Sometimes when you begin your day, you have to ask yourself if things are such that you should either alter plans or just stay at home hunker down and hope for the best.
When the four of us left Greenwood City with an ultimate destination for Fort Kent, Maine, with the day dawning mostly sunny and pleasant, it took only a matter of a couple minutes before the first event brought us to a screeching halt.
There’s a section of State Road 219 between West Paris and Greenwood City that is very narrow, a bit on the bumpy side, with a long and nearly straight down drop from the road to the Little Androscoggin River measuring in places nearing 100 feet or more.
As we entered the section of this road that is narrowest, I heard a booming mans voice from outside our vehicle yell, “Hey!” Others in the truck say they saw a hand and part of an arm sticking up above the top of the embankment.
It took us a few hundred feet to bring the truck, pulling a fifth wheel camper to a stop. I bailed out the passenger side of the truck and made my way as quickly as I could back to where I heard the yell. Looking up, I saw a scraggly bearded man kneeling in the gravel at the edge of the road.
It was then that I came to realize that a vehicle must have gone out of the road. In a half jog toward the kneeling man, I glanced to my left and spotted a vehicle upside down in the river.
When I reached the guy, he first asked me for a cigarette……Imagine! But when you smoke often events like this bring out the addiction.
A asked him a couple quick questions while checking him for cuts and possible broken limbs but on the outside I only discovered a small cut on his right hand and another very small scrap on his right ear. He was obviously incoherent and probably in shock. He had no idea how he got upside down in the river or even how he got back up the extremely steep bank to the road.
Soon, paramedics and police arrived and they took over. It was amazing that this man was still alive. I don’t know how long he had been down there or how long it had taken him to crawl back up the embankment. He was not at all wet which made me wonder if he had been ejected from his vehicle sometime before it ended up in the water.
If he were a cat, he would most definitely have used up one of his nine lives.
But the day’s events don’t end there. After using up about an hour of our time, we headed out for Augusta where we planned to get on Interstate 95 and follow it north for quite some time.
We were entering Augusta on highway 133 coming down a hill. At the bottom of the hill perhaps 3 or 4 cars were stopped. The lead car was signaling to turn left. Milt, who was still driving, hit the brakes to slow us down and that’s when we discovered we had no brakes on the truck. Thank God we had electric brakes on the camper.
We managed not to hit anything and conveniently pulled into a mall parking lot. Located there is a Sears store and auto center. $1,300.00 later we had a new brake job and part of the brake linings replaced. It was now nearly 9 p.m.
Even though we didn’t want to, we drove in the dark the nearly 70 miles up Interstate 95 to Bangor where we spent the night. On the trip up I watched both sides of the highway intently for any signs of moose, deer or maybe even a bear.
The hours that we spent in Augusta waiting for brake repairs, we often discussed about the events of the day and wondered aloud if anything else could go wrong.
Tom Remington
