Everybody has a couple dozen “times I nearly died.” Most of them are uninteresting. For example, this one time I was walking home, didn’t realize a light had just turned red, and nearly got hit by a bus. It missed me by about six inches. But so what? Everybody has a couple dozen stories like that. (Or is dead.)
But my good “time I nearly died” story is from when I was eleven. I have previously mentioned how, when I was a kid, our annual family vacation was two weeks at the Maine coast. Kennebunk, Ogunquit, Saco – but eventually it became Old Orchard Beach, every year like clockwork. Walt Disney World was often said to be “sometime in the future.” I have never yet been. Moral: parents will lie to you to preserve their twisted vision of your innocence.
But do not let the lack of Epcot bring you down: Old Orchard was a pretty great place to vacation. I generally got tired of the beach after three or four days and would go exploring around town. Luckily, Old Orchard had plenty of neat stuff. It had a decent and charming little library, with giant scholarly tomes on the history of Blondie and Popeye, and a pretty decent – if eclectic – comic books section. I read The Dark Knight Returns for the first time at that library, and also Chuck Colson: Born Again, the infamous Archie Comics propaganda piece about the douchebag Nixon conspirator who found Jesus right about the time he went to prison for being a douchebag. Except in the comic book, it was all a big misunderstanding!
It had a church which played movies every night for a lousy dollar admission, and not shitty old movies that no thirteen-year-old would want to see but seriously good movies, like The Princess Bride and Who Framed Roger Rabbit!? and Driving Miss Daisy and Beetlejuice. I saw Glory on the big screen for the first time in that church, and it blew me away. (Still does. If you have not seen Glory, what the hell is wrong with you?)
It had an old-timey ice-cream and penny candy emporium, much like the gay thing Taylor Doose had in Gilmore Girls, except that this one wasn’t fake and old-timey for the sake of being old-timey. It was old-timey because it was old, and care had been taken in its upkeep. The owner was a bitter old man who hated children, and it was not until our third summer there that I discovered, thanks to a local kid, that this was because he had not realized that his candy stick assortment was right underneath the always-open window that he could not see while he was serving customers. If you went in and bought a chocolate bar, with a little planning and an accomplice it was incredibly easy to swipe half again the bar’s value in grape and cherry and lemon candy sticks. To this day, I am undecided if the old guy was genuinely not aware of this and blamed all his problems on a plague of shoplifters, or if he knew about it and put his cheapest candy under the window in order to drive up sales of everything else.
It had a gigantic amusement park and fun-pier with several enormous arcades. This was, to me, well worth the trip alone; in later years and later vacations, I became a pinball fanatic and could get an hour’s worth of play out of two dollars on some of the machines. My favorite was the Bally Midway Doctor Who pinball machine, closely matched by the Data East Star Trek and the Midway Star Wars – some of the greatest pinball machines ever made. I’m not nearly as good now, when I see a pinball machine gathering dust in a bar somewhere. Nobody is as good at pinball as they are before they turn twenty.
It had a Catholic church. I know this because my mother, on any vacation we took, could unerringly find a Catholic church so that we would not miss Sunday mass. This seemed staggeringly unfair to me.
It had tons of Quebecois kids, whom one could play with quite reliably despite the obvious language barrier of them barely speaking English and me barely speaking French. Every summer I would befriend one Quebecois kid about my age, and we would hang out, intuitively building sandcastles or dams (there was always a river or creek leading to the beach that was worth trying to dam, although as one might expect, we never entirely managed it) or setting off water rockets or fireworks. When I was ten I discovered the M-80, which in my adulthood I figure were purchased and sold by the local general store illegally, as they had been illegal for over a decade before I ever saw one. It is testament to my uncanny skill with explosives that I never blew my face off with one of the damn things.1 In any case, the Quebecois kids never stopped me from doing any of this. It’s entirely possible that they tried to but the language barrier got in the way; mostly we used our bilingual mothers to translate for us when needed, and we’d never tell our mothers we were playing with firecrackers.
It had strange brands and franchises who were of course surely mundane, but whose unfamiliarity to my Canadian upbringing made them seem exotic and special. It might seem ridiculous that a Laverdiere’s or a Waldenbooks could seem special, but they did. I always insisted that, when on vacation, we get several Stouffer’s french-bread oven pizzas. I had seen the ads for them while watching The Cosby Show. Similarly, I demanded that we try Lender’s frozen bagels, which sparked a lifelong adoration of the (non-frozen) bagel that has not ceased.2 My father was more interested in the local delicacies: lobster, birch beer, lobster, crab cakes, lobster, and lobster.
It had Shaw’s, one of my favorite grocery store chains ever. Shaw’s had the most fantastic jumbo cookies, which by themselves were great, but then one summer we came back and I asked to go along on the initial grocery shopping trip (as I always did), and Shaw’s had gone to the devil well of pure inspiration: no longer were their cookies packaged in the standard twist-tie paper sacks, but instead were arrayed flat on upside-down Frisbees and Saran-wrapped in place. Thus, you bought the cookies and you got a free Frisbee! (And it was really a free Frisbee: the cookies weren’t any more expensive.) My mother was possibly more impressed than I was; my mother has always had an innate love of anything she can consider a bargain, and a free Frisbee definitely qualified. I am dead sure that if I went to my parents’ house right now and rummaged through the “outdoor sports equipment” bin, I would find three or four of those Frisbees.
But ultimately, I would get bored with everything else and go back to the beach, because when you are a kid the beach is pretty awesome. I was old enough to know not to fuck around with the riptides around the rocks that would drag you out quickly. I knew not to poke the jellyfish. I was eleven, and I knew what was what, so my parents generally let me roam while paying attention to my younger siblings. This was a mistake, for although on the surface I seemed smart, I was of course a spastic idiot.
How spastic an idiot was I? Well, let me put it to you this way: I decided to float on an air mattress in the water. Fine and good. But, I reasoned, the waves wouldn’t let me float properly, they’d keep getting seawater in my face. So I pushed the air mattress out beyond the wave breaks (I was up to my chest in water at this point), hopped on, and just lay back and relaxed for a while.
I have no idea how quickly I floated out; I lost track of time. What I do know is that at some point I decided it was time to go back to the house and get a cookie, so I flopped off the mattress
– and promptly sank down about five or six feet before I was able to start splashing my way frantically back up to the surface. I didn’t touch bottom. I don’t think I could have managed to touch bottom at that point even with sustained diving effort. It’s hard for me now, as an adult, to judge how far out I was, but I’d guess probably about three hundred feet or so. To a kid, it seemed like a couple of kilometers. (The metric system in Canada took, but only fitfully. We measure a person’s height in feet and inches; short distances in feet; the distance from home to the cottage in kilometers.) The point was – even though I wasn’t endlessly far away from land, I was a long way out. In retrospect it is actually kind of amazing that the lifeguards didn’t notice me or do anything.
Suddenly I regretted reading all those ZooBooks.3 Especially the one about sharks. Yes, I reasoned, it was unlikely that a great white shark was anywhere nearby, because great white sharks didn’t hang around the Maine coast so much. Then again, I had to admit, it was awfully unlikely that I had managed to get out here in the first place, and yet, here I was. This was not a day to mess with the odds. The odds were not my friend.
I was so worried about sharks as I began slowly paddling back to shore (fitfully, afraid of sharks hovering below the surface wanting to bite off my hands) that I didn’t realize that clouds had swept in overhead while I was relaxing. Big, dark clouds. The lifeguards on shore were waving people in now. It wasn’t raining, but you knew it was going to rain, and soon. But the rain wasn’t the issue: the problem was that the storm-swells, the giant waves, had already begun in advance of the rain, because this storm was coming in from offshore. The storm itself would last the next day and a half, absolutely drenching the whole of southern Maine in typhoon-quality downpour, and would eventually prove to be very cool to watch. But that was later.
The waves started getting bigger and bigger, and I wasn’t near the breaks yet, and I didn’t yet know that the breaks were already six feet high. All I knew is that the swells were getting bigger and I was going up and down, it seemed, more than I was going towards the beach. I started paddling harder, figuring that the sharks had probably taken off for someplace calmer at this point.
I’m not sure when I hit the breaks, but I know what happened: I was overtaken by a particularly massive wave and swept to shore. I swallowed about half a gallon of seawater and my eyes stung like motherfuckers. In later days, I would dramatize the situation to my friends by claiming that what actually happened is that the swell rocketed me up into the air, and I grabbed both ends of the air mattress and glided down, using it like a parachute. (I even drew a picture of it for art class, when we did our “what we did on our summer vacation” art projects. My self-depiction was quite magnificent.)
Of course, that was total bullshit. What happened is this: I nearly drowned, lost all sense of direction on the way, and in fact when the wave deposited me on the beach spent several seconds trying to crawl back into the surf because I thought I was headed for drier land. I am pretty sure a lifeguard saw me as he cleared people away from the disaster-level waves, but since he never tried to save me I can only assume he thought “well, at least his death will improve the gene pool.”
Eventually I managed to get enough breath to get to my knees, only to be smacked in the face by another six-foot wave. If I had been prepared for the wave, getting smacked by it would have been fun. However, I was very obviously not prepared for it and was shoved back onto my ass, choking down yet more seawater and possibly a small crab. Luckily, though, this time I was shoved backwards enough that I was now out of the breaks. My air mattress was behind me, having been blown to safety quite some time previous.
At this point, my mother came along, dragging one of my younger siblings and carrying my baby brother. “Chris, come on, what are you waiting for?”
“I nearly drowned just now, Mom.”
“That’s nice, dear. Come on, it’s raining.”
“Really, Mom. Lucky to be alive.”
“It’s raining, dear.”
Top comment: I think the time I most feared for my life was when I was on a class trip to France and me and a couple friends thought it would be a good idea to sneak up the back side of a Benedictine monastery so we wouldn’t have to pay to get in, but it was on the edge of a cliff in the mountains. So we were climbing around on the edge of the cliff trying to find a break in the fence, when suddenly I realized that I was one misstep away from a very terrifying and painful death, and was like, “I am retarded! Get me out of here!” and climbed down and paid the 5 euro or whatever. — Karen
- If MythBusters had been around then, I probably would have used the M-80s to imitate Adam and Jamie in some manner. “Can an M-80 blow up a car? Let’s bust that myth!” [↩]
- Unlike my love of the french-bread oven pizza, which I have since learned to be crap. [↩]
- Aside: the modern ZooBooks lack a certain sense of dignity. My Zoobooks were old-school ZooBooks, with the big, blocky, Roman-esque font. Like this one, except not in Spanish. [↩]
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Do you mean the Star Trek TNG pinball machine? Oh man, I loved that thing when I was younger (I’d say “when I was a kid,” but I’m only 17). I used to make a beeline for it every time I went to the arcade at the local bowling alley; its still there today, even though pretty much every other awesome thing in that arcade is gone.
Incidentally, Chuck Colson really did find God, even if it was shamelessly publicized to garner sympathy. Not a big fan of his or anything, but all the same.
“Nobody is as good at pinball as they are before they turn twenty.”
LIES, sir. I am *way* better at pinball now; back then, pinball existed solely to suck quarters out of my pockets faster than any arcade video game ever could, even Targ. Now, thanks to the training simulation that is Williams Pinball Classics on the Wii, I can survive up to TWO AND A HALF MINUTES on a single credit! (Note: this assertion has not yet been field-tested, as I haven’t managed to find a pinball machine in my current hometown.)
You need to get a book deal. You could be the Canadian Wil Wheaton!
Okay, except for the not-appearing-on-Star-Trek bit.
Wow. I’m from OOB, and definitely watched Glory and some of the other movies you mentioned in the Temple, probably at the same showing you did. Small world.
Damnit, Chris, now I want to visit Maine! You’re story of nearly getting killed by Mother Bitch Ocean makes me want to visit Maine!
Visit Maine and eat a Stouffer’s pizza!
There is absolutely nothing special about Disney. Nothing! Once you’re in your teens, which was when I went, the whole thing losses it’s majesty and it becomes just another theme park. Epcot was double crap unless you like a lot of foreign food (which I do, but we only went to the German restaurant).
There’s a great entry in The Completely Unofficial Doctor Who Encyclopedia about the Doctor Who pinball game. You’d have to read it yourself to really appreciate how funny it is, but needless to say it depicts the first five(?) Doctor’s running away from Davros and some Daleks, which really is not a flattering depiction of the Doctor. Also, the art of Peter Davison is supposed to have very girly hair. If I get time I’ll transcribe the entry.
I think some of the cause for your daredevil tactics is to make your mother realize that you even existed. Either that or she’d just given up. I’ve noticed that with parents of multiple children; the more of them they have the less they seem to care what their children do as long as they come back by the end of the day.
One final thing, and boy is this going to make me sound like a hypocrite, is that this thing really tends to ramble. You start off saying ‘I nearly died once. Let me tell you about it’. Then you spend nine paragraphs on this tangent about what the town was like, which is nice setting, but is superfluous to the real story. I mean by the time you start talking about cookies, I’m thinking “So when are you going to almost die?” Luckily, that’s when you get back to the point.
I almost died once. I was in a car with my brother and my friend Tony, and we were driving at about 135 mph, because we were late for Tony’s curfew. We got home, went inside, and sat down on the couch to watch some TV. We heard a muffled “foomp” noise from outside, and when we went out to investigate, discovered that the engine of the car had exploded, scattering flaming debris across the yard. The engine block actually melted and fell through the bottom of the car to create a slab of bubbly metal in the driveway.
Lesson of the day: when you change your own fuel filter, get that fuel line back on FUCKING TIGHT.
I don’t know…I suppose I was expecting bodily injury, but I’ll acknowledge that nearly getting drowned must be scary to a kid.
My near-death experience involved a red light, a speeding car running said light, and me walking across the street. Result? Broken leg, lacerations along my left arm from the windshield, and a $400 ticket for the driver.
Lesson? Your mother was right when she said “Look both ways”.
Damn. I’ve almost drowned a few times and it’s been panic-inducing every time (and yet I kept going back in the water, like an idiot) but never like that.
You’re pretty good at stories, MGK. There might have been quite a tangent at the start there, but I like it.
That old chestnut, eh? Almost drowning in the ocean has happened to me, like, 8 times. Imagine the story you just told, except also imagine getting dragged over a coral bed.
I think the time I most feared for my life was when I was on a class trip to France and me and a couple friends thought it would be a good idea to sneak up the back side of a Benedictine monastery so we wouldn’t have to pay to get in, but it was on the edge of a cliff in the mountains. So we were climbing around on the edge of the cliff trying to find a break in the fence, when suddenly I realized that I was one misstep away from a very terrifying and painful death, and was like, “I am retarded! Get me out of here!” and climbed down and paid the 5 euro or whatever.
Maybe *all* Catholic moms can find a church on vacation — mine sure as hell did, and never let us escape it.
There’s this moment, when you’ve met someone, and you’re getting to know them, when, suddenly, they start telling you about their psychic powers, or when they were abducted by aliens, and the bottom just goes out. You think to yourself, “is this person crazy? Or are they lying?”
So it is with people who talk about Ohio, Kansas, New Jersey, the coast of Maine. Obviously these places aren’t real. They’re too one-dimensional, hooks to tell stories about “those crazy Americans.”*
So what do you do with someone who claims to have actually been there? (Or, worse, been _born_ there?) Back away slowly, I guess.
Fortunately, if you’re just reading their blogs, it’s not so much of a problem.
*You know what other places aren’t real? All those towns that only exist on the exit signs and mileposts of Highway i between Vancouver and Hope. Chilliwack? Abbotsford? Langley? Fort Langley? (What’s wrong, run out of silly names?) You can tell they aren’t real. Otherwise, why would they have built the highway around them?
1) OOB is one of the greatest places imaginable to be a kid or a teenager. I spent the most memorable summer of my life there when I was 15.
2) I can’t believe this people who’re accusing you of “rambling”. The long introduction is totally central to the story. Geez.
These are good. Thank you for doing them.
Doug M.
There is absolutely nothing special about Disney. Nothing! Once you’re in your teens, which was when I went, the whole thing losses it’s majesty and it becomes just another theme park.
LIES.
Disney World, as far as I’m concerned, gets BETTER once you’re an adult. Going as a teen with your family, yes, is not as much fun as going as a little kid– you can’t go off on your own, your younger siblings can’t do the stuff you want to do– but once you’re over the hump it gets amazing again.
Went to Disney as a little kid. Got sunburned and mosquitios up my nose, but I went through the Haunted Mansion about 4 times and loved it.
My ocean story just had me sitting in the water and looking up to see a wave with a horseshoe crab in it looking over me with wigglinh leggs and I screamed and the wave grabbed me and turned me in a somersault and nearly pantsed me. Good times.
As someone who was born and raised in the US, I was familiar with all of the brands you mentioned, except Laverdiere’s. The only trace of Laverdiere’s now on the internet is an article titled “Rite Aid to buy LaVerdiere’s” from May 1994. I was 2. For a second there, I was worried I wasn’t giving my country’s franchises their due.
Furthermore, a little math reveals that I was 11 in 2002-2003 and never, ever would have gotten away with any of this. I live in a beach town with both ocean and bay (and a lake or two) and my parents would not have let me get anywhere beyond ankle deep. Beyond this, I would not have been able to amble around town for fear of stabbings and pedophiles. Even small, out of the way towns makes one wary of tweakers.
I guess things were different in the 1950s.
I’m from Philly, and only discovered the Maine shore (Ogunquit, specifically) when I was about 30. To most people around here, going “down the shore” means southern New Jersey.
Ogunquit’s nice for me and my wife, and for our kids (they’re very little), but I wouldn’t think that kids between the ages of, say, ten and twenty-one would appreciate it as much– Ogunquit doesn’t have the boardwalk/mini-golf-type amenities.
Seeing all of the French Canadians there was kind of strange- in most places in the U.S. (vacation destinations included), when you hear a non-English language it’s more often Spanish than anything else.
you know, I don’t have an I nearly died story. At least none I can think of
I was in Steam Whistle Brewing today and noticed that they were setting up pinball machines and standup arcade games in their gallery space for some event. No Doctor Who, but they did have the Data East Star Trek and Star Wars machines.
None of my “I nearly died” stories has a preamble entertaining enough to make it worth telling.
What the fuck is “a Laverdiere’s?”
Aside from a few near-death car misses, I do have one good story:
In San Antonio when I was in college, it snowed an inch or so and the whole city was paralyzed. People were borrowing cafeteria trays to use as makeshift sleds to ride down the slope of the nearby overpass (which was empty because the city had no plows).
I went with some friends to hike around the nearby Japanese Tea Garden. We were having a snowball fight on a path that turned out to be adjacent to a cliff; I dodged and stepped back into space and felt myself falling.
I had time to think, “I could die, I could break my back.”
Then I hit water and went under. I was so stunned that for a few seconds, I didn’t know which way was up.
(See the fifth picture down, “Looking at the cliffs and the outside edge of the pond” at someone else’s blog at http://newsprout.blogspot.com/2008/04/san-antonio-japanese-tea-garden.html)
Eventually I reoriented myself and stood up in the chest-high water. I realized that snowballs were falling all around me; I thought at first that my friends were throwing them at me.
I heard them yelling questions and shook my head in bemusement, which freaked them out more since they had been calling, “Are you alright?”
As I waded across the pond to the edge and dragged myself out onto the pavement, they rushed down to join me.
They said that when I made that tremendous splashdown into the koi pond, all the fish seemed to think it was feeding time, because they went streaking TOWARD me. That’s why my friends were throwing snowballs around me, to drive them away.
So in a way, I dodged three deaths that day: by falling, by drowning, and by being nibbled to death by giant goldfish.
Hahahahaha, squish, I´m pretty sure your story just one-upped MGK´s, not for writing style, in which he dominates, but for sheer ridiculousness.
I had wondered how on earth it transpired that my sister went to the Maine seashore and came back engaged; it all seems much clearer now.
Must plan visit.
I am a big fan of the old-school ZooBooks.
How funny. I’m an American from Michigan, and every summer when I was a kid my family went up to Goderich, ON for a couple of weeks. It was pretty much the exact same experience, just reversing the countries. A little movie theater on the town square, old-timey atmosphere, and brands / chains that were different and intriguing. Now my sister is taking her kid there every summer. And though the city has grown it still retains the friendly, traditional without being uber-conservative atmosphere. If you’ve never been, it’s a great place to spend a couple weeks in the summer.
I’ve nearly died several times, but I don’t have any interesting stories about it. With me it was always endocrine disorders leading to dehydration, and fluctuating blood-sugars, and also I had a few serious bouts of pneumonia. But there’s never any excitement in disease.
I’ve lived in the US my entire life, and I’ve never heard of Laverdiere’s, or Shaw’s, and I’ve only heard of Waldenbooks on TV. There are none around here.