That’s a great opening line for any story, especially one that is a true account. It is of an event that occurred one early morning on my drive home from work. As a third-shift laborer at a food-manufacturing facility, it was not uncommon for me to be on the road going home at 2 or 3 A.M. in the morning.

It was early Spring and the deep snow of winter was well into melting but patches and mounds still remained. Creeks and ponds are often overflowing this time of year with runoff water, and road closures along some of the low-lying rural areas are common. Local residents live with it and plan their commutes around it.

My route was always via NYS Route 17, which is the elevated intra-state highway (it is now an Interstate highway.) The Almond, NY dam was once again, back-overflowed and some county roads were under a dozen+ feet or so of water and temporarily closed.

Warming Trend

The earth was slightly warmer than the air from the previous day’s temperatures so the fog in the mornings was thick and often one entered heavy fog banks unexpectedly. Driving was a bit treacherous for those prone to speeding and would be especially dangerous if one lacked familiarity with the turns and nuances of the road.

I was going home, happy and content with the previous evening’s work. It was the weekend, -my two days off. I had a big mug of Cappuccino I bought at the all-night gas station on the way home. My guilty pleasure, this.

I had plans later this weekend to drive to the Walden Galleria in Buffalo, NY, for cinema. Lunch would be a calorie love-fest at Taco-Bell or some other ‘fast food’ franchise, and there would be shopping. It was going to be my day.

My car smelled of the delicious coffee confection and was unusually clean, inside and out. I had spent the previous afternoon prior to work washing and waxing the exterior. I had vacuumed the interior upholstery and carpets, and used vinyl protectant on the dashboard and other vinyl parts and cleaned the glass, inside and out. –The burgundy Grand Am had this whole new-car smell going on! Life seemed good for me. A super-clean car inside and out is like wearing a new suit; the wearer feels better somehow.

I had the world figured out.

Just then I spotted some apparition in the center of the road, upright, running straight towards me! My first thought, a DEER! I tapped the brakes to release the cruise control and steered deftly to the right shoulder but maintained my speed as this animated creature shot past my driver’s side window at about two arm’s lengths distance.

Save Me!

I thought I heard a woman voice screaming “HEEELP MEEE!” and then, -the vision in the night was gone, swallowed by the darkness behind my still-moving car. –Did I really see that? I hesitated several seconds before applying the brakes fully and came to a stop. I felt my blood turn to ice water. Rolling down my driver’s side window and over the sound of my car’s motor I could definitely hear someone screaming at the night.

I threw the transmission into to reverse and started to back up. In the glow of the back-up lights, yes, -a tattered human figure was running towards me in hobbled gait. I stopped the car lest I run over her. I got out of the car; her screaming was absolutely blood chilling!

”HEELP MEEE!” she wailed, and mysteriously she changed course and jumped over the guardrail, and partially cowered down in the darkness, hiding herself from me.

I ran towards her and she slowly stood up, trembling violently, and began to sob deeply. Dressed inappropriately for the still-cold mornings, her torn and shredded blouse was water-soaked and muddy and matted. Shoeless, disheveled and clearly cold to the bone, she must have realized that needed to trust me. She climbed back over the wire guard rails and hobbled in my direction. Sobbing violently as she reached out for my hands, my thoughts were along the lines of ‘…Oh my God she’s been sexually assaulted and thrown from a vehicle!’

Too Cold to Speak

I convinced her to get into my car; her skin a pale blue from the cold and barely able to shiver. Nearly hypothermic, she was in still in danger. She was reluctant to get into a stranger’s vehicle but she knew that she really had no options and allowed me guide her into my car. I moved my car over to the shoulder of road to be out of the way of any other traffic that might approach out of the darkness and with the heater set to it’s highest setting, I began to gently interrogate her. I was quite shaken; her form although bathed in light from my headlights had offered almost no contrast from the background of foggy night. I had nearly struck her with the car at full speed!

In broken fragments, she wailed that she had driven her car into the Almond dam, had hit the water and that her car had sunk. She rolled her window down, and swam out. She lost her shoes in the process and had swam over floating chunks of ice and branches in the darkness and, to make matters worse, in the wrong direction! Not back towards the road she had just be on, but ‘forward’ and to the right (see top image, bottom of story) through the flooded underbrush and treetops. Her clothes were ripped and torn; hands, feet and face were scratched and bleeding. Some of the cuts and abrasions on her hands and forearms looked deep but she was so cold that they weren’t bleeding anymore. What a nightmarish hell she had endured!

Hysterical and quite possibly near hypothermia and between panic attacks of reliving the ordeal, she told me her name is Jennifer.

I repeatedly asked her if there had been anyone else with her in the car. Was she alone? I needed to know if I need to be looking for someone else, a sister, child, anybody that might have been in the car with her. We were not going to leave if someone else was still in need of rescue.

“No”, she kept telling me. “I came alone”.

She would eventually tell me that she is attending college in Rochester, NY and that at around midnight on a whim, she had left her dormitory without telling her roommates that she was leaving for the weekend and headed down to the southern tier of the state to stage a ‘surprise visit’ to her boyfriend at his dorm. Her college boyfriend did not know that she was coming down, either.

Later, I would think about the logistics of this err; for all intents and purposes if she had drowned in the Almond dam (or, a worse fate!,) she would have been reported as “missing” a few days later in Rochester, NY, and her car would have turned up a few days or weeks later still, in the Almond dam, some 70+ miles to the south. This would present a mystery and confusion for authorities as to where to look for her.

Image: TOP: The next morning I returned and photographed the spot where the car had entered the water. the water had receeded about 20-feet during the day. The ‘white track’ in the lower-left is where the tow truck had sat, and pulled her car. The water had been several feet deeper earlier.

BOTTOM: A month later. This is how the road normally looks.

Jennifer next explained to me that she had done something, well, really dumb. She had encountered a “ROAD CLOSED” barrier on Route 65 near the intersection of Route 21. She had gotten out of her car and MOVED the wooden sawhorse signage out of the way and had driven around it. Her reasoning was that if she drove slowly enough, she could see and possibly drive around whatever bad thing made the road undrivable and thus would reach her destination.

She sobbed that she (paraphrased);

‘…saw another set of headlights coming towards me so I kept driving slower and slower and they (headlights) kept coming closer and closer until I ‘hit something’ and the water washed up over the hood of the car and my headlights went out and the car stalled…’

She had seen the reflection of her own headlights on the water where it met the road’s surface through the thick fog as she approached, progressively the car moved forward from momentum and floated completely before stalling out. The car sank in about 5 or 6 feet of water, submerged completely.

It was terribly dark that night and the only lights were minuscule points on far off hills; mercury vapor yard lamps of distant farmsteads. Not enough to be helpful.

–Apparently “Road Closed” [sic] signage means something else in Rochester, NY but here in the rest of the state, it means that the road is CLOSED.

She said that she had been ‘on the highway’ for a couple of hours after she got out of the water, cold, wet, huddling by the side of the road with her feet on her hands to keep them at least a little bit warm and be able run to a rescuer if she saw approaching headlights.

She had been on the East-bound double lanes when she saw my headlights approaching from the other direction, and had ran the several hundred feet across the snow-covered ravine median (the snow was about knee deep in places) and, some of this was uphill mind you. She climbed over the wire guardrail and had just reached the pavement as I sped past her. We nearly missed meeting.

Later, she kept telling me that nobody would stop to help her! They would change lanes and speed on, leaving her there by the roadside, screaming and running after them! Several trucks and cars had already passed her by. Several she said, honked their horn angrily, flashed their high beam headlights at her and still they did not stop! She was almost angry that nobody was stopping to help her!

Apparently, she had not been following the nightly news. Just days earlier, a pair of fugitives from the state of Colorado had just been in the area about 50 miles west of this very location, had assaulted the driver of car that stopped to help their out-of-gas car and had hijacked his car (The story was featured some time later on the TV program “America’s Most Wanted”.)

Now convinced that she was traveling without passenger, I needed to get her to a hospital. Any one would do. I pulled the car into Drive and sped away, breaking the speed limit all the way to the hospital. She had at first requested that I just take her to her boyfriend’s place, but quickly agreed that she needed to be seen by a doctor so we agreed to this course of action.

I felt that she would need a tetanus shot at least (she had swam in flood water!), and some additional care I could not fathom. And of course, the police and a wrecker truck must be summoned.

In my haste to transport her, I missed a turnoff for the nearest hospital but continued to another exit and another hospital in the next village that I was more familiar with. It was a 15 or 20-minute err on my part, but it would have to do. She would at least be warm in my car a few minutes longer. I just hoped that she wouldn’t faint and vomit or something, aspirate fluid into her lungs. She could die right there in my car, I needed to get her to professionals, quickly!

Getting her to the hospital was not easy on either of us. She had ahold of my right hand quite firmly and refused to let go. I drove left-handed all the way at speeds approaching 75 or 80 MPH on the 55 MPH highways.

She did have one more major ‘panic attack’ as we sped up a steep inclined hill and entered another thick cloudbank. Seeing the rapidly approaching cloudbank as we climbed the hill, she shrieked and sort of thrashed around a bit in the passenger’s seat, then abruptly settled-down again.

–Poor Jennifer was reliving the nightmare yet again.

At some calmer point I recall her looking over at me, smiling weakly and saying something to the effect of “…you’re such a nice person, -thank you”.

We arrived at the hospital and I parked by Emergency, I rushed in and found ready help. A Wellsville City Police Officer was in there too, having coffee and visiting the hospital staff. This was good; he could begin whatever process was needed now to contact family members, retrieve her car, etc. I was dismissed but remained at the hospital for maybe an hour. The nurses did let me see Jennifer before I left to go home. Now cleaned up, drinking a cup of super-sugared coffee (they explained that she needed carbohydrates and sugar was the fastest way to get them into her.), she looked much better.

She told me that her purse, overcoat and everything was still in the car and that is where her hospital insurance information was, and that the Police Officer was going to make sure it got back to her. We visited for a few minutes before the nurses asked me to leave and let Jennifer sleep now. She thanked me again and the nurses walked me out.

Me on the morning of the rescue.

Upon getting back to my home village, I was too pumped to just go home and sleep. I did have my camera with me and on a silly desire to note this occasion; I walked over to the nearby waterfalls and took a photograph of myself reflecting upon the morning’s events. I always thought that someday I might ‘blog’ this (even though the word and act of “blogging” didn’t exist yet.)

You can see the raging floodwater going over the falls, and the now-thinning fog in the distance. The sun was starting to come up. The day was vastly improving.

I walked over to the nearby restaurant, which just opened, and had an early morning breakfast. The Postal workers from across the street were in there, getting their morning coffee and the inquired why I was up so early. They knew my work schedule. I quickly told them the story and they said, “…that was you!?” Apparently, they had been listening to the Police Dispatch Radio and were following the story, as the Wellsville Police would have had to contact the Almond, NY P.D. to notify them. So great, -now they knew.

I would soon go home to sleep most of the day away. It was going to be a truly great day for Jennifer’s mother and father because someone saved their adult child’s life and delivered her to safety. A great day indeed even though I did not go anywhere. I just stayed at home and slept most of the weekend.

I wonder about Jennifer, where she is now, what she’s done with her life. I hope she is living a truly blessed life, is happy, and remembers me. I still do think of and wonder about her.