The night I nearly died closed off one of the best days fishing I'd ever had. It was late last May, and I was shooting a TV series about Australia for PBS, the BBC and Australia's ABC network. The crew and I had a day off in the old pearling port of Broome, on the Indian Ocean. I decided to visit one of my favorite spots on earth: Eco Beach, two hours' drive south. On that unblemished coast I fished with a friend, Danny O'Sullivan, who had taken up guiding after a long stint in the SAS, the Australian commandos. With eight-weight fly rods and streamer flies, we went after the small bluefin tuna that boil up in schools less than a mile offshore, around 15 to 30 lbs. apiece. That day they were abundant in the sapphire water; I hooked five, boated three and kept one. Gutted, tailed and beheaded, it went into a cooler in the back of my rented car. The crew and I would eat it that night as sashimi. Whistling gaily, I shut the gate to Eco Beach behind me and turned left on the deserted, twilit Great Northern Highway.
And that's all I remember.
The accident happened very quickly, some two miles from the turn. What caused it isn't clear, and there were no outside witnesses. The police, who reached the scene later, claim I had drifted into the wrong lane (Australia drives on the left; the U.S. and Europe on the right), but this isn't settled. In any case, though I believe my lights were on, I didn't see the oncoming car, a Ford with three men in it.
What do you feel when you get whacked? In my case, nothing, and I remember nothing, which seems weirder still but is actually normal. Doctors speak of "post-traumatic amnesia," PTA for short, to denote this peculiar whiting out of violent episodes. The other car hit me head on but slightly off center; its impact was concentrated on the driver's side. It then spun off the road, though its occupants too, astonishingly, survived. Under such an impact, bones may not just break; they can explode, like a cookie hit by a hammer, and that's what happened to several of mine.
My catalog of trauma turned out to be a long one. Below the right knee, the tibia and fibula shattered into half a dozen pieces. The right femur broken, the ball joint at the hip damaged. The elbow of the right arm crushed. Several ribs snapped, their sharp ends driven into the lungs. Collarbone and sternum busted. What saved me was the merest fluke: apart from punctured lungs, a few picturesque cuts and some bruising to my liver and heart, the damage was all skeletal, not soft tissue. My brain was intact; ditto my eyes, spine, guts and genitals. It could so easily have been otherwise, and in the weeks since I have sometimes thought how wildly, irrationally lucky I was to be spared. But not at the time. With the remains of my rented Japanese car folded around me like crude origami, I was trapped, intermittently conscious but aware of no pain, and losing blood.