During my considerable lifetime, I’ve had a few scares. Luckily, none of them resulted in serious injury to your favorite columnist, although I can say most of them were beneficial to the functioning of my digestive system.
These occasions made a lasting impression on me.
I think the first real scare was when I was around 5 years old, living on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada. My brother, Lowell, a worldly 9-year-old, took his role as “big brother” seriously, and from time to time would do something to remind me that he was the boss.
We lived about a block from a public swimming pool, and during the summers we lived there Lowell and I would visit the place. Lowell was already a swimmer and, as for myself, I was satisfied to walk around the shallow end of the pool, making swimming motions with my arms, hoping to fool a few bystanders.
There was a bit of excitement one day when a girl swimming at the deep end of the pool drowned. A lifeguard pulled her from the water, and administered artificial respiration, a sometimes pointless method of restoring breathing in a victim.
It didn’t work.
By the time the Fire Department arrived with their Pulmotor, the girl’s condition was beyond hope. The staff had moved all the onlookers outside, but brother Lowell managed to get fairly close and thereafter, whenever he felt the time was right, would give me a graphic description of the girl’s demise. If he meant to scare me, it worked.
From that point on I had no desire to immerse myself in more water than I could safely bathe in. That changed after we moved to Houston and our youngest daughter, Carrie, bought a home with a nice pool and one day asked if I’d like to learn how to swim. She taught me in less than an hour. Lowell was the first person I told. I wasn’t scared anymore.
About a year after Sharon and I were married, I had gone to work for a large non-foods supplier to Northern Utah’s grocery stores. I was a delivery driver (although an aspiring sales rep, I had to start at the bottom). It was a Friday morning and I had loaded my truck and mapped out my stops. Most of the deliveries were in the downtown Salt Lake City area to little “Mom & Pop” corner groceries.
Cities along the Wasatch Front were subject to the occasional earthquake, emanating from the Wasatch Fault. During my youth we were shaken up a few times, but none compared to what happened on that fateful Friday.
I had only a couple more deliveries that day and pulled up in front of one little market and had begun carrying the totes of merchandise into the store and placing them in the areas where they could be easily placed on the proper shelves. There must have been a half-dozen or more totes in the delivery, and I waited while a clerk checked the items off the delivery ticket.
I had noticed when I first walked up to the store that there was some construction being done on one side of the building. In fact, it appeared that the building that had been on that location was now a hole in the ground! I took note that the store’s outside wall was parallel to the side of the hole.
We were about halfway through the order, when I felt a bit of a temblor. I looked up and the fluorescent light fixtures were swinging back and forth. Someone yelled: “Earthquake!”, and everyone in the store made tracks for the front door.
I was just about outside when one of the walls collapsed outward (into the hole) and the roof fell in on that side.
Thankfully, there was only one person injured. He was one of the owners and he’d been hit in the head by a brick, but received only a minor injury.
The fire department was soon there, and everyone was cleared from the area.
There was one problem; my order was still in there, under a few tons of collapsed building, and it hadn’t been signed for.
When my knees had mostly stopped shaking, I approached the fireman in charge and explained that I had merchandise inside that I needed to retrieve, and he told me that the building had been condemned, was unsafe, and I couldn’t enter.
So I climbed into my truck and headed for the warehouse. Upon my arrival, I wobbled into the building and my boss, Andy, asked why I was finished so early. When I explained that I’d had a very scary near miss, and his best delivery driver was almost a statistic, he looked me over, then said: “You shouldn’t have left our merchandise. Why didn’t you go back in and get it?”
He turned, and walked away.
If I’d had one of those bricks I dodged, I may have used it on Andy (only joking).
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What a Life: Near misses give lasting, and scary, memories - Loveland Reporter-Herald
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