It’s 1970 and I am in my Junior year of college (a very logical mathematics and computer science major) with two babies, a grad student hubby and a full time job in the campus computer center working the graveyard shift. It’s Saturday morning so I have no classes after work this morning. I am driving the 19 miles home to Albion. It’s been snowing all night and I am driving the last 5 miles in deep slush.
The road is an old one and banked wrong. It slopes from the middle down to the right hand side. There are no guard rails. Even during the summer I’ve seen sturdy cars like big Cadillacs pulled from the canyon below – just totally flattened. So I am being good, creeping along cautiously about 15 mph in my 1969 &1/2 Ford Maverick.
Then my car begins to fishtail and with each turn of the wheel it gets worse and I realize I am going to collide with the oncoming car. So I decide (without much pondering) that only one of us should crash to the canyon below and I turn the steering wheel hard to the right. Time seems to slow down as my car is suddenly airborne. I see the sky and the treetops beneath me and I am calmly thinking to myself at least I have my seatbelt fastened.
My car does a 180 degree turn mid air and lands exactly on the only piece of shoulder that is precisely the same size as the wheel base foot print of my car and stops there.
I scoot over to the passenger side (the driver side door would open to the canyon far below) and get out.
The oncoming driver has stopped his car back the direction I just came from and is walking towards me exclaiming that this was the best driving maneuver he has ever seen and how talented I am (yeah, right). He thought it was planned. He thanked me for not hitting him and went into town to call a tow truck.
The tow truck driver wanted to know how I did that since there was no way to drive the car into that position.
So this is the second event in my life that I had a hard time reconciling with my overdeveloped sense of logic reality of believing only what I can see and touch and feel.
I just filed this event away as an unexplainable exception and go about the next 13 years in the same thinking groove.
Life hits me upside the head with several more “unexplainable events” before I get curious enough to find out more about what else is out there that does not neatly fit into a handy formula or solvable equations with pat answers….and thus the journey begins.
