A Near-Death Experience

Once again I have narrowly escaped -- bum, bum, bum -- death by log truck! (quieter and quieter -- log truck, log truck, log truck!)

True. This is the second time that I have barely missed being killed, munched, splattered flat as the proverbial pancake (and which proverb is that?) and yet this time it did not bother me. I did not have to pull over to the side of the highway and breath in huge ragged gasps that didn't seem to give me anything like enough oxygen, until I calmed down.

Driving in to work, merging on to 205, and speeding up as I came down the on-ramp, to reach freeway speeds, only to come right up on the tail of a small pickup which had learned driving at the School of Opposite, and had slowed down to nearly stopping at the end of the ramp. As I braked hard, I looked quickly to my left, to see if I could whip around him, and saw the log truck barreling down beside me. As it passed, I was ready to snap my wheel and skid around this ridiculous little standing-still pickup. Something caught my eye, though, up in the high left corner, and I paused momentarily to assess it -- just long enough to realize that there was a long straight hitch between the truck and the trailer it was pulling, also full of logs. I would have been extremely flattened. Squashed beyond even identification.

I thought about this as I drove peacefully in to work, and found that my heart had not even accelerated. I wasn't concerned bodily at all. Hardly even mentally.

Whereas! The first time I took on a log truck and barely escaped with my life, it shattered me to the point of being incapable of driving. This was the second day I had a license, and I was driving over to the Farm to visit Mom and Dad. Driving east on Hwy 14, I came up behind a slow sedan driving up a fairly steep hill, and I pulled into (what I thought was) the fast lane to pass them. As I passed them, humming merrily to myself, I looked over and smiled at the elderly couple who were both staring at me, in absolute horror. I pulled back over in front of them just as I topped the rise, and just as an enormous log truck, full to the brim with enormous logs came charging over the hill top in the lane I had just that second left. It was a two-lane highway, and I had just narrowly, narrowly missed a terrible, horrible death.

Whew! Even thinking about it makes me anxious. Not this time, though. Wonder why?