Ive also been in a hijacking where I was locked in the boot of my car for 11 hours. However, there was only one person and he was mostly polite when he robbed me, he only pointed the gun at me once Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! AWA... Africa wins again.
Another one of my boating experiences: where am i? what day is it? how long did i sleep, how long will i last? these questions roll off of me like my recent trials of pain. i close my eyes and a tear squeezes out, my stomach contracts, knotting up... i can not relate the horror and nausea, can not ask anyone to empathize with what happened... i have tried and been rewarded with blank stares, and smiles, f*cking smiles... if only they knew, but none of you can. and through these remembering tears, on a back drop of closed and trembling lids, my eyes recall the torment... down below, lying huddled in a salt encrusted blanket, the sounds of my boat breaking up surrounds me, a book shelf breaks free, i watch the bright red dictionary slam back and forth, one side to the next along with the small boat, more of my carefully stored items shift about, finding the bottom of the boat, intermingling, creating a nightmarish look below, and complicating the task of finding anything when i need it. right now i need food, it's been three days since i have eaten, i take a cautious sip of water, hoping to keep it down, fighting back the dry heaves which contort my face, squeeze tears and sweat from out my head, and smother the constant clatter of the boat with the sound of a foreign voice full of indescribable agony. those sessions last up to ten minutes, and i can think of nothing but dying. now i lay in a ball, 60 miles from land, in the middle of a very upset gulf stream. the wind has shifted to the north, which is very bad news, blowing 30 knots or so. every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, for four days, i must get up, open the hatch, display my head to the elements, and scan the horizon for container ships. already i have had two near collisions, so despite the hell i suffer, i rarely fail to be aroused by my alarm's wailing. it was five minutes before a watch when the cannon went off over my head. right after the cannon fired, the thunder started in, followed by fireworks, various explosions, and a passing train. never has the word din meant so much to me, the noise is one of the things i can not get anyone to understand... it's just impossible to put into words... as is what happened next... i pop out of the hatch to see what broke, as i figured by the sound, my jib has blown, the rags which are left are assailing one another and any piece of rigging foolish enough to intervene. somehow the sheets have pulled through the snatch blocks, so in addition there are two lines of 30 feet in length and 1 inch in diameter flying about like a couple of jockey whips. i look around real quick, the seas are 10 to 12 feet true. they would be bigger, but the wind is shearing the tops off in these horizontal lines of whispy foam. the result is a constant rain of saltwater even though the sky is clear. the wind howls, the cannons are steady, the seas toss my little vessel about with impunity, somewhere in the back of my mind i realize that i will not live another hour. there is no way out of this situation. it is not pessimism, i have seen dreadful states, and this was much beyond that. it was not fear, i felt none, i was days past the fear, now i lived in a nightmare that i had grown accustomed to. it was not even my giving up, i was trying all that i could to survive... but at that moment, i could sense the finality of it all. it made me calm... again, i lack the words and i apologize. so, there i am lying on my coc'sle (a flat deck area in front of my cockpit) struggling into my foul weather gear, just about to don my safety harness, when the boat goes up on it's starboard side at a 45 degree angle. on my back, feet first, i begin to slide across my boat and towards the lee cloths i had installed years ago, for this express purpose. the cloth is supposed to catch things before they go overboard. as soon as my feet hit the barrier, the lines holding it to the toe rail broke free, the cloth hinged up and out revealing the dark gray sea below. my slide thus unimpeded, i slipped up to my knees in the warm water, my feet twisted astern by the boat's progress. somehow, i was still alive, not in the water watching my boat sail off, i searched about for the hero, and noticed my left hand, clutching a bimini line, holding me from certain death. the boat lurched back, throwing me to the other cloth on the port side. it held. i got my harness on. heard my heart beating over the thunder on the bow. looked forward at the mayhem, realizing i must join it, do the impossible by freeing the tattered mess. i no longer trusted the lines which held me, nor did i trust the seas to warn me before they again set my world askew. i knew still that my time had come, that to expect a tomorrow was as foolish as expecting i may be pregnant. yet, as i clawed my way forward, the severity of what had just happened dawned on me. somewhere amidships, with a wave crashing over me, i realized i should already be dead. the next five minutes, or ten, or whatever, was bonus. a gift given to me by my left hand. ladies and gentlemen, i was smiling from ear to ear as i reached the bow. i was grinning as the boat plowed into the next monster wave, the water rising up to my chest. i laughed at the sheets as they attacked my arms and head, bruising both. i wrestled them with glee, untying an impossible knot, lowering a stubborn sail, reducing the noise, living this glorious life in the middle of death's reminder. i beat the cannons that day, i cheated death that day, no one can understand how close it was, how even thinking of it now brings happy tears to my eyes, how different i feel, how... something... no words, really... those four days, from ft. lauderdale to charleston, all alone, over 50 miles from land, those days nearly destroyed me. there are too many horrors to describe them all, and as i just demonstrated, i can not even properly describe one of them. suffice it to say, by not destroying me, the days created me. i am not the same at a very fundamental level. i sleep less, i do more, i smile and laugh even more than before (which is saying a lot), i think about other people in a way i never have, i notice things that were forever invisible to me. basically, i think, i am alive to a greater degree. maybe because i got close enough to death, so many times, so quickly, that being anywhere else seems like a forever away.
meh, a 10 month run/hide across three countries from the soviet military police OMON. Twice they got pretty close, one time a locked door and a hunting rifle away (friends from the tv with video cameras arrived before they could get in, OMON hated publicity), the other just a thick garden bush away. Oh, and one other time I got through a checkpoint in a trunk of an ambulance. Wild days. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And very interesting. On the edge.
If all that's true, I've had you figured all wrong. In fact, you went up 1 point in my book. Congratulations, you have 1 point.... lol Kinda curious though, what, and why were you running
Our neighbours decide to take a holiday so they ask us to feed their Yorkshire Terrier dog, which had 7 puppies, and their African Grey parrot. The dog was tied to the washing line so that it could move around without its leash getting tangled up, but its collar was too loose so it used to wriggle out of it and it would come over to our house first thing every morning because it really loved my wife and my wife really loved the dog as well. This wouldn't ordinarily have been a problem, but the fact is that it was neglecting its puppies, by trying to spend most of the day with us. Anyway, one day we took her back to her house and put her back on her leash and that's when I noticed that its collar was so loose that it could easily come off with even just a little pull, so I tightened it by one notch. We went home, had lunch and then my wife said that she was going around to the house to take the dog for a walk. She comes back 5 minutes later in tears and tells me the dog is dead. I rushed over to the house and found the dog hanging from the washing line after trying to wriggle out of her collar and twisting her leash so that it got shorter and shorter until eventually her legs weren't even touching the ground. I was shocked and overcome with shame and guilt knowing that it were I that had tightened her collar, but without of course suspecting what the outcome would be. I tried to give the dog the kiss of life as it stared at me blankly with its still wide open eyes but unfortunately it was too late. We phoned the neighbours and told them the sad news, but they were more concerned about my wife who was distraught with grief. The neighbours then asked us to take the puppies and the parrot to our house and look after them until their return, which we did, amazed that they could still trust us with their beloved pets. That was probably the worst day of my life.
Revolution, politics, independance, power. They thought that through my capture they would have been able to get to a person who was crucial in our fight for the independance from the USSR. A hostage trading card. I got to see the order for my arrest and "delivery" to Moscow in 1995. The saddest thing is that the tv guys who saved me back then are all dead now. 3 shot in seperate instances by OMON, one drowned in a stupid diving accident. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Here are some fragments from the records of that time, and the death of two of them: http://www.piparmetra.net/pagrabs/HOM2.mov http://www.piparmetra.net/pagrabs/HOM3.mov Still got tears watching those. The singing revolution, as it has been called, was not all that singing behind the scenes.
that must have been pretty intense I watched shows as a young kid about communists, you know. But to think they'd actually have black opts... well i sure as hell wouldn't want to have been you lol But terrible news for your news friends, and i'm willing to bet you're not the only one they saved.
