Near Death in Belize

The closest I’ve come (yet) to dying (as far as I know), was while I was teaching in Belize a few summers ago. Here’s what I emailed back a couple of days later:

This past week provided the most excitement of the trip so far, though not the kind of excitement I’d prefer. On Friday I went on a tour of Tikal, over in Guatamala, the largest Mayan ruin. On the way back we got into a bad accident. Coming over a hill, the driver tried to brake for a slower car at the bottom of the hill, but the brakes failed. We began fish-tailing, then at the bottom of the hill spun around 180, slid off the road, into a ditch, and as we started to roll, slammed into a tree. Everything and everyone was thrown to the left side of the van (we weren’t wearing seatbelts, as that is not the custom here). I was in the passenger’s seat and hit the lower back of my neck hard on the driver’s seat. People from the slower car stopped and pulled us out. I was shaky and couldn’t stand for awhile. My back was incredibly sore, but nothing was broken. There were a couple of others with minor cuts and bumps on the head, but being in the passenger seat, I ended up the worse off. When we got back to San Ignacio (we took a cab back to the border and the tour company picked us up there) I went to a doctor, but he wasn’t in (it was 6 pm Fri.). But I was feeling a bit better. By Sat. morning I felt much better than I thought I would. And by this morning, have only a stiff neck and a bit of pain in my lower left ribs, where I must have hit the gearshift. It was a bad accident that could have been worse, if we would have rolled or hit the tree head-on, there would have certainly been one fatality (me), and probably others. As I said, it’s the kind of excitement I’d just as soon not experience.

There’s much more to this story of course than the email account. I was in the front passenger’s seat because as the oldest of the eight on our tour, I was sore from our long hike through and climbs up the ruins, and the others took pity on me. The driver (near my age) had apparently been drinking for the three hours that our group had been out on the tour. As he was passing the slower car, pumping on the failed breaks, he yelled out “Help me! Help me! I can’t stop! I can’t stop!” I don’t recall being pulled from the van, but I ended up sitting on the side of the road, across from the wreck, not only in pain in my neck but also with a cut on the back of my leg. Someone had a bandaid and put it on me. When I had my senses, I immediately began calling out that I’d lost my glasses and couldn’t see. Someone found them in the van, a huge relief. A group of locals quickly gathered. Someone in our group had his passport stolen from the van, but soon after, one of the locals returned from across a field with it. For a while, while I was still on the ground, no one could find my backpack, with my passport and camera, and I worried that it had been stolen as well. But once I was able to get up and search the van I found it in front of the driver’s seat, littered with bits of glass from the driver’s window (that I would be finding for months afterward). The cab the driver got for us (after about an hour) took us not directly to the border crossing, but rather to the souvenir store just short of the border crossing. Somehow I just didn’t feel like souvenirs.

That night in San Ignacio, our wreck was the talk of the town. Passing people in the restaurants or bars, I’d be asked if I was in the accident. There was disagreement as to what the cause was, break failure or a drunken driver. I knew it was break failure, as I was sitting there watching the driver pump the failed breaks. He might have been drunk, but that wasn’t the cause of the wreck. There was a meeting of some in our tour group who started talking about a lawsuit. I was just happy to be alive. The owner of the tour group was also the owner of the restaurant where I ate, and he was the one who wanted me to go to the doctor and had one of his employees drive me there. But when we got to the doctor’s, I could see that it was little more than a clapboard house, and I just didn’t have faith in good coming from it, so I asked to be taken back to town. By then the talk of lawsuit had heated up, but I just wanted to have dinner. The owner bought me a Scotch, appreciating (and no doubt trying to influence) my not joining the lawsuit talk. After dinner I went to the Internet café to email my wife about what had happened (not the above). I bought a bottle of rum on the way back to my room, though still didn’t sleep all that well.