I had a near death experience once. A friend was driving my Renault Clio on an empty motorway in the northeast of France a few years before the Millennium. I had purchased that car the year before because the TV adverts featuring Nicole and Papa were really good. Times have changed for the worse in that respect, as well as in many other ways.
I was in the passenger seat, and my pal asked
me to light a cigarette for him. He leaned towards me and I held the lighter in
front of him. When I looked up we were heading straight for the central
reservation at about eighty miles an hour. What happened next was terrifying. My
friend desperately jerked the steering wheel to avoid a collision. He managed
to regain control of the car after another two or three sharp turns of the
wheel. He pulled up on the side of the road, switched off the engine and sat
with his head in his hands for about ten minutes.
Those are the
facts, but what happened in that very short time was supernatural. I’ve heard
that time seems to stand still in such moments of total crisis, and so it was.
I was a witness to my friend’s efforts to control the car, and I saw it all unfold
as if time had slowed down. It was as if an unseen entity had flicked a switch
and we were living through those seconds in slow motion, which I suppose means
we were close to death. I’ve never experienced anything else like it.
I think I took over the driving after that incident. We continued for about thirty minutes before stopping for the night in a place called Épinal. We had dinner and a bottle or two of wine in an Ibis hotel. I’ve never laughed as hard as I did during that meal. My friend was always funny, but he attained unmatched heights of comedy that evening. I suppose we were both hysterical after almost dying, but it was probably the funniest night of my life, and I’ve had a lot of them. We went for a walk in Épinal afterwards. All I remember is that the river Moselle was wide and bordered by flags.
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| The river Moselle, in Metz |
I’ve rarely enjoyed
driving abroad. Looking back, I can scarcely believe some of the drives I attempted
when I was younger, like the occasion I thought it would be a good idea to
drive all the way from Carcassonne to Navarra, over the Pyrenees, in one go. Fortunately,
I never blew a tyre and my car was never stolen, although someone did once pinch
a windscreen wiper in Annecy. I’ve never been able to figure that one out.
