What was your narrowest escape?

At 10 years old, there was a period of a few months when I became obsessed with exploring caves. After watching a documentary about a group of spelunkers who get lost in a Mexican cave during a flood, I fell in love with the idea of miner's headlamps and clever rope tricks used to drag yourself through narrow crevices and junctions. I searched my neighborhood for any place I could find that looked cave-like. I crouched down and scuttled around the crawl space underneath our house with my father's oversized work flashlight for hours until the battery died. My father worked nights at the rail yard and for several years wondered if his eyesight was failing because his flashlight always seemed to be dimmer than that of his coworkers.

Mountains are often used to evolke the majesty of God, the splendor of the earth, and simultaneously exalt and dwarf the spirit of we mere human beings. In "man vs. mountain," the mountain has put me on my rear end every time...except once, when I was even less lucky.

In the early 1970s I moved to the East Texas town of Tyler and spent a winter working construction.  I'd been rattling around the South and West  working various jobs, but no place had prepared me for Texas.  The people there seemed half-wild, more violent than any I had ever seen, rough, quarrelsome, and dangerous, but at the same time the most neighborly and helpful people I'd ever encountered.  And it seemed like every third person I met had spent time in prison.  People were always swapping prison stories as well as tales about harrowing encounters with police on the streets of Texas.  It soon became clear that not only were people  prone to crazy behaviors that got them into trouble, but the Texas authorities had a particularly punitive attitude a

My friend Eric and I were walking down the middle of a deserted two-lane road in the middle of nowhere, Georgia at three a.m. I was a college student; he was in high school. Our car had broken down, and there were no cell phones back then. So we walked, hoping to find a phone to call AAA. To amuse himself Eric was tossing firecrackers in the road.

After about a half hour of walking, we heard dogs barking. Not the yip-yip of little chihuahuas, but low, reverberating doberman-size barks and angry growling. “I sure hope there’s a fence between them and us,” I said. Suddenly I could see in the light of a street light ahead the silhouettes of several large dogs coming towards us at a full run. There was no fence.