Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The closest you've ever been to death?

I was a passenger in a roll over in an old 56 chevy truck back in the 80's. We were going some where around 55 mph. Passenger door got smashed in half, but some how I wasn't thrown out. Neither of us wearing a seat belt, not even sure if the old truck had em or not. Truck ended up drive side door down, so we both crawled out of the smashed passenger door.
Neither of us got any broken bones, but my high school buddy had some pretty bad cuts.

Some of your stories have me thinking that getting smoothed by a train would be a pretty mundane way to die.

The scariest was foolishly brush hogging across a f surly steep hillside and uphill tires caught a rock and up on the two fuwnhill wheels went the tractor with in the seat and no ROPS back then in 1974. I KNEW I was going to be on the bottom of a Massey Furgeson sandwich with no one due to check on me for hours.

Actual closest was getting knocked off a ladder when teaching in the Caribbean and I was racing to reinstall a metal gutter after reroofing the head mistresses house and a lightening storm with torrential rain was almost over head. The end of the gutter swung straight up as I was climbing the ladder and lightening hit the end and knocked me off the ladder and gown to the ground. I guess the gluing through the air broke the circuit enough it didn’t fry me for good,

Had a guy come back from lunch and do a check, hit E stop.

Bad waterleak on his machine and no flow detector to kill cycle. Couldnt see from my machine.

Molten metal, would have blown us and half the plant.

I noticed a lack of "dying of covid but for that vaccine I'd be worm food"

I had a stroke in 2017. Had to learn to walk, talk, and use my right side all over.

I've cheated death so many times I don't recall most of the times. I was kind of an adrenaline junky for quite awhile, but got over it sometime in my 20's or early 30's when my kids were small. Even with the adrenaline seeking spirit pretty much out of my system I still recall a couple times that were pretty close calls-

In high school about 68 or so we were coming back from a hunting trip. I was tired and my dad said I could sleep in the cabover bed of the camper we were carrying on his 66 Chevy pickup that year, but it was locked. I didn't want him to go to the trouble of unlocking it at the moment so I just nodded off in the middle of the front seat between my dad and older brother. As we drove down the Columbia river gorge the wind picked up pretty substantially. in one area where the wind always seems to funnel through the rocks we hit a huge gust that caught the front of the truck and camper as we were going about 55 mph or so. The front end of the truck came up so high we could only see sky in the windshield and when it came down we shot forward about as fast as that old truck would go. Dad looked in the mirror and realized the wind had ripped the camper off the truck and flung it about 150 yards down the freeway on the other side into oncoming traffic. We stopped and went back to check the camper and the cabover had been ripped off and thrown down the highway and everything in it had been blown down the highway from that point to at least 400 yards away... not sure how I would have done as a sail that day but someone was looking out for me.... I do remember that when the truck came down it damaged something in the engine and it took about 20 quarts of oil to get the last 120 miles home to keep up with the leaking...

Another time when I was an electrical apprentice I worked with a journeyman who was a grumpy old a-hole who nobody else would work with. Since I was the apprentice I was chosen to help him out and couldn't say no... so, one day he gets all pissed off because he doesn't like how some laborer is sweeping the room we are working in and he storms off, leaving me to keep working. So, I just tried to keep busy by hooking up a 1200A 480V switch gear to a 400A subpanel in the same room. As I'm hooking up the ground wire I reach in the bottom of the switch gear and pull the 4/0 ground through the other wires it was tangled in and the end of the ground wire sweeps across an incorrectly placed hot buss below the other busses and in the supposedly safe wiring compartment. When the gear exploded the fireball came out both sides of the gear and completely surrounded me. This is usually caused by the ionization of the air from the electrical explosion and can last for a couple seconds. Worst part was this gear was only about 30 feet from the transformer feeding it so the available fault current was huge- probably in the neighborhood of 100,000 Amps or more and it was feeding this fireball until the 115K fuse back at the main building a half mile away blew.... I heard screaming and somehow I jumped back at least 10 feet and hit another transformer that stopped me but was across a large floor access opening about 6 feet wide. ( I later realized the screaming was me) .Once my eyes cleared somewhat from the flash so I could almost see, I could see my hand was pretty severely burned and the skin was like fried pig skins sticking up all over up to my wrist, where my old army field jacket started. That jacket saved me some serious pain as it was curled up and black all the way up to my shoulder. The rest of my body was protected by the front of the switchgear as I bent over. I was incredibly lucky that day- which was Valentine's day 1979. Spent 6 days in the regional burn center in Portland which was only about a mile away with a few people who weren't so lucky. Several of them passed away while I was there....

Somehow I think God has more of a plan for me as I've cheated death more times than a guy has a right to in one lifetime. Partly doing stupid stuff and other times seeking that adrenaline rush.... at 69 I'm running out of opportunities to do these things but it doesn't mean I'm going to stop completely...

Bob

WOW! As a young boy of about 12 when the ragheads did that cowardly act I remember praying in the car that our Soldiers and Marines would be ok. I was so angry because I didn’t realize that there was that kind of evil in this world.

We didn’t know each other back then nor do we now but despite our never meeting you have been in my prayers for almost 40 years.

For the last 2 1/2 years I've been on a slow decline thanks to an un-curable and in-operable cancer. I'm still looking down at the grass but I'm "aging" pretty fast. The rare cancer that I have is not treatable with chemo or radiation, and the location of the tumor makes it in-operable for a 73 year old man.

The good news is MA Anderson has kept me alive these 2.5 years with trial therapeutic drug treatments, but they too come with a physical price . There are no free lunches with cancer. One day at a time.........

It is what it is.

My closest times were duck hunting in my HS years. One evening we put on our waders and went out in a slough to shoot puddle ducks, the second was in an overloaded underpowered duck boat of ancient manufacture. Both times the water was deep, dark and cold. In either case, if one more thing had gone wrong, we'd have been goners.

Every day brings each of us that much closer......

I had some close calls, shot at on a search warrant, hit by a drunk driver as a pedestrian, but the most scared I have ever been in my entire life was the day I got married. I had no spit and I was looking for the back exit door of the church. I looked death in the eye on that day and I was the one that blinked! I was pooping through a screen door. Liquid feces!

Non ya bidness. Y'all blab to much

Lost a friend duck hunting a few years (maybe 10 now?) ago on the bay here. Near as they can tell, he got out or fell out of the boat with waders on. Filled up and drowned.

I came close once fly fishing browns. Stepped off the back of this little island. Had no clue the depth but the front was barely 3 or 4 feet so I "assumed". When my feet hit bottom, the water was within 1/2 inch of the top of my waders and I was scared out of my gourd. Never again.

I'm so sorry to hear this.

Hang in there, brother!

That reminds me, 1980, 16 y/o, went through the ice skating on the lake, about 500 yards off shore. Managed to break ice enough to the point I could slither up on the ice and, laying down flat, was able to scoot to thicker ice and eventually get back on the skates and skedaddle. Had to ride home on the motorcycle..... might have been a little chilly; never did tell my parents.

Thanks much.......... Hanging in is about all I can do. But life is still good with a great wife, kids, and grand kids to love and who love me. And some good friends. The rest is just about a last day on the calendar that we all face.

Fell out of a treestand when I was 14 and straight onto my back. It was an old wooden stand and there was a wooden side rail that broke and I remembering seeing blue sky and waking up and it was dark. Took me awhile to comprehend what happened but I walked away with just a few cracked ribs.

I'll second that!
Keep up the good fight, my friend.

My spleen blew at a bar but I didn't that, I just suddenly felt pain, nausea and lightheaded. I drove home and called my girlfriend, she came over tried to take me to the hospital but I thought I would feel better the next day. She called my parents who drove two hours in the middle of the night to make me go to the ER. Doctor later said I was a couple hours from bleeding out.

I was a back seat passenger in a pretty high speed Trans Am wreck, but we missed the trees and cars and landed in a potato field. Talk about a soft landing, lol. No injuries.