This is a little story about the closest I’ve come to dying. So far. Which also explains why I tend to drive gingerly when it’s snowing.
I was coming back home from work in dad’s (manual) Ford Tempo on December 21st 1991. It was snowing moderately hard in Quebec City and I felt I just knew that road so well because I drove it at least 3x a week and let my confidence get the better of me, also I was heading to my dad’s Xmas dinner and we had guests over. It was on Du Vallon in Quebec City, which really wasn’t built to be a proper highway as it’s got a big kink to get around the support for an overhead highway that crosses it. Anyway I get past a guy and decide that kink would be a good spot to get back in the right lane, so I stupidly push down on the clutch and let inertia get me back to the slow lane… on snow.
That’s when I learned a very valuable lesson about liftoff oversteer. The rear of the car swings around and I’m just a passenger now. I seize the steering wheel with all my strength and close my eyes because I know it’s going to be a big one. Somehow a part of the car hits the guardrail, I feel I’m no longer in touch with the ground, and the car lands heavily on the passenger side.
By some miracle the car stops neatly in the right lane and everyone around successfully gets around me. I just sit there in a bit of shock and realize I’m still alive. I don’t even realize that the crash caused my glasses to whip off my face — unfortunately they’re on the road way right under me, and as I undo my seatbelt my foot lands heavily on them. My arm hurts a bit, just because I was holding on to the wheel so tight I tore my bicep a little bit. I find a way to pull myself out through my side window and by then a lot of people have already stopped and are helping out. Then a police car comes and eventually takes me home.
Now I had a close friend who was working at the same place and normally I would have given her a ride home, but that day her shift ended later so I was alone in the car, which was definitely a good thing because she would have been seriously injured. And that’s about as close as I came to dying but somehow walked away with barely a scratch (and broken glasses).