In 1990, Following the holidays with my family in the mountains of Western North Carolina, I was driving our Honda Civic Manual transmission car through a blizzard. The sky was dark and dreary, reminiscent of Gotham City. The snow was a fury and the highway, covered in slush and ice.
In a straight stretch of road, I opted to change lanes, from the left to the right. There was no one in front of me. I looked in the rear view mirror and passenger side mirror and the nearest vehicle was approximately 12 car lengths behind me—their lights a dim, yellow blur.
Without changing my footing on the accelerator, I slowly turned the steering wheel to place me in the right lane. Within seconds, we were spinning 360 degrees while sliding to the left. The concrete median was in front of us, then visible through the passenger window and seconds later. We had stopped spinning and were sliding, quickly, towards the concrete barrier on the driver’s side.
Then, just like that, it was over.
The car was on the side of the road, facing the right direction and the engine was still running—though my foot was no longer on any of the pedals.
My husband and I caught our breath. We had been spinning at such force that the cassette tape we had listened been listening to moments before– had ejected and was between our infant child’s legs in his rear facing car seat. My fingernails were broken. Our infant child, still asleep in his rear facing car seat as if nothing had happened. There was no traffic in either direction.
We stepped out of the car to assess the damage and that is when we saw her. A football field distance up the road, and on the opposite side was a red Jeep Cherokee.
Behind it, a blonde woman, without a jacket, but dressed in a red sweater and dress pants, was speaking to us. She was not hollering—simply speaking, in a soft, casual voice.
She first asked, “Is everyone okay?”
I answered, “We’re all well.”
She then said, “There is a rest stop just through this underpass. Pull in there and rest a bit.”
My husband answered and said, “Will do!”
We watched her get in the Jeep Cherokee, saw her brake lights come on, merge into the right lane and she simply vanished.
As we went back to our car, my husband and I both noticed that there was nowhere in the median that was marred with tire tracks. The snow was pristine in the median’s ditch. There was no evidence that we had been sliding and spinning. No one around for miles.
My husband drove and sure enough, just through the overpass was a rest stop. We pulled in and as we parked, we both looked at each other and said, “You saw her and heard her; right?”
There was no denying we had, as we had each answered her. She seemed to soothe us. We both felt during those moments of spinning that our fate would have us slam into the concrete barrier, yet our car had stopped right along the road as if we had simply navigated there. We were not in the valley of the median, we were on top of the slope, facing in the direction we needed to travel. There was no indication our car had ever been sliding or spinning on the road or in the median around us. It was as if we had been picked up and gently sat down.
Upon returning home, we took the car to be serviced a month later, and the mechanic called my husband back to ask him what had happened—there was dirt packed tightly in every nook and cranny on the underside of our car.
To this day, we believe, our guardian angel drives a Jeep Cherokee.