Close calls

I had done relatively well in the Sunsa 10K race in Amsa-dong. I just needed to traverse an intersection, and I would soon be at the finish line. It was the duty of some retired Marine Corpsmen to tell the drivers to stop and let us runners through. Two of them so indicated to the person behind the wheel of a silver car. I might have assumed or trusted that I was well protected, but why take the chance? I halted and looked right just in case. It’s a good thing I did because he or she was in a hurry and in no mood to wait for a silly footrace. Had I not taken the cautious approach, I might have been killed or badly injured. Even if it were the latter, the thought of spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair and/or in constant pain was sobering. I was not hit, however. The Marine Corps guys (Semper Fidelis!) indicated in every nonverbal way that they were sorry, and please don’t be mad. Not at all. It had not been their fault; I just resumed the race.

Disaster did not happen that day in early September 2011 but it could have. Thus I had reason to remember some other close calls from the past. There have been several, but the three most vivid are as follows:

1. Shortly before we graduated from high school, my then-girlfriend Debbie Hart—I wonder whatever happened to her?—and I were in my car, a blue 1964 Buick convertible. We were in the vicinity of Tenison Golf Course in Dallas, pausing at an intersection and about to cross a three-lane street. That alone should have told me it was a one-way street, with all the traffic moving east. Perhaps distracted by Debbie’s pulchritude, I accelerated. We immediately heard the loud horn of a 16-wheel tractor-trailer. The driver swerved and narrowly avoided what would have been a devastating collision. The truck was coming from Debbie’s direction, so she would have gotten the worst of it. Oh, heck, we both would have been killed. Her death would have been a bit earlier and more gruesome, that's all.

2. Jump forward three decades or so. I was alone in my car—a gold Mazda in this case—and coming out of the parking lot of the Goodwill Store on South Lamar Boulevard in Austin. There was a no-left-turn sign, but I brazenly disregarded it. I had done this several times before when the traffic was light. No harm, no foul, as they say in the basketball world. Well, it was a foolish and almost tragic mistake. I thought I had looked carefully enough and discerned no cars coming from the left. How wrong I was! In fact, a car was traveling at a fairly high rate of speed. The driver, fortunately for me, had been paying attention. He honked and gave me a mean look that I fully deserved. But he, like the truck driver near Tenison Golf Course in 1971, managed to avoid hitting me. This was a very close call. After arriving at my home, I informed a friend that I had nearly gone the way of all flesh. I asked her, “Would you at least have put cheap, plastic flowers on my grave?”

3. My final example of close-but-not-quite came in January 2003, not too long after the incident on South Lamar. I was in the same Mazda, in a very vulnerable position. I sat near the bottom of a short and steep exit ramp off Interstate 35 in downtown Austin. Some civil engineer should have lost his job for designing it so poorly. If a driver did not know about this unusual exit ramp, he or she would come off much too fast. Indeed, studies had been done and shown that it was the site of an exceedingly high number of accidents. As stated, I was near the bottom of the ramp. Only one car was in front of me as we waited for the light to change. I looked in my rear-view mirror and was horrified to see a car roaring off the highway, its driver unaware that the ramp was much too steep. An out-of-towner, obviously. To his credit, he recognized the predicament and did his best to ameliorate it. He jammed his brakes immediately. The screech of rubber on pavement was quite loud but nothing compared with the metal on metal that was coming all too quickly. His car slowed from 65 miles per hour down to almost nothing and hit my back bumper with no more than a love tap. The man, who was of Greek descent if I remember accurately, took full responsibility and apologized profusely. I was on my way to the funeral service for Dr. Henry Renfert at St. David’s Episcopal Church. As you can imagine, I said a fervent prayer of thanksgiving inside that holy place.