Chapters: 1. Why Don't Men Obey God?
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3NARROW ESCAPES FROM DEATH
It seemed that Satan was determined my father would not
fulfill the place to which God had appointed him. Dad once told
me:
"I was about six years old, or I might have been seven,
when I nearly missed death again. It was out near our
schoolhouse, which stood in the woods, and all around were
saplings--tall, slender saplings. We boys would climb up
high in them, grab the top and jump down. They would just
swing you to the ground and let you down real easy. It was
good sport.
"Well, one day Daddy had left Uncle Pete to work back in
the creek bottom and my brother, another boy, and I were
sent to help. While we were there, I thought I would show
this other boy how we would swing from the saplings. There
were some tall, young trees there; so I started up one of
them. Of course, I didn't know one tree from another. I
didn't realize that I was climbing up a white sycamore that
wouldn't bend.
"I remember yet how I took hold of the top of the tree
with my hands, my feet on the lower limb, and just swung out
into the air. I was already looking forward to the exciting
glide and easy touch to the ground some twenty feet below.
But instead, when I swung out, the top of that little tree
broke off and down I came. I hit the ground hard on my
neck, my head, and my back, just missing a fallen log by
inches. It could have broken my back or just plain killed
me. By God's grace it only stunned me. After a few minutes
I was able to get up and walk around.
"Pete didn't think I was going to be worth much for work,
however, and he said, `Now you go to the house
27 and ask Addie (my older sister) how soon she will have
dinner ready for us." So I headed for the house. I can
remember going up through the fields, then stopping about
halfway and returning to the creek. `What did you come back
for?' Pete asked.
"I said, `Where was I going?'
" `I told you to go tell Addie to get dinner,' he
answered. "Why didn't I know it?" I replied. But Pete
urged me, `You go ask Addie how soon she will have dinner.'
So I turned and again made my way through the fields to the
house. Going in I asked Addie when she was going to have
dinner. (Now this is what she told me afterwards. I knew
nothing about it at the time because I didn't know what I
was doing.) She told me the time dinner should be ready.
"Then I went into the room where my other sister, Flo, was
asked her the same question: `When are we going to have
dinner?' And she answered me. Pretty soon I was out with
Addie again asking, `When are we going to have dinner?'
Then I was back to Flo with the same question.
"It wasn't long before they recognized that I was out of
my head and didn't know what I was saying. They became
pretty alarmed and had me lie down fast. That was around
ten in the morning. I never came to my senses until about
four in the afternoon. It is a miracle that my mind worked
well afterward, let alone that I wasn't killed on the log at
the bottom of that sycamore tree."
When he was about twelve to fourteen, Dad had another close
brush with death. For some reason he and his brother were left
alone on a Sunday afternoon, and, as boys do when they are alone,
they thought they would do something exciting. They decided to
go to the creek and skate.
"It was bitter cold," Dad relates, "but George and I had
on warm clothes and our half-soled felt boots. We didn't
have regular ice-skates, but you could slide on your boots
almost as well as you could on real skates. We were having
a time skidding up and down that creek on our boots.
"There was one sharp bend in the creek where the
28 water had rushed fast enough to keep washing the bottom
deeper and deeper. It must have been a couple feet or more
over my head. I didn't think about it, but, of course, the
ice would be thinner where the water was moving faster. As
I was skating around that bend, the ice gave way under me.
Before I knew it I was clear to the bottom underneath the
ice in freezing water.
"Here I had on heavy winter clothing and those big felt
boots. As soon as I hit the water my clothes were soaking
wet, and I weighed an awful lot more than normal. With
current as swift as that was there, and as heavy as I was
with all that water-logged clothing, one would have expected
me to be swept downstream. By all rights, I should have
died a prisoner under the ice.
"But, by a miracle of God, I managed to come back up right
where the ice had broken. Think of that! If I would have
been swept just a short distance down stream, I never would
have been able to find the hole in the ice even if I could
have fought the current. It was a marvel, I know.
"Somehow George managed to get a long stick to me while I
hung onto the ice. It's not easy to get out of a hole in
the ice. The sides generally keep breaking away and, more
often than not, someone else gets dragged into the water
before the whole thing is over. But he managed to haul me
out. As soon as I hit that cold air, my clothes were frozen
stiff as a poker. That was a very close call with death."
Upon another occasion, Dad was home alone with Uncle Pete.
As Pete cleaned his 32-caliber pistol, he was snapping the
hammer, unaware that a cartridge was in the cylinder. Dad
happened to be walking past him when the pistol discharged with a
tremendous bang. It frightened them both nearly to pieces. The
bullet shot behind my dad and splintered the casing across the
room. My father stated, "If it had been a little sooner, he
would have shot a hole right through me." The incident was not
mentioned by either of them until much later. Dad's parents
never knew how close he came to death that time.
29 The horse and buggy era was not without its own peculiar
type of dangers, as well. Dad told me:
"I was out riding around in a rig with two other young men
when three fellows in another buggy came up besides us. Ray
Pond, the one driving our rig, thought he would just let our
horse out to keep them from going around us. He nudged the
horse and it took off. When our horse began to run faster,
the other driver said, `Oh no, Wendy! (that was Ray's
nickname)--you will never see the day that you can outrun
me!' And he urged his horse into a run to pass us.
"About that time our horse made a sudden jump, which
startled all of us. I mean it made a tremendous lurch!
When it jumped, it tore loose the belly band, and the two
buggy shafts flew up into the air. There we were with our
horse running madly off and the buggy shafts flying up and
then smacking down on the horse's back. The more they
slammed, the harder it galloped.
"Now unless you have been in one of those frail little
rigs with the horse running out of control, you can't
imagine what it was like. That horse wasn't just running a
race; he was madly out of control and running berserk. If
we had hit a rough road or come to a sharp turn, we wouldn't
have had a chance. Getting thrown from an open rig at that
speed would have meant permanent, crippling injury, or
death, one or the other. It was only a miracle that we got
him stopped. We all could have been killed."
Death continued to stalk my father on the Fourth of July,
just before he started courting my mother. At the age of
eighteen he was helping extract pipe from abandoned oil wells. A
block and tackle was being used to exert the force necessary to
pull the pipe from the ground. In order to begin the process of
extracting the pipe from one of the oil derricks, Dad was on the
platform helping to pull the huge pulley block into the top of
the derrick and fix it securely. This large block weighed over
two hundred pounds. Connected by ropes to this was a second
pulley block weighing some one-hundred-fifty pounds in itself.
30 As this apparatus was being hoisted to the top by a big
horse team, it became entangled or lodged in some manner that was
unsatisfactory. The boss yelled, "Grab that bottom block, Eldon,
to keep her from going up too far." When my Dad grabbed that
lower pulley block as it started up past him, it simply lifted
him right off the platform, leaving him several feet in the air,
his feet dangling.
Just at that moment, high in the top of the derrick, the
rope supporting Dad and the pulley blocks suddenly broke. Dad
fell to the oil-soaked platform below with a two hundred pound
weight hurtling from the top of the derrick onto his head!
By a miracle of Jesus, when his feet hit the oily platform,
he skidded sideways just little. That huge block came crashing
into the wood less than two inches from his body, nearly grazing
his head. Just a little closer and that heavy block would have
crushed him. Once again, God had spared my father.
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