“It happened suddenly, and I wasn’t sure I was going to get out alive.”

I am one lucky woman.

I was driving along the freeway on the outskirts of Los Angeles when my tire blew out.  In my panic to get across the lanes to safety, I lost control of my SUV and found myself rolling over and over down a steep hill into a ditch.

I think I lost consciousness and I’m not sure for how long, but when I awoke I realized my SUV was hidden from view, and I didn’t see anyone rushing down to help me.  It was surreal. My head hurt quite a bit, and I was trapped inside the car.

What had happened, I surmised, was that because it was late at night and not too many other cars were on the road, no one saw what had happened.  And here I was trapped in my car about forty feet below the level of the other cars speeding by at sixty-five miles an hour.

And no one knew I was there.

Worse yet, when I managed to pull my cell phone out of my purse, I realized it was a dead area.  I couldn’t dial a number.  Then panic set in.  I thought I might lie here for days and starve to death or die of thirst, and nobody was going to come save me.

I thought about my husband and my kids, and I started to cry.  It was a terrible moment, and I felt my situation was hopeless.

I tried kicking the door but it wouldn’t budge.  And even if it had opened, I was helplessly stuck inside.  My right foot was stuck between an unmovable seat and the crushed dashboard.  I was bleeding a bit, very tired and very weak.

I must have fallen asleep because when I awoke, I was surrounded by firemen, all in uniform, and they were prying my door open with a huge metal bar.  I gasped when I realized I was going to be saved and would see my family again.

When I asked how they found me, one of the men said that I owed my life to their mascot Dalmatian, Hattie, who started barking madly as they drove by on the freeway.  He kept barking and kept looking back; so on a hunch they pulled off the freeway, hiked back to the spot where Hattie led them.

They said they still couldn’t see anything from the Freeway but Hattie raced down the hill and then one of the men caught a glimpse of my overturned SUV.

There’s no way the dog could have seen me as the fire truck raced by, but somehow he sensed I was there and that I was in trouble.

It is said that animals have psychic powers far beyond what us humans have, and I believe it.

P. Strausser
Reseda, CA