The As It Happens Files (14 page)
Read The As It Happens Files Online
Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
It was a story we could all relate to, and with an outcome that made everyone feel good.
Well, almost everyone. No sooner had we aired Elizabeth Jordan’s dramatic tale than folks were on the phone, on email, sending us their reactions to the runaway Chevy Blazer, and what most of them were saying was, “For heaven’s sake, why didn’t she just turn off the engine!”
Most, but not all. Some were saying, “For heaven’s sake, why didn’t she put it into Neutral?”
I guess they’d missed the part where Ms. Jordan said she’d tried that and her engine sounded as though it was going to explode. After we aired those reactions on Talkback, more people called to argue with the first callers. Some of these people worried that if you turned off your engine, your steering would lock, and then where would you be?
The argument raged on, outside the CBC and in, because there is nothing like car talk for getting everyone involved. But no one had a definite answer to this question: how
do
you stop a runaway SUV?
Mark decided we should put it to the experts, so he hit the phones and started calling around. First he called the police in Suffolk, Long Island.
Did they know about the runaway 1994 Chevy Blazer?
They did.
And could they tell us, please, what
should
you do if your car is out of control like that?
“That’s a good question,” they said. They’d get back to us after they’d finished reviewing the case.
Next, he phoned Young Drivers of Canada and asked them what they would advise in a situation like this. Young Drivers said you should get the car into Neutral and then use your brakes.
“She had no brakes,” said Mark. “Wow, that’s not very good.”
Don McKnight of the Ontario Provincial Police said you should first take the power away by putting the car in Neutral, then turn the engine off. Don’t try to take the key out of the ignition, he said; just turn it back one notch. That way you’ll slow the car down and still have your steering.
Bobby Ore, who trains police bodyguards and stunt drivers, agreed.
“Turn the ignition back one position and/or put the car in Neutral,” he advised. Better for the engine to explode than to run into a telephone pole or another car.
Brian Holmes of the Canadian Automobile Association said all you needed to do was turn the ignition off. You couldn’t remove the key anyway unless the car was in Park, and you couldn’t put it in Park if it was still moving. He also advised
against trying to use the emergency brakes. Elizabeth had tried and they didn’t work, but Brian said if they had, she might have locked her back wheels and spun out of control.
So the consensus seemed to be: first cut power to the engine. Even better: avoid getting into such a fix in the first place.
Six years later, I tracked Elizabeth Jordan down again. She told me she’d got herself a nursing degree, got married and was working in obstetrics in New York. I asked her if they ever found out what went wrong with the Chevy Blazer. She said that, as far as she could remember, a piece of the air intake valve had got stuck in the throttle, probably when her car had been worked on a few days earlier. She was sorry to report that Edwin Hernandez, the police officer who’d saved her life, had since been killed in a car accident.
By the way, Elizabeth Jordan was still driving a Chevy—basically the same as she had before, she said, but newer.
Here’s another good little car story. It’s May 2005. Andreas Bolga of Cologne, Germany, is driving down the autobahn in his Smart Car (I told you it was a
little
car story) when a huge tractor trailer suddenly starts to move over into his lane … where he
is.
The truck driver does not see the little car that’s already occupying the space he’s trying to move into, nor does he notice anything when he hooks the car onto the front of his truck. He does sense an extra bit of drag, which he thinks might be a flat tire, so eventually he pulls over to the side of the road to have a look-see. To say that he was surprised when he saw what was causing the drag is, I gather, something of an understatement.
Luckily, no one got hurt in that adventure either, although the little Smart Car was quite bent. Andreas said he was
going to get it fixed up and keep it, though, because his Smart Car was now his Lucky Car.
At
As It Happens,
we were pretty impressed with how Elizabeth Jordan and Andreas Bolga kept their heads in the bizarre and terrifying circumstances they found themselves in, but Mike Brady may have earned himself the title King of Cool when he and his wheels met with a mishap, and not only because the temperature was hovering around minus 22 degrees Celsius at the time.
Mike, a basketball coach in Regina, was on his way home from visiting friends in Hodgeville, Saskatchewan, when the accident happened. He lost control of his van on a lonely country road around 10:00 p.m. just after Christmas 2002. He had no cellphone. And there was no question of getting out of the van and striking out on foot, because Mike Brady also happened to be in a wheelchair—he doesn’t have the use of his legs.
How Mike managed to survive the next 41 hours is a story that rivals Ignacio Siberio’s and was the subject of a conversation we had on the radio a couple of days later. First I wanted to know how come he hadn’t frozen to death.
MB: I stayed with my van and I had half a tank of gas and I didn’t know how long I’d be there, so I ran the van every
2
hours for
15
minutes.
ML: Warmed up the van a bit.
MB: Just warmed me up. And I didn’t want to warm myself up too much, because then you start to sweat and that makes you colder. So I just got the chill off me, and I had my two dogs with me and one would lie on my thigh
and she would keep warm herself—she’s a smaller dog; the other one’s a big fluffy Bouvier, and she was steaming the whole time and if I wanted to warm up my hands, I’d get her up on my lap and cuddle her and pet her and hold her, and she would warm me right up.
ML: That was good. You had nothing to eat or drink?
MB: I had two Christmas suckers that I had put in the pouch of my wheelchair to give to a couple of kids I know and I forgot to give them to them, so I had one for lunch on Monday and one for breakfast on Tuesday morning.
ML: Oh gosh. Now, what was going through your mind?
MB: Well, there’s a lot of stuff goes through your mind in a
41
-hour period when you’re by yourself. There was one point where I wasn’t sure anyone would find me, because I didn’t know anyone knew I was missing. And when you know there’s a possibility that you may not make it through something … For me it was easy. I mean, I’ve had a life that’s been a fulfilling life, I’ve done some things that I’m really proud of and I just knew that if that was the time, then that was the time, and if my time wasn’t up, then someone would find me. I didn’t wait all the time in the van—
ML: You didn’t?
MB: I had made up my mind the night before that if they didn’t find me by one o’clock Tuesday afternoon, I was going to try to see how far I could wheel down the road. I had to dismantle my chair to get it out of the van, and I threw it out the door and got it back together. Then I warmed up and jumped in the chair about two o’clock and started to wheel back down the road the way I had come.
ML: Is your wheelchair electric?
MB: No, it’s a manual chair.
ML: This is your arms and shoulders doing the work.
MB: I was using my arms the whole time. When I got to a snowdrift, the chair wouldn’t go through it. I couldn’t get going enough up the hill and through the drift, so I crawled through the snow and dragged my chair, and when I got through the drift, I’d get back in my chair and wheel.
I went through two drifts—and they were anywhere from
20
to
30
feet long—and I looked at the third drift down at the bottom of the next hill that I was coming to, and it was at least
50
feet long.
ML: You must have been crying with frustration.
MB: Well, I was looking at it and I was looking at the hill, and I said,
If the next one is the same as that one and I can’t see a house from the top of that hill, I’m going to go back to the van. I’m strong enough that I can make it back.
And I’d just started down that hill—I was about halfway down—when a truck came up behind me.
ML: And he was out looking for you?
MB: He was out looking for me. He’d just started at one o’clock and this was around three, so he had just been out for two hours.
ML: What did you say?
MB: “Am I glad to see you!” I don’t know if I said it as much as I cried it.
ML: Yes. Because then all the relief would have come flowing out.
MB: That’s when the emotions kicked in that I was okay. I wasn’t sure at that time whether I was fully intact, because being a paraplegic, I can’t feel anything below my waist, and I wasn’t sure if my legs were frozen and my toes were frozen, because I expended all my energy on my upper body, keeping it warm and making sure that it was intact, because I couldn’t afford to lose a finger or an arm or anything. But if I was to lose a toe or a foot, to me it’s not a big thing, other than cosmetically—I would have an empty spot on my chair.
ML:
Were
you okay?
MB: I was totally fine. I had a scratch on my knee from when I got out of the van, and other than that—I think that the people who were looking for me and didn’t know I was okay had a harder go of it than I did.
ML: Your dogs are okay, too?
MB: My dogs are unbelievable. They’re here and they’re happy. They won’t leave me; they’re always laying at my feet. That was the hardest thing: when I was in the van and waiting and wasn’t sure if I would make it—
ML: You were afraid for the dogs?
MB: I was really afraid for the dogs. And I was in a dilemma: do you leave them locked in the van or do you leave the van door open so … they can come and go as they want, and at what point in time do you make that decision to open the door and leave it open or what?
ML: Glad you didn’t have to.
MB: You know what, there’s a lot of people glad and there’s no one gladder than this gentleman right here.
ML: I hope you have a very good year.
MB: You know what, they’ve all been good years.
With that kind of spirit, you knew that Mike probably
would
have a good 2003, but still, I was surprised, when I had a chance to talk with him again five years later, to hear about all the good things that had happened to him
directly as a result of driving into a ditch on a winter night in Saskatchewan.
The first thing that happened was that he came into some money.
MB: After I got lost, the [Regina]
Leader Post
did a follow-up story on my wheelchair basketball team, and a gentleman here in Regina phoned me up and gave me a cheque for ten grand.
ML: A total stranger?
MB: Never seen him before in my life. He just said, “These kids need it.” So with that ten thousand dollars, I kicked in seven thousand dollars of my own money and I bought eight brand-new wheelchairs, and that kicked off our wheelchair basketball programme. It got it into the next phase that it had to go, and now these kids that I started with are all in Grade
12
and just graduated.
One of my kids was in Grade
10
and he had a
63
average—one of the smartest kids on my team. And I talked to him. He went from
63
in Grade
10
to
93
in Grade
11.
He quit smoking and he’s looking at going to the University of Chicago. He did his SATs this weekend.
ML: You must be so proud.
MB: He’s looking at playing basketball for the University of Chicago and actually getting an education, from me getting lost in the snowbank. It’s such a stupid story; a stupid act on my part gave all these kids a whole different opportunity.
ML: What’s your team called?
MB: The Paratroopers. And they’re a really cool bunch of kids.… Way back when, three weeks after I got lost—I coached a young girls’ team and my Paratroopers—we played a basketball game between my able-bodied girls and my disabled kids. They had a great time and I thought,
That was pretty cool
—and then my phone started ringing.
“I heard you played a game.… Will you play my team?”
“Will you play
my
team?”
We played seven weeks in a row!
ML: How did your team do in those games?
MB: I was the referee so I cheated a little bit, just because you want everyone involved to have fun. And I also wanted my kids to learn, so as their skills developed, I called it harder.
But the head of the league—they found out that I was doing these exhibition games—he came to me and asked me to join the league the next year. A wheelchair team in an able-bodied league!
ML: Really. Is that the first time that’s happened?
MB: First time in the world.… We’re still playing. That programme is still going on six years later. Just three weeks ago, I went out and bought more new chairs, so I had ten good ones, five on each team.
Now I go to schools with all these chairs and do talks. I talk about getting lost in the snowstorm.
ML: You just never know, do you?
I said to Mike that it seemed to me that he must have restored hope to a lot of broken lives, and I wondered what had happened in his life to restore hope after he got hurt.
MB: I’ll probably cry here. I had huge family support, and that’s one thing that happened to me this year: my dad passed away. That’s why it’s hard …
When I got hurt, my dad was almost the same age I am now, so he walked in and he was a brick. He never showed that it bothered him. I found out later he almost lost his business, he was so emotionally stressed. We were building a workshop and he had just installed the windows, and he ripped one out and lowered it so I’d be able to see.
My coaching is my dad, too; he started me coaching. He said, “You’re going to coach your little brother.”
And I did that as a
15
-year-old. And my little brother, who was
12
when I got hurt, now works with the disabled community; that’s his job.
ML: What a difference you’ve made.
MB: The only way we can pass on a legacy to people is through our coaching, through our lifestyle, through our
Living.… What kind of people did you help develop on
your path through life? I’m passing on the legacy of my dad and my grandfather and his dad before him.… There’s two times in my life that I thought I was going to die. When I had my accident as a
20
-year-old, and I hadn’t lived, I was scared about losing my life. When I got
stuck in the snowbank and I left my van to wheel, I didn’t think I would make it when I left. But when I left that day, I wasn’t scared. I’d lived a life. I did all that I thought I was going to accomplish.
Obviously, some higher power than me decided that these young kids needed someone to be their role model still.
