We left Charleston, NC, for home still early enough to see school children waiting by the road for their school bus. I noticed that even the African-American children looked like little ghosts in that foggy air.
When the sun finally broke through with more force, I could see, that we were driving on a somewhat elevated road with deep ditches right and left alongside the road. This area must still be pretty swampy I realized. Culverts had been built over the ditches here and there where a house came into sight.
Traffic was light now, and we could see far ahead into the distance of this narrow, two-lane road that seemed to touch even the horizon. Then a small hill in the road came up, what we in Pennsylvania with our hilly road system would call a small elevation. We could make out a fairly large truck just coming up over this rise, and it turned into an eighteen-wheeler when it approached us in the other lane.
Just when we almost reached that truck, another vehicle appeared from behind the truck, and the driver of this particular car had thought the road free of oncoming traffic and had put his vehicle into full-speed passing gear. We had no way to avoid it. We were on a full collision course with that automobile! There was no escape to the side of the road, lined with deep, water-filled ditches.
The truck driver had the best chance to come out alive, but that high roadbed was also against him. With wide-open eyes, he probably already saw the three-way vehicle accident in the making!
I had pressed my eyes shut, expecting the blow up any second now! What is one thinking in a moment like that? Everything was happening so fast that there wasn't time to think!
I felt our car veer to the right, then veer to the left, and when I opened my eyes again, we were driving alone on the highway again! I couldn't comprehend it. Did we fly? Were we still alive, and was this an out-of-body experience in a another dimension? I wondered.
But there was my husband still sitting next to me, as safe and sound as I could tell. His lips were pressed together in a very pale face. He looked like a race car driver at the Daytona Speedway. He let out a long breath before he was able to talk.
"That was close!" he blurted out. "I had no way of avoiding that sure head-on collision! Just by instinct, I steered hard to the right and felt the tires digging into the gravel of a roadbed, leading over a culvert to a house, then before hitting the ditch, I jerked the steering wheel to the left and was back on the highway again. That other car must've passed us during the split-second without hitting us.:
I couldn't say anything. I couldn't even cry. I realize while writing this that I must've been in shock!
Epilogue: My husband, Henrym was 67-years-old when this incident happened. He lived eleven more years and passed away in 2008. We didn't talk much about this occurrence but accepted it as being very fortunate! While writing this, I cried the tears I couldn't cry at the time, and I than the Lord above once more for His miraculous, divine intervention!
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