Scariest moment of your life

Well, at least is sounds as if you didn't violate any laws or MSHA regulations in the process, platyr.

 

20 March 1993, 0546 GMT: I'd just gotten off watch on the USS Grayling, where we were about 100 miles off the northern Russian coast. The mess attendant put my breakfast down in front of me, there was a bang, a shudder and the plate went sliding down the table. The captain, a noted prude, let loose some fine swearing from the head of the table and we all started running. He went to Control, obviously, and I went aft to the engineering stations. About three hours later, when we'd found no water coming into the people space, didn't hear distress signs from the other sub and hadn't been depth-charged, it dawned on me how close I'd been to becoming fish food. Oh yeah, I also knew the investigation to follow would not be fun.

 

Blessings on you Del for running silent and running deep.

 

So, when somebody says, "Another day in the salt mine," you can really answer "Yes."

 

Hearing the words "brain" and "tumor" coming out of my doctor's mouth.

 

Standing next to my wife at the altar and feeling like it was a complete out-of-body experience, it was like watching myself have a panic attack.

 

Imagine her feeling, though!

 

All right, I'll play.

Age 11: I stepped out in front of a moving car traveling about 35 MPH. I was turned around talking to my friends and not paying attention to the traffic in front of me.
Looking over my shoulder, I stepped off the curb. My buddy Chris, turns white and screams, "Golf!"
At that instant, I feel the right front tire of the car run over the tip of my shoe. My bookbag breaks the passenger door mirror, but I escape unharmed. I stand there as the car goes by me- stunned. The lady driving tries to slow down and stop, but there are cars behind her and I'm not hurt- scared, but not hurt - so she keeps going and so do I.

Age 18: My first year as a whitewater raft guide on the mighty New River. Our boat of trainees was coming around the bend preparing to descend the Keeney rapids (a 1/4 mile stretch of Class IV rapids - one of the best on the river). As we come around the bend and glide by Whale rock, there are a LOT of boats in the eddy (a pool) at middle Kenney. Not one or two, but a dozen or so.
We eddy out and hit the beach to find the trip in front on us, another river company, had a boat flip and one of the customers got her foot caught in an underwater entrapment.
Her nose was six inches from the top of the water, but she had her ankle caught in log entrapment. The guide didn't notice her missing for a few minutes and once he did, they couldn't get to her. By the time she was freed, she had been under 20 minutes.
In the New River Gorge it's very hard to get in and out. It's isolated. It takes a good hour and half to get a rescue chopper in there.
So I stood in line with about 15 other guides to perform CPR on that woman for an hour and half. We all took turns in 10 minute increments.
I have never been so afraid in my life.
I'm no EMT or even a life guard - and I had NO desire to be. I was just a 19-year-old kid who thought this would be a great summer job; drink free beer, bag hot chicks in bikinis and party like a rock star.
It's one thing to be in a car wreck where you can't control what's happening or you are dealing with your life. It's another when you're trying to remember your training to save the life of someone else. Whether she lives or dies, you will live - and live knowing what you did that day was right and proper or wrong.
The lady died.
She was never resuscitated, but it wasn't for our lack of effort. I have never forgotten the day. She died on a rocky beach in an isolated stretch of God's Country, surrounded by stunned family and a motley crew of river guides.
Aside from that being the scariest moment, it was also the most pressure-packed time of my life.

 

Cont'd

Six years later: We are preparing to run the lower Gauley River after being flooded off the New. Normally, the LG is a great trip. Tons of fun. But on this day the water, which is a constant balmy 40 degrees, was really high. Too high to be running commercial trips. But the River Manager thought otherwise.
We had 12 trips out that day - with six to eight guides on each trip. I can count on one hand the number of guides who had seen and-or run the LG at that level.
One guy, a 15-year veteran guide in his 20s, said wasn't going and got back on the bus.
Not wanting to be a coward I remained. When out customers came the horror show kicked into high gear: a busload of fat people and boy scouts.
I was given seven fat people (all over 250 and a 300-pound woman who though she was taking an exaggerated log flume ride) and a 12-year-old boy.
If I'da had a lump of coal before we started I would have shoved it up my ass and invested in a diamond mine.
Half way through the trip everything's gone well. Than all Hell breaks loose.
We are approaching Upper and Lower Mash. Upper Mash at normal levels is normally a rock garden you have to pick your way through to get the eddy before running Lower Mash. That day it was a raging current of swells, boils and holes that just dared you to stick a boat in it. We lumbered our way through Upper and come out with a boat full of water and flesh. However, unable to make the eddy to bail the boat we are instead drifting toward Lower Mash. Normally, this isn't a problem. This day, there is a roar - the likes of which I could compare to a soldout Mountaineer Field during the Backyard Brawl - below us.
The entrance to Lower Mash, which is guarded by two rocks on right side of the river (the eddy side) has formed into a wicked raging, recirculating set of 15-foot falls. Our boat drifts over the 15-foot falls and remains upright - thank God for the fat fucks in the boat!
But, fat people and the Boy Scout can't paddle for shit. -- especially with a boatload of water. Rather than sliding out of the rapid and on downstream to the rest of the trip, our boat is being slowly sucked back into the falls.
Deathly afraid of being sucked into the hole and having the boat flip (four undercut rocks line the entire left side of the rapid for about 500 yards), I grab the 12-year-old boy and throw him into the middle of the boat for safe keeping.
"Paddle!," I scream at the top of my lungs over the roaring water. "Paddle you fat fucks or we are all doing to take a very nasty swim before we die!"
Rather than dig in, they are all staring at me.
"What the FUCK are you looking at?!," I shriek. "If you don't put your God Damn paddles in the water and get us the fuck out of this hole I will you push you ALL into the water myself! Now start Fucking Padddddlllllliiiinnnnngggggg!!!!"
By the grace of God that boatload of fatty tissue squirts out of the hole and survives with its people intact and no swimmers.
Suffice to say I'm rattled. I once saw a guy jump off the New River Gorge Bridge (876 feet from the bottom of the arch to the top of the river) with a parachute. The chute didn't open and he barely had time to hit the reserve. He hit the water at 40 MPH and swam out. He was shaking badly and could barely talk. He stutteringly asked for a cigarette when he hit the beach.
After being released from the Ice-cold grips of that watery hell, surrounded by folks only Jenny Craig could love, I had an idea how he felt.
We pulled over to the nearest eddy, I pulled out my dry bag and first aid kit, opened up the bottle of brandy I kept in it and took large shot.
I leaned over the boat stuck my head in the brown ice water that passed for rapids of fun and came up cold and wet, but in a better mood than I had been in the seconds before.
I passed the brandy around to the crew to soak up the adrenaline.
After a five minute break to regroup we went on about our merry way and had a good trip. That four minutes of hell in the MASH unit remains seared into me memory forever.


Now, anybody want to go rafting .... ;D

 

I believe her story began about 6 hours after mine

 

damn. i have nothing to add. one spinout on an icy on ramp in which i thought i'd get blindsided once i stopped. my life has been incredibly blessed. i always wonder when the other shoe will drop.

just about all these scary moments seem to have one of two things in common: cars or water. i guess that means we should all start walking a lot more and stay the fuck away from all bodies of water bigger than a juice glass.

 

I'll second that to say 9 a.m.-8:30 pm-ish Sept. 11. I probably spent 11:59 of those 12 hours making phone calls to everyone in my life, making sure everyone was OK. The other minute, I think I pissed my pants. That was the most ... unprepared scared ... I've ever been in my life. I'm prepared mentally for a car crash, or an accident, or getting mugged, or most other "normal" scary situations like the ones that have been laid out on this thread. I dare say I'm even prepared mentally for death (I'm not scared of it, per se.)

But 9/11 scared me more than anything before or since. Those first few hours, when NOBODY knew what was happening, why THAT happened, what could happen, what would happen, or where it might happen again, were the scariest of my life. They changed my life -- and hell, I didn't know anybody on those planes, or in those towers, or in those cities. I just saw it on TV, radio, Internet.

At 8:30 that night, my lifelong best friend, then an active-duty Marine, called me to tell me she was scared too. And it made me feel safe again. Not only that she was OK, which was my chief concern, but also because she said she was ready to do her job, whatever that was going to be. And I felt proud of her, and proud to be her friend, and proud that she was a Marine. And I wasn't scared anymore.