July 1st, 1968 - A Trip We Should Not Have Survived

Hi all and welcome back if you have visited before. Well rather than start at when I was 4 (that indeed would be tedious) and move forward from there perhaps this might be a better idea. Pick isolated dates and events, place it by year and then after maybe a few months or so place it all in chronological order. So I will tell a story here that still haunts me to this day and I still wake up in a sweat and this happened over 40 years ago.

It was the start of a long weekend and I was going to head "North" for the first time with a group of close friends to a place called "Sable Beach" sort of The Daytona Beach of Central Ontario. All week my friends and I were excited as we counted down to this first long weekend where I had a car. We packed everything in including, believe it or not, a portable Reel to Reel tape recorder (it took 15 "D" size batteries) and headed out onto The QEW and headed north on Highway #6 towards, well who knew ? Now Highway #6 from Hamilton, Ont to Owen Sound in those days was just two lanes and during the exodus, that occurred every long weekend, was frightfully slow and agonizing to an 18 year old anxious to begin an adventure, but plod along I did. Here is a favourite song of mine from the era ...



Well we crawled along, or so it seemed to me until well I just couldn't stand it anymore. There was a dawdler in front of me and finally I just had to pass him and so I pulled out left and accelerated. All was going good and then I noticed that there were a few more cars lined up almost bumper to bumper in front of him and so I said what the heck and decided to pass a few more. By this time I had reached a speed of about 75 miles an hour, and was increasing it. Unfortunately the line was continuing and other than stopping or slowing down and re-gaining my old spot the only choice it seemed to me was to keep accelerating and keep passing cars and so that is what I continued to do. By now my speed was about 85 and we were passing cars number 7 and 8 and the silence in the car began to build to the point where it was almost screaming at me. - Now before I go on I had mentioned in my first post that it might be a bit of mystical journey and here I would like to suggest that I somehow believe that there is a ... well a force if you will ... that has guarded my life from what early date well I do not know. This is but one instance but I will post others. I would like you to consider that as we finish the narrative. As the silence in the car became overwhelming I began passing cars number #9, #10. now #11 - holy shit now #12 and then the inconceivable reared up we were approaching a hill. A very, very large hill actually. At this point I was doing about 85 - 90 and it would have been almost impossible for me to have slammed the breaks on and got back in line and so for reasons I truly will never understand until the day I die I decided to continue to pass these cars ... ON THE HILL ! Number 13 as I got about 1/3rd of the way up - the silence is numbing, number 14 as I got half way up the hill - all breathing has stopped and finally #15 as we crested the hill. Now there are moments I am sure in all of our lives that are burnt like engrams in our minds and soul and this is one such moment for me. The instant of the crest, the point at which I honestly thought I was going to die and take 5 of my friends with me, the point where traveling at about 90 miles an hour we were going to be killed and take a family of innocents with us, the point where I fully expected to see the front of another car or maybe worse a transport trailer truck looming in front of me --- but it never came. No believe it or not when we crested the hill and I was able to focus, and breath again, the next oncoming car was quite a distance away. It was honestly unbelievable. That this road, a very heavily traveled one at that, could remain so clear for the time I was in the passing lane goes beyond the rational and enters the realm of the irrational and for me the paranormal for I was in that lane for I would guess almost 3 minutes and not to have met another car coming in the other direction for all this time and then to see the next car way off in the distance giving me plenty of time to slow down and move over and calm down, is in my opinion and actually in the opinion of some of the the others in the car, who I fortunately had a chance to reacquaint with at my mother's funeral also felt it was divine intervention and that we had cheated death or a least been given a pardon.

And as a postscript I need to tell you that I still awaken many nights in a sweat and many times in my dreams I do not make it and the transport truck that I missed first time around is there to greet me. I wonder ... ? - Thanks for listening folks - Don Barone