Scariest moment of your life

Driving home from Cincinnati after visiting some friends and introducing myself to Graeter's. Driving on I-64 west of Lexington, it's mountainy and dark and really foggy. Passing a valley and it's completely filled with fog and clouds. Spooky and pretty at the same time. I'm driving my mom's Crown Vic because it has A/C whereas Eeyore, the grey 1991 Buick Regal of mine, did not.

Moving along and the fog lifts a bit to reveal a 10-point deer staring at me. He doesn't walk out onto the interstate, he doesn't run, he just sort of materializes, as though transported. I hit the brakes and star fishtailing all over the interstate, eventually doing full spins until I come to a stop in the left lane, facing the median. I miss the deer, and as I walk out to look at what if anything I hit, it turns out that everything is intact. Somehow I not only didn't hit the deer, but I didn't hit anything else either, so the car was just fine. Lucky me.

As I got into the car to start it, I look out my window and see a car barreling towards me at about 75 mph. He's a quarter-mile away or so. I don't have time to get the car started and out of the way. I can only squeeze my eyes and pray he either switches lanes or takes me out painlessly. He saw me in plenty of time, though, and switched lanes. Lucky me times five.

Ended up staying at a Days Inn in Staunton instead of going the rest of the way home. That was scary enough on its own merits.

 

Two of them:

The first was about three years ago. I was riding with one of my best friends on I-5 north in Seattle. We'd driven up in her miata from Oregon for the weekend — her to see her folks and me to meet with my soon-to-be SE for my first internship in college — and were only maybe 15 miles from my exit.

We're in the carpool lane on the lefthand side and, in south Seattle there's an exit on the left randomly while all the rest are to the right. There's very light traffic as it's about 10 p.m. and all of the sudden, this green ford expedition comes from the far right lane all the way over into us. They realized we were there apparently at just the last second, because the ass end *just missed* tapping the front right of the miata and they got back over a lane and sped off. My friend, trying not to let us get crunched, had slammed on the breaks. We think they might have actually tapped us because as her brakes locked up, we were going straight for the divider between I-5 and the offramp. She swerved to the left so we wouldn't die and we ended up doing 360's down the offramp. After about four or five probably, the ass end of the miata hit one of the walls of the offramp, leaving us horizontal down a one-lane offramp. She had a few neck/back problems for a while, and I (in my own little car) was gunshy of huge SUVs, but otherwise we survived. I didn't think I would live long enough to have a first internship.

The second was about six months ago, during one of a half-dozen trips I took from Oregon to Seattle while in the process of moving. Driving north on I-5 in downtown Portland, through the Terwiliger Curves where the speed limit drops to 50 because people are stupid. I've driven them enough that I normally go about 60-65 and like to be in the left lane. All of the sudden, little pimped out honda comes up behind me out of nowhere, passes me on the right going probably 80 at the beginning of one of the bigger curves, gets back in the left lane, fishtails and does 360s across the four lanes of I-5 from the left to the right and back to the left, coming to a stop resting about 2 feet from the median. I have enough time to get over and miss hitting him. Luckily, I'd been at the front of a small pack of cars and there had been no cars on the stretch where he spun. Everyone saw it happening and slowed down, not knowing where he'd end up. I saw someone behind me stop, but I was too shaken up by it to think enough to pull off on the side and check on the driver. If they'd actually *hit* something, I would have definitely stopped.

 

360 in a Pinto after a blowout on the NYS Thruway, came to rest in the passing lane, facing traffic. There were five of us in the car. Luckily, there was a slight break in traffic and they guy got the car safely off the road. We'd have been crispy critters.

Christmas Eve, 1986. Flying home after a basketball trip in a DC10 and the right engine blows up with a tremendous roar, the plane shudders and immediately descends about 1,000 feet. Pilot gets it under control, shuts down the engine, returns to the airport and executes one of the smoothest landings I've ever experienced.

 

July 15, 1985. Hit and run while on my bicycle. Dead for at least 4 and a half minutes. Respitory therapist named Michael Lewis riding down the road saw the big lump in the middle of it, stopped, gave me CPR and saved my life. In a coma for 6 weeks. God bless the good doctors at Vanderbilt!

 

My sophomore year of college, our baseball team made its annual spring trip to Orlando for a week's worth of games. Three vans and the coach's car. For a college baseball team, this was a pretty hard-edged bunch, a lot of rough guys.

As we left at the end of the week, two of the seniors muscled their way to the two front seats of the van I was packed up in. As they pulled out of the parking lot for Pennsylvania, they pulled out six bottles of tequila. The two proceeded to guzzle tequila the rest of the way to the top of Florida.

We went up I-95 through Georgia at 100 miles an hour, passing cars on the right-hand shoulder and doing two 360s along the way. Amazingly, we were not stopped. Anyone who tried to talk these two idiots into giving up the wheel and shotgun position either got swung at or pushed to the back of the van.

At one point, I was in the back seat, actually writing my obituary. The shortstop turned around, saw what I was doing and said, "Hey, mon, we all gotta die sometime."

When we stopped at a McDonald's in southern South Carolina for a BR break, I was looking through the parking lot for cars with Pennsylvania license plates, hoping I could talk them into taking me with them.

By the time we got to the middle of South Carolina, the two seniors began to feel droopy and finally allowed me to take the wheel. I didn't give it up for the remaining 10 hours, kept both hands grasping the wheel with white knuckles in case anybody felt like they wanted a turn.

 

Jesus Christ.

The only time in my life I genuinely thought I was going to die (not scared that I might, but totally certain that I would) was while flying on VASP, the national airline of Brazil -- from New York to Toronto, strangely enough.

Plane is nearly empty (not so strangely, given it's the fucking national airline of Brazil). Only entertainment is the big blue screen at the front of the cabin with the altitude and speed on it.

Not long after takeoff, there's a loud bang. I'm talking a bang like a Dumpster being dropped. Plane shudders. Beast immediately starts to drop, which I could feel in my guts, but which I could also see on that goddamn screen in front of my face. Altitude is plunging by the thousands of feet. This is it.

And this I now know: When I go, I'm going like the rapists in Straw Dogs: all sideburns and venom. I'm swearing at the top of my lungs... at my boss, for making me take this cheap-ass flight, at fate, at fucking Brazil. Every person I've ever met is suddenly a goddamn motherfucking piece of shit.

We drop probably 12,000 feet, fast. Other people are yelling. Guy across the aisle from me has pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper, presumably to write a will or a love note. I mean, I'm not alone here. We all think we're booking it.

When suddenly, the plane stops falling. Altitude picks up. Everything gets calm. Everything returns to normal, strangest of all.

No announcement from the cockpit. No explanation. No apologies. Just some green-looking flight attendants, passing out buns, as though some tinny baked goods would make us forget what had just happened.

That flight changed me. First, I decided I'm just a passenger in life. Whatever happens, happens. It's all up to the universe.

And second, everytime I meet a Brazilian, I punch him as hard as I can, right in the face.

 

Thankfully I haven't been directly involved in anything like some of the shit here. Damn.

My brother was in a horrific car accident a week after he got his license. He was driving my little car and decided to cross the highway at rush hour. It was bad.

My dad and I happened to drive up on the scene before EMS got there. My car was only recognizable by the ribbons on the antenna. And there was my brother, laying out the back of hatchback covered in glass, with a good samaritan holding his neck in place and both were covered with blood. My dad went into shock, so I had to take charge at the scene and at the hospital.

The paramedic at the scene told me we should have been sponging my brother off the pavement, but somehow he managed to fly out the back of the car as the sides were being crushed together, catching his foot and holding him in. He escaped with bruises, and the blood on his neck was from a glass cut.

 

When I was a kid, I fell out of a moving car going 35-mph turning onto a busy street. My only injury was a badly scrapped up knee. It's a miracle I wasn't ran over.

During my younger and dumber days, I went skidding into oncoming traffic at 110-mph in my car and survived. I felt something grab the steering wheel and it wasn't me. Definitely moved me permanetly from the realms of the antitheists.

My dad was a fire fighter for a while. A lot of late nights, especially when there was an explosion or house fire involved.

 

Fuck me. That's the funniest fucking post I've seen on here in a long time. Thanks. Now my damn stomach hurts.
I guess turning 360s on a two-lane highway right after a meeting a car going the other way just seems kinda, I don't know, wimpy by comparison. But I did jump off a cliff on the Buffalo River in Arkansas. Three times. I even have the Christmas cards to prove it.

 

How is a story of someone on a MOTHERFUCKING PLANE (no snakes involved, right?) plummeting 12,000 feet in a matter of seconds funny?

 

See, this is why you're still a junior member. You're not hardened yet.

 

Dammit Shottie, I forgot the sarcasm font.