10 Seconds

Wow! Who knew I could see my life flash before my eyes twice in about less than 10 seconds.  It was Sunday Halloween night. I had just gotten done going on the walk of horror at St Mary’s University and was running a friend of mine back to his apartment. We were on our way back to my boyfriend’s house, which is just off of Hwy 14 going up Stockton Hill. I was driving up the road, and I had a car in front of me that was just going incredibly slow. This road I was on is a road that has 3 lanes. It has one lane for the traffic coming down the hill and two lanes for the traffic going up, so I signaled over so I could pass this car in the other lane.

 The road I was on is a hill road that has a lot of turns to it and weaves in and around the bluffs. So at this point the car I passed was just a little ways behind me. I was approaching the first corner, when all of a sudden the car coming down the hill moved into my lane. At this point the car looked to me like a big SUV and was about 30 feet away from me. All I kept thinking to myself was I hope to god that car moves back into its lane, because now the car that I had passed was now just about next to me again. There was no room for me to move over even if I wanted to. I kept looking at the headlights and waiting for them to move back to their lane, and then I saw the deer. Not one, but three and they didn’t know where to go, because they were stuck by the guard rail on the other side of the road, where traffic was coming down. I jammed my breaks so hard, because they were running about frantically. I had nowhere to turn, I had to hold my ground in the lane I was in and pray to god I got it stopped before I hit one and got into an accident.

As all of this was running through my head, I couldn’t help but hope to god the car coming down the hill wouldn’t hit one because it could very easily be thrown up into the air and hit me. At this point I consciously had no idea where the car was that I had passed. I was just so concerned with the doe that was running out in front of my car that was not stopped yet.

To my surprise, I missed the doe from hitting the front of my car by mere inches. I couldn’t believe that I got it stopped, because going 55 miles an hour and basically trying to stop it on a dime is not the easiest thing in the world to do, on top of it I was trying to worry about all the other things that could have happened. But to my surprise I was just fine, along with the car. As I proceeded to drive up the hill again, one of the doe’s started running up the road in front of me, but then it slowly crossed over to the woods. By this point my heart was just racing and I was just happy nothing bad happened.

The next morning, my boyfriend called to tell me that when he went back down that road to go to work, he saw that one of the doe’s had been hit. I have no idea if it was hit during the time when I was going up it, or if one of the many cars behind me ended up hitting it, but all I know is one life was ended, so I just hope the person in the car that hit it came out ok.

It’s a scary thing how something can change so quickly and without much warning. It just comes down to how easily you can adapt to change in such a short time. Reflexes, adrenaline, and sudden decisions are all things that I think people take for granted. These are things that could change a person’s life in the blink of an eye, for better or for worse. The scariest thing about this whole story, is it happened in about 10 seconds, and these were all the things that ran through my head in this short of time.