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The rain slowed, and I sped up toward the national wildlife refuge and the elevated highway that separates Lafayette from Baton Rouge. For several miles, there was a strange dead calm when the wind and rain stopped altogether. I sped up even more, going sixty-eight now.
Then, out of nowhere, gusts of wind rose up, turned gale force, buffeted the car, and sent leaves ripped from trees down in the refuge windmilling across the already slick surface of the highway. A small sedan in front and to the right of me fishtailed on the wet leaves, corrected, and almost straightened out.
Then it swung violently sideways into my lane, and I had to swerve, throwing my car hard to the right.
I’d taken all sorts of defensive-driving classes in the course of my career, but nothing I knew could save me from smashing my right front fender into the guardrail.
Going better than sixty when it hit, the car upended, spiraled up, and cleared the guardrail before plunging into darkness.
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METEOROLOGICAL DATA WOULD LATER conclude that four different tornadoes hit southern Louisiana that night. The third, an EF2-level twister, formed near Ville Platte around 1:35 a.m. and wreaked destruction all the way to Opelousas. The vortex lost shape there, but the forces of it continued on in spiraling powerful gusts that swept down over the wildlife refuge and the highway, causing the sedan in front of me to skid and making me swerve, which sent the rented Jeep Cherokee into the guardrail and then over the side of the elevated interstate.
I remember feeling outside myself as I fell, as if this were happening to someone else entirely. The single remaining headlight beam gave me a split-second view of a dense forest canopy before the driver’s side of the car smashed into it. The window next to me shattered, and then everything went kaleidoscopic and herky-jerky as branches snapped beneath the car, interrupting but not stopping the fall.
The nose of the car smashed into an ancient cedar tree, snuffing out the remaining headlight and causing the trajectory of my descent to change. The Jeep whipsawed rearward in one last, long drop, at least ten or fifteen feet.
The back of the car’s impact with the ground should have been colossal, bone-breaking certainly, perhaps neck-snapping and fatal. And the sound should have been deafening.
Instead, the swamp seemed to open up and swallow the speed and mass of the car with a noise that was a bizarre cross between the thwacking of a tennis racket hitting a ball and the splash of a kid doing a cannonball into a pool. Reeds, swamp water, and oozing black mud blew out the rear window and sucked up half the car before it stopped.
For several long moments in the pitch-black, I sat there in the astronaut’s position, rocked back in total shock. Finally I moved, shaky with adrenaline.
Nuggets of shatterproof glass spilled away from my arms, which, other than suffering from a funny-bone sensation, were working. So were my legs, and so was my neck, which, like my head and face, was splattered with the muck that had saved my life.
I pushed at buttons to get one of the interior lights to go on, but the electrical system had died. I dug in my pants pocket, found the mini-Maglite I always carry, and shone it about, trying to get a full sense of my predicament.
The swamp had swallowed the back half of the Jeep and pinned my door shut. The hood jutted above me, free of the mud. Broken branches and limbs stuck up from the grille like a bizarre floral arrangement.
I got my cell out and saw it had died. There was no calling until I could recharge it. The driver of the car that had swerved in front of me had to have seen me go over the guardrail, right? The police had probably been alerted, or would be in minutes. Had there been any other cars or trucks close enough behind me to see the crash?
I couldn’t remember. At that late hour, in the bad weather, traffic had been exceedingly light.
What if no one came?
Then it dawned on me that time was ticking away. Sunday had given me a deadline. I had to be in New Orleans by 4:30 a.m. That was two hours and forty minutes from now. I couldn’t afford to wait for rescue. In fact, I couldn’t afford to be rescued. There would be police and ambulances and questions that I had no time to answer.
After unbuckling my seat belt, I had to do several contortionist moves to get my head and shoulders across the front passenger seat and my feet and legs up onto the driver’s seat. At some point during the car’s fall, the passenger-side window had been blown out too. I punched out the remaining glass, pushed aside the vegetation, and looked out, happy to see that the muck was a good eight inches below me.
Shining the flashlight around, I saw a stand of cedar and cypress trees on a bank of sorts about five feet off the nose of the car. My beam picked up scars and broken branches on the tree closest to a twenty-five-foot cement stanchion that supported that section of the highway.
Overhead, a truck roared by and disappeared in a hiss. It was raining again, and if there were sirens coming, I couldn’t hear them. I flashed the light back at the stanchion and up its side a solid ten feet, and I found what I was looking for. Okay, I thought. I have a chance.
Looking around, I smiled, dug in my pocket, and came up with my jackknife. With several quick cuts, I removed the driver’s-side and passenger’s-side seat belts and tied and snapped them together to form a makeshift rope about four feet long with a closed buckle at one end from which a two-foot piece of strap hung. I tied that around my waist.
After taking several deep breaths, I put the flashlight between my teeth and squirmed my head, shoulders, body, and hips out the car’s window. At that point, I was sitting in an awkward position, gripping the windshield frame.
I needed another handhold and grasped the butt end of the windshield wiper and used it as leverage to hoist myself out and onto the hood of the car, which was canted left and rose steeply. I got my right shoe braced against the windshield frame and my left against the wiper base, and I was able to reach up and grab some of the tree limbs sticking up from the front grille.
It wasn’t pretty, but I managed to pull myself up onto the nose of the car, which was rock solid. It took me three attempts to get into a crouch, left knee down in the branches, right foot up on the grille.
Gripping two other limbs, I took several deep breaths, said a prayer, and then sprang out into space.
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