speaking of the scare of a lifetime

Subject: speaking of the scare of a lifetime


Let me first tell you all just how good it is to be sitting here at my
computer in the safety of my office. Cathy and I just had the scare of a
lifetime this afternoon.
We had two clients scheduled for 1:30 PM. and headed out half an hour early
so we could grab a quick bite of lunch at the
Bay View restaurant in Port Townsend. Our county road is two and a half
miles out to highway 101. We headed North on 101 and had gone about two
miles when Cathy shouted, "Holy Christ!", and whipped the truck to the left
into the South bound lane,leaned on the horn as she swung back to the North
bound lane, all the time saying, "Oh my God! Oh my God!"
Cathy then slammed on the breaks and threw the truck into reverse shooting
backward down the highway.
As she prepared to bail out of the truck she told me, "We just about had a
head-on." Then she was off, running down the highway shoulder.
I grabbed my cell phone and scrambled out of the truck and began heading the
way she had run. From ahead of me Cathy called back, "Someone's already
called 911. Get me your handkerchief." She dashed back and said that the
man had stumbled out of his car and was bleeding badly from the head, nose,
mouth and ears.
After a few minutes Cathy came back and filled me in.
The fellow had begun drifting into our lane at about sixty miles an hour.
Cathy watched to see if he would correct his drift and pull back over the
center line. He kept coming. Our shoulder was too narrow to pull off, and
she was concerned that at the last second he might try to pull back in his
lane, and if we were going around him, he'd take us out for certain. But
she had no choice. He was now fully in our lane and showed no signs of
shifting. Cathy whipped the truck into the South bound lane and began
hitting the horn, even as she pulled back to our side of the highway. The
fellow did not swerve or show any sign of hearing us. He shot off the
highway, and straight up into the air, landing between a utility pole and
the fence around the Headwaters Ranch.
As we backed up the driver crawled out of the car and staggered around.
Cathy told him to sit down. She said he was already going into shock. A
woman rushed up from her car and said she'd seen the whole thing. "Is he
drunk"? she asked Cathy. "I can't smell any liquor on his breath", Cathy
told her. Another driver, an older fellow, came up and asked the driver,
"is this car stolen?"
Now that struck Cathy as a rather strange question, considering the man
needed medical attention, not grilling by a stranger.
The fellow did say that he wished we'd not called the police, since he had
no driver's license.
Cathy left a couple of our business cards with the women who'd witnessed the
entire accident, saying we'd be available if the police needed our
statement. "I thought sure you folks were as good as dead," she told Cathy.
If I thought that Cathy was rattled enough to turn around and head home, I
was wrong. We called our clients and said we'd be about half an hour late,
slid into the Bay View, had a good lunch, washed down by several cups of
their fabulous coffee, and showed up at our clients door as if nothing much
at all had happened. When we returned home I called a friend in Port
Hadlock to arrange for a meeting tomorrow. She told me that there had been
a serious accident on highway 101 around 12:30 this afternoon, down by the
Bolton Ranch. And now I'm waiting to hear back from her husband. He
volunteers with the Port Townsend police. He told his wife that there'd
been an accident near the Bolton Ranch, and the driver had died. the
highway was closed for the investigation to be completed.
The Bolton ranch is directly across from the Headwaters Ranch.

Carl Jarvis