A Close Call

This is the scene of the car crash that Natalie had on a recent icy night. Sure enough, as I have often heard, this area is less than 5 miles from home. Traveling too fast down a very long, steep sloped hill, she hit black ice. She braked and began a series of twists, turns, going from side to side and wound up in this creek. The jeep landed passenger windows side down, over the edge of the embankment in this icy cold water.

A passerby, (not the first because the car was not well visible from the road), saw her lights and stopped to help. With super-human strength, and no doubt with the assistance of both of their Guardian Angels, he lifted her door up so that she could crawl out. She called us from his cell phone crying that we had to get there right away.

I grabbed a blanket and started to make haste to get there, terrified at what I might find. Larry had already gone to bed so he quickly dressed and we headed there as fast as we could safely make it on this ICY night with freezing rain. There she stood with not a scratch on her, shaken up and apologetic for taking the car out on such a night. By then three other vehicles had stopped to help. I was so grateful to all the gentlemen who chose to Get Involved. I thanked them all from the bottom of my heart and try to remember their intentions in my prayers.

When the policemen got there, they needed her license. Sam, who came with us to the scene, crawled into the jeep to fish around for it and was successful. This time, it took two men to lift the door straight up without the aid of adrenaline and God's Grace! The side of the jeep was flush with the road because this is an embankment and the angle for lifting anything was terrible.

 The windows all broke on the passenger side and Natalie said that she was beginning to panic. Hearing the creek water  running into the car, she thought that all the fluids from the engine were leaking and would soon explode. The passenger door mirror is still in the creek when these pictures were taken over a week later. They don't capture the cold, snowy, icy, rainy, dark night as it happened. When the  tow truck arrived, he took one look at the car and said that what we needed was a wrecker. That was promptly dispatched. At that point we went home, carefully traveling the icy roads and slid around ourselves .It had taken me awhile to call home to say that Natalie was alright and Juby had been sobbing, holding the calendar that Holly and Tom had made for us on the page filled with pictures of her beloved sister.

The jeep was declared a total loss. We are sad to have lost it but are Thanking God that we didn't lose our daughter. For days afterward, we were all in a state of shock knowing how fast your life can change. We were acutely aware of coming close and experiencing a near miss to death or a  serious injury.