try to get across the border immediately or else I might be stuck there for days (and miss my flight). He shoved me into a van filled with about 10 people. No one spoke English. I didn't realize it at first, but eventually it dawned on me that we were trying to sneak across the border. The back row was filled with some militant looking young men, I was in the front seat between the driver and his son. Everyone was talking excitedly in Arabic. The driver kept turning up the radio news program so we were bumping along dirt roads amid the desert hills with a cacophony of shouted arabic around me. The only words I understood were Clinton, American and jihad. Dangling charms from the rearview mirror kept hitting me in the face. It was a bit uncomfortable but I would be lying if I said I didn't think it was totally out of control awesome at the time. Every now and then the driver would stop and talk to some militant looking young guy standing beside the dirt tracks we were following. Their conversations always got to the point where they were both staring at me, but eventually we would drive on. The part where I started to get nervous was when I could begin to see the walls of the old city of Jerusalem peaking over the hills as we twisted around them. I realized that if the Israelis just opened fire on the van my chances of survival in the middle of the front seat with no seat belt were pretty slim. There was nothing I could do though, I didn't even have enough room to slouch down behind the dash. But then suddenly we turned a corner onto on a paved road in Jerusalem and I got dropped off at the old city gate.

6) There are countless times when I was doing something stupid in a car with my high school friends where I should have died. There are a lot of empty stretches of road in rural North Carolina that practically demand you do things like have the passenger slide over to take over driving while you're doing 60mph down a remote stretch of highway coming back from Emerald Isle, while you are climbing out the driver's window and onto the roof. Then jump from the roof over to the bed of your friend's pick up truck followed by sliding in his driver's window and taking over driving the truck while his passenger slides out the window, into the back of the truck and then through the passenger window of your car. There's more stories like that than I can really list here. Stuff involving driving school busses, using gasoline to set the road on fire while playing car chase and on and on. I probably have forgetten most of them.

7) In December of 2004 I went on an three week Indochina vacation starting off in Vietnam and later meeting a bunch of my SF friends in Thailand. We were going to do a New Year's Eve Psytrance party in Krabi, Thailand. We were going to all meet in Krabi, but then decided to first go to Koh Samui / Koh Phangan for the monthly Full Moon Party. The first full day most of us were on Koh Samui is when the big tsunami hit the India and Thailand coasts, ultimately killing more than 225,000 people in eleven countries. Krabi, where I had a beachside hotel room booked until we changed out plans, was one of the places wiped out. Koh Samui however is on the other side of the Malay peninsula and was unaffected (except for the swarms of foreign tourists rerouting there). The irony was that the Full Moon Party was a dreadfully awful Eurotrash infested experience full of drunks pissing and tossing their beer bottles in the ocean, but it was the dreadfully awful party that may have saved our lives.

Sapna and Elaine, Full Moon Party

8) In high school we used to get a case of beer and head down to Atlantic Beach for the night. We'd start a bonfire and sleep right on the sand in a sleeping bag. We usually did this next to an old abandoned submarine watch tower from WW II. This was a three story tall concrete tower on a raised platform. It was a little tough to climb up onto the platform, but we had it worked out. Once inside each floor was just a bare concrete room about 20x20 feet square. The floor of each room except for the bottom platform level had a big square hole in it, about 10x10. There was also a hole in each floor where the stairs used to be. They were almost entirely gone and what was left was really decrepit, but we could manage to scramble our way all the way to the top floor where you'd get pretty nice views. It was a great place to sit and drink your beer. Inevitably someone would start suggesting we jump over the 10x10 holes in the floor. Now ten feet isn't a long way to jump, but considering how often we did it and how much drinking we sometimes had engaged in, I'm still amazed to this day that none of us ever fell to our deaths. A girl from the next county did exactly that a few years after I graduated and they tore down the tower.

9) We were having a party at my place in college. It was a house everyone called The Barn because it looked like one. I lived on the second floor where the party was, and the property manager Larry lived downstairs. It was late in the night and the party was just beginning to wind down but there were still a dozen or so people there. I had retired to my room where I was busy trying to hook up with someone I had been hoping to hook up with for some time. So when I heard the first scuffle outside my door I ignored it, hoping my housemates would take care of it. A few minutes later though I hear "he's got a gun" and decide maybe I needed to investigate this. I come out of my room and I see my housemate John Ray and Larry wrestling over a shotgun. At this point I didn't know who was crazy, so I figured I would just get the gun away from both of them until we could sort it out. So the three of us are now wrestling over this shotgun. We're pulling back and forth, twisting around. We do this all the way down the hallway and down the stairs off the back deck into the backyard. When we reach the bottom I finally convince them both to let go of it. At that exact moment I'm blinded by lights as the cops come around the corner of The Barn, weapons drawn on me and yelling to drop the shotgun. Take your pick where I could have died in that one. The upside is I totally got lucky afterwards.

I'm probably forgetting a few. It's been a long life. I've been held up at knife point, thought I was going to die another time surfing, almost had my head taken off when an SRL robot called the Hand o' God spun around suddenly, been caught offshore in bad weather in a canoe...

Fortunately I take it easier these days, being a dad and all.