It’s All Fun and Games Until…

Today’s Prompt is asking for us to show a time when we narrowly escaped disaster.  I wasn’t going to do this, for despite having a few minor incidents over the years, I couldn’t think of anything noteworthy.  Until, I remembered this…

They say that when you’ve spent a long time with someone, you learn their every nuance.  You become attuned to the little things on a subconscious level that may never significantly present itself to the individuals, even if outsiders notice it.  It’s especially common in two people who have spent a good decade being everything from squabbling members of an extended family-style environment to dating, to friends, to lovers, to best friends and back again.  Needless to say, we knew each other very well.

image: http://www.pinterest.com

And it saved our lives.

We were fifteen or sixteen years old and his dad had just picked up a used racing quad – so, of course, we had to take it out to the trails to try it out – It wasn’t just for decoration, you know!  We ended up at a popular location that already had several different groups with their quads and three-wheelers running the free-range tracks.  The place was fairly wide open, with nice, hard-packed dirt roads that were wide – but there was one wicked, blind corner on a hill.

A hill we were heading down, when a three-wheeler came flying right at us from around that corner and slammed into the safety bar along the side of our quad that saved my right leg.  The force and trajectory (I’m sure this is where all of the physics I forgot from school would probably come in handy) sent us into a spin so fast, it was like being on the ‘scrambler’ at the fair, we could barely move against it.  Yet, somehow in the nanoseconds immediately following the collision, we both became acutely aware of each other.  All at once, he felt me sliding backward, my legs destined for the rear tires, so reached back to hook his arm around my knee and keep me in place – just as I saw his head flying forward and down right toward the wide, metal plate between the handlebars, and quickly lifted my hand to cover his forehead, shove his head upright again.

I learned that day, exactly what people mean when they say that “It just happened so fast!” In the blink of an eye, we saved each others lives and then held on for dear life until the spinning came to an end – which it did, in a shallow ditch back up at the top of the hill, where both of our dad’s were waiting with pale-shocked fear plastered on their faces.  A lot of different factors saved us, of course.  The safety bars along either side of the quad, the fact that knowing it was a blind corner, we had been heading downhill at a cautionary speed – probably even more technical-riddled jargon I simply don’t have- but, even to this day, our families believe it was our immediate, intuitive gut-instincts that really allowed us to walk away from that accident completely unscathed.