“Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives?” asks Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker
Oh, but it doesn’t—or rather, not only then. Not at all. Anything fantastic enough, witnessed, will do the trick.
I’ve seen it, following a vineyard tractor slowly making its way down the narrow dirt road that ran along the creek at the bottom of our ranch. The young man driving and young woman were squeezed together on the tractor seat, distracting each other. A car came from the other direction, and the girl suddenly put the tractor in reverse, apparently thinking there was room for anyone to pass. From my distance, I watched the tractor’s right rear wheel roll to the crumbly edge of the road and hang in air an inch beyond. The edge gave way, and the tractor went airborne, flying into a slow, ballet-like somersault, moving through what seemed like an excess of air, in a high and infinitely graceful loop. There was no noise. I would never see anything so beautiful again, every color, every outline unnaturally clear. Never know this eerie pause in the onrush of normal events.
But this, of course, was not normal. It is the improbable-unexpected that jars loose these long, still moments. The tractor bounced off the nearly vertical bank and came to rest upside down in the shallows, its wheels spinning like the paws of a great beast who cannot right itself. I left my car, none too bravely, to whatever awaited, and found the girl sitting halfway down the rocky, loose bank, nursing her shoulder, the young man scrambling up to her side.
I had a car phone, way back then, and called the Sheriff. In a short time, the chopper, patched through, was calling me back, hovering anxiously above. But we were inside a cathedral of trees, with no way to see each other, air or ground. I herded them to the field across the creek—our field, then—telling the paramedics to keep heading west, no matter what.
We heard them crashing through the underbrush, cursing as they slipped on half-submerged rocks. Soon they came clambered up the bank, insofar as the stretcher, which they still bore, would allow. But no one, as it turned out, needed rescue. By stretcher or by air. The girl and the young man were flown off anyway. Remarkably, they were mostly unhurt—but it made sense, I supposed, that in its wondrous, strange flight, the tractor would have thrown them free.
I don’t have to tell you that time assumed its clock pace again. But the question remains: did time slow down? Or is time far more mutable than, in our daily struggle, we usually ever know?
I saw something simlar to this… a pickup truck going about 80 and then crossing the grassy median and flying high into the air right in front of us…exactly like a ballet leap in slow motion. Breathtaking and scary. So glad your people were all right. We were doing 70 and did not stop but a big truck behind us half mile did.
If time and space are one, as Einstein theorized, then you witnessed an unraveling of the fabric of life. It’s a very loose-weave existence we have here, although we have to believe otherwise to go on.
Lovely storytelling. I rode that arc with the tractor.
It’s not at all uncommon for people who have had near-death experiences, intensely spiritual moments, or various kinds of trauma, to recount a profound, if momentary, shift in their experience of time. Having had several such experiences myself (one near-death, and several spiritual epiphanies)I have often wondered about the question raised in today’s blog: does time slow down or even stop? My belief, which would surely be mocked by anyone of a scientific persuasion, is that when we are witness to or part of an experience which is quite out of the ordinary, we can slip for a moment into a sliver of the parallel universe, and there time IS different. Time slows down or perhaps stops, and it is precisely this alteration of time that enables us to experience something outside of the usual range of our five senses and our fixed sense of time.
These time-altered experiences are almost always unexpected, and often so profound and so intense that
that those reporting them frequently lament that they do not have the words to accurately and faithfully describe the experience.
Thanks much for today’s thought-provoking blog entry.