The story left off with a trip into the Appalachian mountains in our church bus to a youth camp, when the bus broke through the dirt road and turned over into the river below. The rest of the story follows below.
As the bus came to rest on it's roof at the bottom of the muddy-brown river, I suddenly realized that I was sitting upside-down in my seat. My hands had a vice-grip on the seat in front of me, somehow still seated in the inverted bus seat. I let go and fell down toward the roof of the bus, scraping my elbow in the process.
The pain of the scrape served to rouse me somewhat from the fog of disbelief at what was happening. But somehow it didn't shake much sense into me, as my first priority was to insure that my guitar hadn't been damaged. I found my sister and asked her to make sure the guitar was OK.
Then I saw Dad, making his way toward us to verify we were not seriously hurt. He told me to leave the bus and run down the road to find help. The camp we were on our way to visit should only be a mile or two ahead.
The bus had settled into the river on an angle, with the right side where I had been against the riverbank and the left side facing upward. I climbed to the nearest window and grabbed the latches to open it, but it wouldn't open until I realized I had to pull up instead of down; of course, the bus was upside-down, so the windows had to open in the opposite direction.
As I was preparing to exit the bus, I spotted Onnie and Shirley, two of the older adults who had come along on the trip. Onnie was holding his arm, and I immediately assumed it was broken. I asked if they needed help, and they told me to go ahead, but asked me to help their son, Tim, off the bus.
Tim was a younger, elementary-school-aged kid, who I could tell was shaken from the accident. So I grabbed him and helped him through the open bus window and followed him out. We climbed over the bottom of the bus and jumped onto the river bank, where we grabbed tree roots to climb through the muddy bank up to the road.
I left him on the road and immediately began running forward to find help. There was no way to know how far I would have to run, but I ran as fast as I could. As I ran ahead, my mind filled with fears and concerns. Did everyone survive? Even if I found help at the camp, how long would it take to get an ambulance all the way into this remote area? Should I have stayed behind and helped people who were hurt? What if I didn't get help in time, and people died? What if the bus moved farther into the river and people drowned?
All of these thoughts just pushed me to run a little faster, despite the fact that my chest was hurting from ragged breathing. I was going to run until I dropped if I had to.
Suddenly I rounded another curve around the mountainside and spotted a camp. There was a softball game in the field, and I saw adults behind home plate and the pitcher's mound. I picked the tall man behind the pitcher and sprinted to him, trying to get his attention by waving my arms and weakly calling out as I ran.
When he first spotted me, his expression was puzzled. He must have wondered where this kid came from, and why he was running and gesturing like that? When I arrived next to him in the softball field, I breathlessly tried to blurt out what had happened, but he didn't understand me. He grabbed my shoulders and told me to calm down and take a deep breath. When I caught my breath, I told him of the accident.
He and the other man, upon hearing my message, moved very quickly. After I confirmed that there were probably people injured and in need of medical care, the second man ran to the lodge to place an emergency call. The first went to his car, and the three of us were soon on our way to the scene of the accident.
We arrived at the scene quickly, and the men immediately began helping pull passengers from the bus. One of the older boys, a graduating high-school senior, was dispatched to run back to the camp for blankets. I asked some of the adults who were helping remove people from the bus if I could help, and they thanked me for getting help so quickly and told me to just stay on the road and get some rest.
I began looking around. A group of men and high school boys were continuing to pull people out of the bus. Some were helped up the bank to the road, and others carried. One of the older boys was working to help others, oblivious to a large laceration in his knee. I thought I saw a flash of bone through the blood on the knee, then someone told him to get out of the river and get help for his knee. He stopped and looked down at his injury for the first time, and immediately turned pale with the realization. He was helped up to the road, where another adult began to tend to his wound with a bandage from the first aid kit.
Wandering around on the road, I saw the gathering survivors milling around silently in groups of three or four. On a makeshift stretcher at the side of the road I saw one of the adult women, Bev, lying completely still and seemingly comatose. Although there were no outward signs of injury, she laid silently with her eyes open and unseeing. I asked a nearby adult what was wrong, and was told Bev was in shock, that she would come around soon.
Then I heard a shaking sob from one of the girls standing in the road. The single cry was like a trigger, setting off a wave of crying, sobbing, and wailing from all of the girls along the roadway. I separated myself from the crying mobs quickly, because no self-respecting boy should be seen crying with the girls.
In the end, there were a variety of minor scrapes, bruises, and scratches, but not many serious injuries. Onnie did suffer a broken arm, and there was the deep knee laceration, and a few other injuries that required brief hospital stays. And Bev did come out of her shock-induced coma, quite shaken but able to recover quickly.
We heard from the emergency services personnel that we were highly lucky or blessed. If we had slid off the road almost anywhere else, they said, the accident would have been much more serious. We somehow avoided trees that could have broken the bus apart. We went into a relatively calm and shallow part of the river, which otherwise might have flooded into the bus much higher with rapid-moving muddy water. As it was, they found it remarkable to find our injuries as few and minor as they were.
So we did a farewell performance of our program before going home in the cars of many friends and family members who drove to Kentucky to take us home. That performance, in the little Krypton church, was standing room only. The evening was electric, with all of us singing our hearts out and the locals in attendance finding themselves swept up in the emotional thanksgiving everyone in our group were feeling and expressing. A very large number of people walked to the front of the church for the altar call which customarily ended the service.
The newspaper did a big article on the accident, which listed the names of everyone involved; except for mine. The paper published a list of all who were "injured", which included Dad and my sister Julie, but skipped me. But I brushed it off, deciding that since I wasn't injured, there was no reason for me to be listed as such.
After arriving home, an encore of our program was presented at my home church, where the entire congregation came forward during the altar call to weep and hug each other. The experience seemed to bring everyone in the congregation closer together and led to a strong feeling of extended family among everyone in the church for many years to come.
There are several people who shared this experience who clearly saw the hand of God in protecting us from major injury or death, and using the incident to closely knit the members of the church together. Was divine providence at work, or was everything that happened easily predicted and explained?
The answer is a matter of faith.
1 comment:
good story.
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