I'll tell you now about my own near death experience, which happened while driving, of course.
I had just started working at the new job within the week, and hadn't quite figured out the best way to get to the building yet. The way that I had taken is much different (and surprisingly less interesting) than the route I take now.
You might enjoy a diagram:
The green line in the diagram shows my current route to work. The intersection through which the green arrow turns now has a traffic light, which wasn't there when this story takes place.
I was headed in to work following the path of the yellow and red arrows. You can see the little dot of my car circled in the satellite picture on the right side. (How can I tell if it's so small? Trust me... If there are only two cars, the right one is mine.)
As I have said, there were no traffic lights on the road, nor were there stop signs or any kind of sign. Traffic was known to go far too fast on this road, much in excess of the suggested 45 miles per hour. I was slowing down during my traversal of the road (near the yellow arrow) so I could complete my turn when I looked in the rear-view mirror.
In my mirror, the car behind me was approaching very speedily. In fact, it did not seem to me as if the car might not intend to stop. But I figured that he still had a while before he got too close, and I could probably make the turn in time to avoid him. So, looking up toward the next intersection, I checked for oncoming cars.
Here's the dilemma- a car was approaching from the other direction. As the oncoming car got closer, the car behind me seemed more intent on not stopping. Finally, it became a question of whether I wanted to risk cutting off the oncoming car or get crushed by the guy behind me.
I quickly whipped the car around the corner, no doubt surprising the oncoming car, but avoiding him by a reasonable margin. The car that was behind me didn't fare so well.
As I continued down the road toward the office, I saw the guy who was behind me suddenly try to avoid me at the last moment. He swerved to the outside and caught his right-side tires in the grass and gravel on the side of the road (the X on the map), and then couldn't escape them as half of his car headed up the hill.
The speed combined with the elevation flipped the right side of his little black Ford over the left, and he skidded on his roof all the way to the next intersection as the weight of the transmission slowly crushed the car down onto the weak car body.
I was a little panicky when I rolled into the office. I didn't know how to use the phones yet, and there was a whole strange discombobulated exchange between myself and the receptionist about calling 911. We finally worked it out and I gave the details to the operator.
The whole situation was very surreal. I had just escaped >something< and was calling to report what had happened to someone else as a result. And then just followed through with the rest of my day as normal.
