Turn Left

This incident happened about ten years ago.

I was out late in my sleepy suburb of a hometown with three of my best friends. That night we piled into the car for a trip to Wendy's for some late night fast food.

The Wendy's was within a large parking lot of a shopping mall. We arrived to find the store closed, so we changed the venue of midnight snack to the Jack in the Box on Main Street. Fun times, I know.

We turned our car around to one of the exits from the parking lot back to the road. As the car pulled up to the curb to ready for the turn, we realized our friend driving, Frank, had pulled into the wrong exit. We needed to go left, but our left turn was blocked by a median.

"No, this is a right turn only exit. We need to turn left!"

The others repeated, "Yeah, back out. We need to find another exit!"

Frank started to reverse but he hesitated. "Are you sure?" he asked.

We then realized that our destination was on Main Street---to our right. Frank was initially correct. We all laughed at the chances that we'd all be lost in our own hometown. We then made a right turn into the left lane along the median of this four lane road.

The headlights of the oncoming car grew with such speed that we barely had the chance to react. The drunk driver had overshot a right turn at the intersection ahead and was now on the wrong side of the median heading straight for us.

He was easily coming at 50 mph and we were sitting still. He was, however, far enough to have time to react, and he swerved his car to the right. He bounced off the median and crashed on a pole to our left. His car was within ten feet of ours when he swerved off.

At that moment my friend Lawrence shouted "WE JUST HAD A PSYCHIC EXPERIENCE!" And I was too jittery to deny it. The four of us became lost in our own hometown for just enough time so that a drunk driver with poor enough faculties to overshoot a right turn could see us and avoid us. If we had turned right when we reached the curb, we would have been creamed.

I'm generally a believer in extremely good luck. I think extreme coincidences be just as fun as whatever supernatural explanation might be enjoyed by others. But this time it was the group of us losing our heads really got me reconsidering.

It's truly amazing that the timing of our hesitation at the curb was perfectly calculated for the event about to unfold. Whatever it was that caused it, it saved our lives.