If a person can stack a respectable number of years behind him then the law of averages also sticks a number of close calls in there. And it feels a little like tempting fate to talk about your close calls but if you wait too long you won't get a chance to talk about it at all. Fate seems to be the right word in all of this. A flip of a coin. Mere chance. Or good luck. Any of these events could have ended in a bad way but I'm extremely happy that they didn't.
I don't clearly remember my first close call as I was mere hours old but family lore says that I was rushed by dad to a childrens' hospital where they had a then very new incubator. I was born premature in November in Finland and the prevailing medical idea was that babies needed lots of fresh air, even in winter. My parents had lost a child who only lived for a few days the previous winter so I suppose they weren't taking any chances. Thank you folks. I have lately wondered how they managed to snatch me to another hospital. I can't imagine that happening today. And how did they convince the other pediatrician to play along? I later heard that dad found enough sugar and flour on the black market (all food being rationed just after the war) to have a cake baked for the nurses at the kids' hospital.
Likewise, my next close call is a little hazy in memory as I was less than a year old and in a pram. Mom left me outside a store (no worries of being snatched back then) and was horrified to see the back wheels of a coal truck nudging the pram. Mom was one of those people who could really imaginatively use the language so I bet those truck drivers learned some new words. From that time on, my close calls were only of the everyday variety.
We came to Canada when I was five and a half. That in itself wasn't terribly risky although I was sick and running a fever all the way. Just one more thing to add to mom's load, traveling with a teenager and two little kids. Less than a year later, I had just wandered out of a local store on the old King George Highway at the bottom of Peterson Hill when a motorcycle-riding bully picked me up by my shirt and pushed me up at eye level against a wall and held a knife in front of my face. I hadn't seen any movies (no tv) about that sort of violence so I wasn't particularly frightened. I can still remember that he was wearing one of those captain's caps that Marlon Brando wore in the Wild One and I thought "What a great hat"! I think that my fascination with hats started then. Anyway, parents even then were on a "need to know" basis so I never mentioned my little adventure.
As I got older, risky behaviour also increased in frequency. But this was everyday risky behaviour that every kid in those days was subjected to. That's why I think that fate has so much to do with it. It's not that we were so much more competent than the next kid but that it just wasn't our time. My friends and I were continually on the go when we weren't in school. Down to the river, fishing from the log booms; wading across the inlet at low tide; playing in the rail yards; building rafts on Mundy Lake.
One bona fide close call happened when I was seven or eight. My friend Ronnie Garneau and I had wandered over to the dump on Como Lake Road (where Dr. Charles Best Secondary is today). Some kid had found five bucks in some old clothes there so that became a stop on our rounds. It was about three miles from where we lived, no bikes, so we did range quite a bit even then. A couple of men were using a revolver to plink at tin cans on the frame of an overturned car and a ricochet creased the back of Ronnie's head. It was just enough to draw blood but as we were walking side by side either one of us could have been really nailed. Again, my parents didn't need to know. I wasn't the one bleeding.
Once I started driving, the chance of mishap increased exponentially, especially as I had the unfortunate habit of falling asleep. I have woken up at 60 mph (100 kph) and found that the driver's side wheels were on the divider of the old Lougheed Highway only inches away from a row of light poles. I just opened the window to clear my head and carried on. Sleeping did catch up with me a few years later when I rear-ended a guy who had stopped for a cat. I was almost home and did walk there minus my front teeth. I don't sleep at the wheel anymore.
Once I started working, the chance of mishap again ratcheted up. One had to be careful in large rail yards where switch engines were making up or tearing down trains. Rail cars would be separated down long individual tracks with a hard shunt and then left to roll on their own to smash into another line of cars. The action wasn't necessarily where the switch engine was because a lone car could be silently rolling elsewhere. Again fate played a part when I was climbing between cars. Just as I got up on the knuckle hitch, the whole line of cars gave a mighty lurch forward. A few seconds earlier or later and I would have been under the wheels.
Working construction also brought its own dangers. There was always the chance of something falling from overhead. The chance of falling from high places oneself wasn't really such a big risk. I found that most people working up high really were careful. Usually one hand or a safety belt kept you safe. On one commercial job, dad and I happened to be partners. I had built lots with dad so we knew what to expect from one another. In this case, we were working on a plywood mill expansion at Pacific Veneer in New Westminster. The crew had to dismantle some construction from the beginning of the 1900's. The walls of the mill were built with beams that measured about 2 foot by 2 foot and thirty feet long. Each beam probably weighed 1000 pounds. This one beam became wedged between some posts and wouldn't come down so the kid on the job was sent in with a sludge hammer to wail away at a post to bring it all down. Well it worked and I found this beam coming in my direction. Things do really slow down to slow motion. I remember putting my hands out and levering up and that beam pushed me back about eight feet. If my feet had been on the pavement at the time of contact, I would have been under it. Oh well. All's well that ends well. Right? Dad just said later "Boy that looked bad". I don't think that he ever told mom. Needs to know basis only.
I did have later close calls in planes and boats and some confrontations with bears but I am convinced that fate played a role. I don't think that people that have catastrophic things happen are any less skilled than anybody else but are on the unlucky side of that flip of the coin. Fate for some reaches the end of the line and for others continues on.
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