Death Comes In Threes AKA The Third Time’s The Charm

Sometimes the strangest vibes will come sliding across my brain like a melody out of place & remind me of incidents long ago and nearly forgotten. Kind of like my nine months, a pregnancy almost, spent in Indiana. It was mid-summer 1994, one of the hottest summers I had ever lived through, following on the heels of the coldest & snowiest winter season in Fountain County, Indiana.

Having never lived in a rural area other than two college towns in Illinois, both Macomb (Western Illinois University) & Lincoln (Lincoln College), or visited friends who lived in small towns throughout the United States, I never did get used to rural driving, especially during bad weather.

During my brief stint of living in both Attica & West Lafayette, Indiana I thought I’d never make it out alive. It almost happened too, not once or twice, but three times I felt like it was “the end” for me.

The first time came during the early winter of 1994, when I was close to leaving my managing editor position at the Fountain County Neighbor in Attica. Too many head-butts with the publisher didn’t exactly go over too well in my mind. What can I say though, I thought I was doing right & of course it turned out I wasn’t “good enough” for them. Oh well, what was a guy to do, anyway?

Driving to Crawfordsville, the closest & semi-biggest city outside of Lafayette, always took me 90 minutes or so to complete. One afternoon, I decided to take a curvy dirt road that I had driven a few times before. There was a bit of snow on the ground, as well as some on the road and so I thought I could cut my time in half if I took this road down.

It was one of those roads that were cut through the middle of a forest, beautiful trees surrounded each side of the road, though with the snow upon them, made them appear even prettier to the naked eye.

It was in the middle of the shortcut that I had to stop suddenly & that’s when all of my troubles began. My car, which back then, was a 1992 red Geo Prism with a little over 40 thousand miles on it, from all the distance traveling I was doing, going back & forth from Indiana to Illinois and then up to Wisconsin to visit my then-girlfriend and her baby boy and then back again.

A little rabbit had crossed my path & rather than hit & kill it outright, I decided I would try to swerve & avoid hitting it. Big mistake! Once I did that, my car started sliding across the road & then left the road. It kept on sliding until it finally came to rest against a tree on a river embankment. The river itself was only 10 feet away.

I didn’t have any way of communicating to the world I was in trouble, so when I settled down after screaming that I was going to die; I backed the car up until I was back up on the curvy dirt road. It was at that moment that I saw that rabbit hopping along the road. I decided that next time I had to do that, I wasn’t going to play Mr. Nice Guy anymore. Thankfully, there was no physical damage to my car.

The second time death & I crossed paths, was in mid-March, when a major ice storm had dropped a bucket-loads & bucket-loads of sleet & rain & ice and made Highway 52 to Highway 28 from Lafayette to Attica extremely dangerous to drive.

Nonetheless, I thought it would be easy, because after all when I attended college at WIU in Macomb, Illinois, in the mid-1980s, I had ridden my bike downhill on College St. during an ice storm in the Spring of 1985, so driving a car would be a piece of cake. Ah, what wisdom & knowledge I thought I had, as I turned the corner between a silo and a farm field.

Before I knew it, I was flying at 55 miles an hour (or what felt more like 200 miles an hour) at full force like Santa Claus’ sleigh across the midnight sky and landed in a cornfield.

The third time I had met death was the real thing. I had just left a job interview in Indianapolis, Indiana, when I making a right hand turn. An 18-wheeler was doing the same thing same time & didn’t bother to look where it was going. Sure enough a few moments later I heard the crushing of twisted metal & breaking glass only to realize that I was getting crushed by the truck.

I must have passed out because the next thing I knew, I saw a big white room & with hundreds of angels wearing baseball caps and smoking pipes, showing me home movies of my life up to that summer in Indiana.

The weirdest characteristic wasn’t so much their pipe-smoking, but it was the way they showed those films. As soon as they opened their eyes, the movies would appear & then subsequently be screened. When I awoke, the truck driver although ornery, came over to see if I was alright.

As a state trooper rolled up & surveyed the damage, neither of us was issued tickets. We exchanged addresses, insurance company information and went on our separate ways. It is interesting to note that death cycles do come in threes. What it said for me in 1994 says a lot more to me than now than ever before.