Almost Home..

So tonight on the way back from my friend Vince's in Phoenix, I nearly died. I hit a big rock in a pile of rubble and went a little on two wheels, steered and fishtailed, then oversteered and did a donut on highway 8, stopping barely in time.

But what happened in my head as it all was going on really is why this is here.

I just remember thinking as the car spun toward the edge of the Tecate Divide, "Oh, man... and I am almost home." One hour left on the road and I was going to fly off and down.

I was calm and everything was in slow motion. I accepted it, even as I tried every trick in the driving book to recover.

"I was almost home, this cannot be happening," I thought.

Then time caught up with perception and the world stopped with my car. I thought maybe I wasn't here any longer for a second, out of my body and looking at the great ravine outside my car window. Then I heard the crickets and the radio.

I was facing the wrong way and had lightly smacked my front driver's side fender against a boulder a bit as I had come to a stop. I looked for lights and slowly pulled around to face the right way.

I felt an urge and parked, then puked into the chasm almost as soon as I rounded my back fender. I stopped retching, the radio in my car static-babbling and the crickets chirping away in the high mountains.

I felt exhilarated and pondered the great mountains I loved all around me. The same mountains Marcie only loved when there was rain and greenness or snow to see. The ones she went to with me, "just because" when there wasn't any of those things to enjoy.

The exhilaration faded. I gulped and gathered my senses and thought of Seamus waiting for his meal. I washed my mouth with some mouthwash and lots of water, then drove down the mountain.

And even though I was thinking on an entirely different level in the rush of the near-accident, all I could think coming down the hill was that I was calm in the face of my assumed sure death not because I wanted to die, or because I was ready.

It was just that whatever happened, I was, at that moment, going to make it home.