The Fear Factor

1

THE RESCUE

OVER BREAKFAST THE morning after the rescue my mom could tell just by looking at me that something had happened. I left it at, “I hit a dog on the freeway.” Which was true. But the rest, the part I couldn’t bring myself to tell her for fear she might lose her mind from retroactive panic, is the real start of my story.

I was driving home to Tacoma, Washington, after spending the evening with a childhood friend in Seattle. It was a clear summer night around midnight, traffic was light, and I was sober. All that was the fortunate part. Less fortunate was the car I was driving—my mom’s SUV of a vintage that is infamous for being unstable during sharp turns. Normally Interstate 5 doesn’t require any sharp turns as it wends its way from Seattle toward downtown Tacoma. The eight-lane freeway curves only slightly as it rises up over the Puyallup River, the peeling blue mass of the Tacoma Dome looming ahead of the southbound drivers.

I don’t know where the dog came from. The overpass traverses an industrial area with no homes that a dog could have escaped from, and it has no shoulders that a dog could run along. It’s hard to imagine a less likely place to run into a dog. But run into it I did. Or rather, I ran over it. I tried to avoid it, jerking the steering wheel as soon as I saw the tiny orangeish mass streaking across the road at a speed only an absolutely terrified dog could muster. Jerking the steering wheel to avoid an animal is, of course, the wrong response. Just mow it down is what all the experts say. But my first instinct was to avoid the dog, and I had no time to override that instinct. I love dogs. I wanted a dog so badly when I was in grade school that I daydreamed about being blind so that I could get a guide dog. Recalling the feel of my front wheel rising slightly as it rolled over that poor creature still makes me shudder.

What came next was worse. The combination of the car turning sharply and then tilting as it rolled over the dog destabilized the SUV and sent it into a fishtail. It veered sickeningly leftward across two lanes, then swooped back across them to the right as I fought for control of the wheel. But by the third turn the pull of the wheel had become too strong and I lost control completely. The car started to spin. A sickening succession of images passed before me as the car carved circles across the freeway: guardrail… headlights… guardrail… taillights… guardrail… and… headlights. Then, still facing the headlights of the oncoming cars, it slid to a stop.

Getting my bearings, I realized that I was in the far left lane of the freeway—the fast lane. Only now it was the far right lane because I was facing backward toward the oncoming traffic. Because the car had come to rest just past the apex of the overpass, it wasn’t visible to drivers coming toward me until they crested the hill, which left them with little time to avoid me. Some of them came so close before they swerved that the car shook as they blew past.

There was no shoulder to escape onto. The bridge was hemmed in by guardrails and only inches separated them from where I sat. I couldn’t have driven the car onto a shoulder anyhow because the engine had died. Does spinning around kill a car’s engine? I remember wondering vaguely as I stared at a dashboard full of warning lights, including the ominous CHECK ENGINE. My teenage brother and his friends spent many a snowy day turning doughnuts in parking lots, but I didn’t remember hearing that it made their engine die.

I turned the key in the ignition again and again, willing it to catch, but it stayed stubbornly silent. I knew that if I didn’t do something it was only a matter of time until a car, or worse, one of the eighteen-wheelers barreling by, plowed into me. But what could I do? I turned on the brights. I turned on the emergency flashers. I had no mobile phone in 1996, so I couldn’t call for help. Should I get out of the car and shimmy down the narrow shoulder away from it? And then what? Run across the freeway to an exit ramp? Or should I stay inside where at least I was protected by layers of metal and fiberglass and airbags?

I don’t know how long I sat there, terrified, weighing these equally unappealing options. Thinking you’re about to die makes time bunch up and stretch out in odd ways. But next thing I knew, I heard a rap on the half-open passenger’s side window, on the side of the car nearest the guardrail.

I turned toward the sound and flinched when I saw who was standing there gazing in at me. I wasn’t sure whether my situation had improved or just gotten much worse. Tacoma’s downtown was racked by violence back then. The epicenter of the violence was the notorious Hilltop neighborhood just to the west of where I sat. The emergency rooms of the two hospitals that stood like concrete sentries on either side of the Hilltop treated a steady stream of shooting victims, most of them either members or rivals of the Hilltop Crips. People from the part of Tacoma where I lived did not hang out near the Hilltop. We definitely did not go there and interact with men like this one. He seemed an unlikely candidate for a roadside hero. He was wearing sunglasses, despite it being the middle of the night, and an abundance of gold jewelry. His head was shaved and shone like a coffee bean. When he spoke, I thought I saw the gleam of a gold tooth.

“You look like you could use some help,” he said. His voice was low and rumbling.

“Um. I think I do,” I responded, my voice catching in my throat.

“All right. Then I need to get in your seat.” He gestured to the driver’s seat.

Oh Jesus, I thought. Now what? This man wants to get in the car with me? My mom didn’t even want my friends driving her car (understandably). What would she think of this man driving it? But I had zero other viable choices.

After a pause, I nodded. “Okay.”

He walked around the hood of the car and watched the traffic for a moment. His head bobbed faintly leftward as each car passed, like a jump roper finding the rhythm. When a gap in the traffic appeared, he moved fast. In an instant, he was outside my door and yanking it open. I lifted myself over the center console to the passenger’s side in time for him to swing himself into the driver’s seat and slam the door shut behind him. He grasped the wheel and turned the key. Nothing.

“It won’t start,” I said. He turned the key again. Still nothing.

His gaze moved systematically across the dashboard and controls. It landed on the gearshift, which was still in drive. Without comment, he moved it back to park, then tried the ignition again. It caught! He pulled the gearshift back to drive, watched again for a gap in the flow of traffic, and, when one appeared, floored the accelerator to launch us in a smooth arc across the freeway. A moment later we were safe again—relatively speaking—on the diagonal stripes of the off-ramp. He eased to a stop behind his own car, a dark-colored BMW that gleamed orange under the sodium lights. Since getting into my car, he had not looked at me or spoken. Now he turned to me, taking in my jagged breathing and my face, which felt tight and drawn. My skin felt cold, and my legs were shaking uncontrollably.

“You going to be all right getting home? Need me to follow you for a bit?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, I’ll be all right. I can get home,” I said.

Did I thank him? I’m not certain. I think I somehow forgot.

“Okay. You take care of yourself then,” he said. And then he was gone. He returned to his car, and the summer night swallowed him up.

I never learned his name. I know nothing about him. Was he a Hilltop Crip, or was he an expensively dressed attorney or preacher or salesman? All I actually know about him is that while he was driving on Interstate 5 near midnight—Was he tired? Did he have somewhere to be?—he encountered an SUV marooned in the fast lane facing backwards, brights blazing and flashers blinking. Could he have even seen me inside? If he did, it could only have been for the briefest of moments. Most of the drivers passing by barely had time to veer out of the way. But in the second that passed between when he saw me and when he pulled over, he made an incredible decision: to try to save my life. He pulled into the off-ramp, parked, then ran some fifty feet across four lanes of the busiest freeway in Washington State, in the dark, to reach me. Did he have second thoughts as he stood staring at the cars and trucks blazing past him at freeway speed? If so, he didn’t yield to them.

He then tested his luck against the traffic twice more: once to get around to the driver’s side of the car, and then again to launch the car across the freeway from a dead stop. Any of those three times a miscalculation or a stroke of bad luck could have caused him—and maybe me—to die a violent death. But he did it anyhow. He did it to help me, a woman who found him frightening and couldn’t pull herself together enough to thank him. He was clearly capable of great bravery and great selflessness. He couldn’t have been looking for a reward—not even the recognition of a little story in the Tacoma News Tribune. By not telling me his name, he guaranteed that no one would ever know what he had done. He was a hero in every sense, and I am sorry to this day that I can’t tell him that, and thank him for my life.

In the immediate aftermath of that night, I was mostly tormented by fear and regret: How did I manage not to hit another car as I was spinning across the freeway? What would have happened to me if the stranger had not arrived? Would I be lying mangled in an intensive care unit in a hospital on the Hilltop? Would I be dead?

My stomach turned every time I thought about the dog that had set off the whole chain of events. Such a frightened, helpless creature, and through my own stupid actions—intended, with terrible irony, to spare its life—I had killed it. Had it suffered? I hoped not. But I couldn’t erase it from my mind. For weeks afterward I could still see matted, orange tufts of its fur stuck to the asphalt when I drove across the bridge over the Puyallup River.

As time went on, though, a new kind of torment took hold. It wasn’t so much an emotional torment as an intellectual one. I found myself turning over and over in my head questions about my rescuer and the improbability of what he had done.

He wasn’t a singularity, of course. Heroic rescues happen everywhere with some regularity. The Carnegie Hero Fund honors dozens of them every year. Everyone has heard news stories about someone who leapt into a river to save a drowning child or rushed into a burning building to rescue an old woman. But these stories are somehow remote and bloodless. It is easy, reading them, to discount the risks and pain that the rescuers faced—the freezing, rushing waters of the river, the heat and hiss of the flames—and the feelings they must have experienced. For most people, even those who can picture the scene vividly, the outlandishness of the rescuers’ decision makes it difficult to imagine what could have been going through their heads. What were they feeling? Were they frightened? If so, how did they overcome their fear to act so bravely? The difficulty of comprehending the decision to risk suffering or death to save a stranger makes it tempting, I think, to treat the mind that would make such a decision as a locked box, remote and unknowable, and somehow fundamentally different from the minds of the rest of us.

I was stuck in the same trap as everyone else. I couldn’t imagine making the decision my rescuer had made—choosing, in a fraction of a second, to risk my own life to save a stranger. The impenetrability of the final outcome made the mental process that could have led there impenetrable as well. It was a problem with no solution, with no hint of which way the solution might even lie, and no matter how many times I turned it over in my mind I couldn’t seem to make any progress.

But as it happened, my life had just taken a turn that would begin leading me toward an answer. The previous year I had entered Dartmouth College as one of the many premed students in my class. It was a terrible fit. I quickly found myself fighting to stay awake during the first class period of my first premed biology course. By the second class, I was relying on a classmate’s trick of bringing a plastic baggie of Cheerios with me and eating one of them every few seconds for an hour to stay awake. The trick worked, but I knew the bigger picture was futile. What was I doing studying a topic that literally bored me to sleep?

As luck would have it, I had also enrolled in an introductory psychology class that term. From the first class, I was hooked. We covered every question about being a person I had ever thought to ask, and many I hadn’t: What is consciousness? How do we see in color? Why do we forget things? What is sexual desire? Where do emotions come from? I can still picture the imposing figure of my professor, the Dumbledore-esque Robert Kleck, striding up and down the aisles of our classroom as he posed questions like, “Is it really true that tall people have better life outcomes?” then pausing dramatically.

Well, do they?? I wondered frantically, all five feet of me. (They do.)

I devoured my textbook, festooning it with highlights and scribbling exclamation points and stars on nearly every page, marking all the insights I wanted to commit to memory. I later marked one page with a sticky note as well. It was a page about teaching sign language to apes, and while I was reading it I had an epiphany: psychology research is something people actually get paid to do—people can do it for a living. I decided I was going to become one of those people.