Near Death: Volume One - 1973

It was 1973. Nixon was President. Idi Amin still had hundreds of thousands of people to kill. "W" was in the Air Guard. And I was coming back from Tiffin in my Dad's Ford LTD with Mike Newkirk as my passenger.

We had gone to a bar in Tiffin (Club 224) and the band that was playing that night was famous in those parts for one song: Smut. The words that I remember were, "S-M-U-T, you love that smutty smut." Really profound stuff. They did a lot of covers, but that was their only original song, and they played it several times every time they took the stage.

I was drinking beer back in those days. Hell, I still do when the mood strikes. On this night, Mike and I were on Rt. 18 barrelling toward Bellevue. I was in a hurry to get home (not wanting to get grounded for coming home late on a Sunday night). As you approach the city limits, there's a railroad crossing, and about a half mile from the crossing, the warning lights came on.

We're cruising along at about 80 miles per hour, and I didn't want to wait for a train, so I asked Mike how it looked. He said, "Looks good."

It looked good in my direction, too, so I ignored the flashing red lights and drove over the tracks.

When I was exactly over the tracks, I took a gander to my right and saw a very bright light about 10 feet from the car. It was a light from a train that was moving toward us at what seemed like 800 miles per hour. I've always been good with math, so I knew the train could not be moving that fast, because the sound of its horn reached us the same time as the light. The instant we cleared the tracks, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the train speeding by.

There is a grocery store just past the tracks, and I pulled into the parking lot trying to catch my breath. My heart was pounding so hard that I thought my ears would bleed. I looked over at Mike.

"I thought you said it was clear!"

"I looked your way," said Mike. "And it was clear. I didn't think to look the other way."

The moral of the story: Look both ways before you cross.