🪦 the day I almost died.

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The truck was smashed beyond belief. Dangling upside-down from our seatbelts, I wondered if my friends were even alive.

I vividly remember being terrified to turn and look at the other seats in the truck, not knowing what I’d see.

The truck was flipped on its roof, so deep in the Vancouver Island rainforest you could barely see it from the road.

Just a few minutes before, my two friends and I had been rolling down Highway 4, headed home from a surfing trip to Tofino.

It wasn’t even my truck… it belonged to my best friend Alec, but I had taken the wheel from him an hour before. We had spent the day battling waves in the Tofino surf, and we were swapping driving duties to keep each other fresh.

If you’ve driven the road to Tofino, you don’t forget it. Windy roads, steep cliffs, jagged rock faces, deep lakes. If there’s one thing you don’t want to do, it’s drive off the road on Highway 4.

And yet there we were, in the wreckage of a Ford F-150, somehow all still alive and breathing.

Bang, bang, bang.

I looked over, and someone I didn’t know was outside the truck, smacking the window with their fist.

“Are you guys alright? Are you all alive?”

I thought it was a ghost for a second, and then quickly snapped back to reality.

“Yes, we’re good, I think”, I yelled back to him.

The car in front of us had miraculously seen our headlights disappear off the road, and slammed on the brakes and came back to find us.

We all managed to squirm out of the vehicle, by some miracle.

I vividly remember getting out, and looking at the truck and not recognizing it. It was flipped on its roof, and had slid backwards through the woods until the box of the truck slammed into a tree. The surfboards were smashed, and one had ejected so far we couldn’t even see where it was.

Now before you ask if I was drinking or speeding, here’s a quick rundown of what happened.

I had been following another car for around 45 minutes in the heavy rain. I was driving well under the speed limit, as it had poured all day and the roads were soaked.

(Thankfully, since we had been closely following the car ahead of us, their driver was able to vouch for our speed later when the police showed up.)

As we came around a sharp bend, the rear wheel on the driver’s side came in contact with the yellow line, and the momentary loss of friction made the truck start sliding.

The truck bed started to drift while coming around the corner, and I instinctively over-corrected.

Within a few seconds, the truck fishtailed out of control. I vividly remember the sensation of losing contact with the ground, and the world suddenly went black as we flipped over and over through the air, careening well over fifty feet into the woods.

It was like the hand of God guided the truck perfectly through the woods, coming to rest with a jolt against the trunk of a tree. Mere feet to the left or to the right, and we would’ve been crunched.

I was still only in university at the time… but the experience had a profound impact on me.

Near-death experiences will do that to you.

I remember returning back to school after the accident, and feeling shell-shocked for weeks.

You look around and wonder how people could care about such stupid things. And in the same breath, you wonder why they don’t care about the things that are the most important.

Most of all, you wonder why you ever spent any of your own precious time on anything that didn’t truly matter.

I wouldn’t have even known it at the time, but that experience was a catalyst for massive change in my life.

You see, we’re all told that life is short, and you have to make the most of it. We all know it’s true.

But there’s a difference between knowing its true, and living as if its true.

In the weeks that followed the crash, a few things became very clear to me.

I started to realize that I loved the mountains as more than just a pastime… it slowly started becoming a way of life for me. I realized I would do nearly anything to be out in the wild, chasing experiences that made my eyes light up with awe.

I had also been a bit of a social butterfly my whole life. But after the crash, I gradually began to close my circles. It become much clearer to me that quality matters more than quantity, and I needed to focus on the friends that meant the most to me rather than trying to please everyone.

Most of all, I came face-to-face with the realization that God had given me another chance at life.

I’ll never forget the look on one of the firefighters’ faces when he realized that we had all walked away from the crash without injury. He looked me up and down, looked into the woods at the truck, and then looked back at me.

“Holy sh**, you all should be dead right now.”

We should’ve died that day. We had no business surviving that crash. And yet in some divine stroke of grace, we all walked away unharmed.

Every day we’re given is a gift. Life is short, and nothing is guaranteed.

That’s why I read the obituaries - give it a try sometime. Remind yourself that life is short. Wake up every day with the knowledge that it could be your last.

You’ll never be able to truly live without realizing the immense gift that we have to be alive on this spinning globe.

Live accordingly.