The whisper of the axe

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Inspired by someone on my flist exercising caution based on experience and thus not dying in a horrible car wreck]

The closest I've ever come to just being flat-out no take-backs killed involved the route I took home from grade one. We lived in the tutor's residences on Columbia Street. My school was five or six blocks away up Columbia [1] and there were train tracks about a third of the way from home to school. One day I was walking home, tripped just short of the tracks and as I stood back up, a train came through. I could have covered the distance between me and the tracks in the time it took me to get up.



1: Or much longer via a "short cut" I discovered, which looped all around UW campus and took me by the Tuck Shop in V1 (which was only useful if I'd remembered to hide my money: the teacher used to confiscate any loose change the kids had for some charity or other].

Comments

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm, interesting train of thought! (Why, yes, I do crack me up.)

I fell out of attic once -- fell right between a heavy oak chair and a bicycle. Had I hit either of those things, I think I would have gotten broken.

Of course, most of us probably have narrow escapes all the day that we'll never know about. The alternate route, the long stop light, the unplanned stop at the store -- who knows what they save us from?

[kuangning]

Did your parents know about the teacher taking your money? Because giving voluntarily is a far cry from a flat out demand of "I'm going to take your loose change now."

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

For all the Nicol-esque accidents I've had in life, alas (?) my closest encounter with the Reaper's scythe came from a boring-old case of food poisoning courtesy of tainted custard in a Napoleon/mille-feuille pastry.

-- Steve's taken food safety very seriously ever since.

[outerego.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience with a train in Germany.

I was wandering around town, a little lost. I stopped to get my bearings and looked back the way I came from, then turned around to forge on when out of nowhere a train shot by, missing me by an arms length. A very big, fast train.

I still can't figure out how I had wandered onto a track--I'm sure I was in the middle of the town at time and can't remember seeing a level crossing or the like.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I was once hiking on a trail around Mt. Hood; late in the summer but high enough that there were occasional snow banks blocking the trail. I came across a significant one of these and was carefully traversing across it. Then there's a blank spot in my memory, and then I was a few feet below the level of the trail, spreadeagled and clinging to the snow bank with both hands and feet. Below me was a long, steep slope down the mountainside.

I can't say for sure that the drop would have been fatal -- it would have depended on how long it took me to skid to a stop and what I hit along the way -- but it would have been very much no fun at all; and while people knew where I was nobody was expecting me to make contact for a few days. It could have been pretty bad.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I think the sub thing is the only exterior dangerous thing (other than my father). Everything else is medical.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Even leaving aside my experiences with Aurora drivers, I almost got run over today. I was crossing - with the light, I must point out - when two cars making left turns decided that they weren't going to wait for me to finish crossing. The ground was covered in slushy snow which was in turn covering patches of ice here and there, and I was very carefully carrying an extra-large coffee from Tim Horton's, so I know I wasn't walking at my usual quick pace, but that in no way absolves the driver who came directly at me at about 40kph and then veered suddenly to go around me when I had the right of way.

OTOH, I'm in Montreal for the weekend, so I suppose I should expect the drivers here to be maniacs...

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there were more exciting ones, but My Beloved Spouse and I used to have a strong disagreement about the amount of re-labelling that was required when repurposing food containers.

Then I staggered into the bathroom one night at 3 am, picked up what I firmly believed, for some good reasons, to be the bottle of water I had left there, and caught the reek just in time to VERY narrowly avoid taking a large gulp of bleach.

He woke up to me screaming (I kind of wish I hadn't, but I wake up badly; and I hadn't actually WOKEN UP when I did it, I had just gotten up to pee), and ever since then he is a firm proponent of the notion that THREE Skulls-and-Crossbones on a small container of non-food is just barely adequate.