The Time Underage Drinking Saved A Life

or ... The Time Something Completely Off The Wall Lucky Happened.

The place - My hometown of Delphi Indiana - on the side of a road leading out of town.
The time - 11:30PM one summer night 1988, not sure what night.
Age - 18 between junior and senior year of high school

Cruising through town
with a girl whose name I don't remember now.  Well I do remember that she snuck out of her house to go cruising with me to Purdue.  She was a friend of a friend.  Well call her 'S'.  We ran into a classmate of mine that always had beer or pot.  We'll call him 'E'.  On this night he had beer - Little Kings to be exact.  I was going to buy his remaining stash of Little Kings for some amount of money that I'm sure was too much.  Inflation is kinda funny like that when you are buying beer underage.  We agreed to meet just outside of town near the base of a bridge and do the exchange.

The road was tree
lined on one side with a a steep embankment and mini-forest and a corn field on the other side.  A few minutes later and we were on the side of this road, lights dimmed, he popped his trunk, I pulled out my cash....

A blood curdling howl
came from the the wooded area.  E and I looked at each other and thought that people were partying or camping out in the woods.  We went back to our transaction.  Another scream - even more horrific.  This one was not from someone playing.  E decided that someone was being raped and that he was getting the hell out of here.  We heard it again - the person screamed for help.  I went down the embankment but it was too dark to see anything.  E moved his car sideways in the road and pointed his headlights down there.  We saw the back of a car wrapped up in some trees.  This car looked familiar.

As I approached the
driver's side window I saw another of my classmates, we'll call her 'C' laying across the seat in a contorted position.  She was barely coherent.  She asked for a cigarette.  With the smell of fuel in our noses, E and I decided that wasn't such a good idea.  I yelled up to E that it was C from school. We both instantaneously agreed that he should drive into town and get the police.  I saw E drive away back towards town - but then he stopped but side of the road and threw out the beer.

I remember trying to
comfort C while S was moving my car into position so that we had some light.  I was scared.  I remember helping to hold her up and I remember holding her hand.  Obviously, S and I were not going to make it the campus for cruising.

Not more that a couple
minutes passed before I heard sirens in the distance.  Then I saw flashing lights over the horizon.  The first cop arrived and ran down the embankment asked some questions that I don't remember - he used his walkie talkie to ask for all sorts of help - and then his car started rolling away on it's own.  Yeah he jumped out without putting it in park.  E caught up to it and put in park before it ran over the embankment and into the water.  More police arrived.  Firetrucks.  An ambulance.  They had to cut apart her car to get her out.

C credits me with saving
her life that night but this was obviously a lucky event that warrants no special accolades - we were buying beer on the side of a country road that summer night.  The police asked us some questions about how we found C and her crashed vehicle - as you couldn't see it from the road and the car had no lights.  Of course we told them that we were just flagging each other down to shoot the shit.  I think they determined that she had been there for at least an hour when we found her.

C survived
with a broken leg I think.  E never graduated.  S was never heard from again.  And Me?  I'm right here but something changed me that night.  I can't pin point what the change is/was but I know that my life was different from that night.

I emailed C a link to this post.  C - hopefully everything is where you want it to be these days.