Scrapes & ses Bru
Escapes from my close encounters with death
Tony D. Guhr
Glad you could sit down for some retelling of some stories of my life. These particular events certainly impacted my thinking and greatly influenced my view of life and people. These experiences taught me some lessons the hard way that I would rather avoid a repeat of the classroom work!
Many of my friends and family have heard me tell two or three of these stories from time to time. Here are my accounts of a bunch more. I decided to write these down so that my nephews, nieces, cousins, and friends could hear the rest of the story and the details of many accounts they had not heard before.
When I review my life experiences and what individual events or situations that taught me the biggest lessons of life, these particular stories come to mind. As you will see, some of these crises were serious enough in their consequences, the experiences forced me to ask and answer some fundamental questions.
One of the most significant challenges of youth and even as an adult, is learning to trust others.
When a person steps onto the winter ice on a river or lake and hears that loud cracking sound running 20, 50, or 100 yards in front of you, that sound produces a sense of anxiety, even fear. It fires the imagination of falling through the ice into 5 feet or 10 feet of icy cold water. Becoming soaked to the bone and maybe not finding a way to crawl back to shore. It can produce genuine panic. Most often, it generates a decision to not venture onto the ice.
The crackling of ice in a glass as a soda is poured into it on a hot summer day, same sound, the same medium. This crackling of ice produces a sense of pleasure and anticipation, not fear.
We have bodily senses of sound, sight, taste, touch/contact/hot and cold, and smell. Additionally, we have many senses related to perceptions like… height, tight places like caves and pipes, dizziness from merry-go-rounds or rides at the fair, absolute darkness, discomfort from overeating, hunger pangs, and thirst.
There is one most critical sense for living above the fray and with an improved perception of events and situations in our crazy world. It is the sense of determining what is good or evil and who is good or evil.
For everyone who partakes only of milk is unacquainted with the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who, because of practice, have their senses trained to distinguish between good and evil. Hebrews 5:13-14.
How can someone develop these senses to distinguish between good and a whole lot of trouble? The text above suggests the essential exercise, which is practice!! Pay attention to the details of what you are observing and experiencing. This text does not mean you learn what evil is by jumping into evil. Believe me, it will find you all on its own. Experimenting with and participating in what is evil, by its very nature will directly and unequivocally deaden your senses. Ask Eve, the first mother of the human race, who learned all about buying into what was obviously wrong and rebellious by its very intent. Ask King Solomon, who declared and described in great detail his efforts to experiment with it all (Ecclesiastes).
How does a sense of trust develop for us in our relationship with others? What situations and what people should we distrust? Who can we go to that is trustworthy? What demonstrated proofs should we require and be looking for?
Six short stories have been read and retold for now 3,000 years. They are found in Psalm 107 of the Old Testament. These stories were told and written down by King David of Israel around the time of 1000 B.C. These stories share the same theme. They describe various persons in severe trouble and in urgent need of help. The characters in these six stories are defined by their different circumstances and motivations that got them into the dangers they were in.
1 Simply lost. Psalm 107:4-9
2 Rebellion. Psalm 107:10-16
3 Foolish. Psalm 107:17-22
4 God initiated test Psalm 107:23-32
5 Wickedness. Psalm 107:33-38
6 Oppression of culture. Psalm 107:39-43
I will let you read those accounts on your own. They are similar to what follows throughout my own history of a few of the jams I found myself in, some by my own doing, I will admit! What follows next are the times in my life when I was in urgent need of quick help and experienced the protection and provisions of God Almighty. I am so glad God knows my GPS location and keeps track of it!
Glad you have picked up this book. You will enjoy it and benefit from some of the lessons I learned, which came from many harrowing experiences. In this retelling of events, I did start another list of several hundred more experiences that I will put into another record.
God is to us a God of deliverances; and to God the Lord belong escapes from death. Psalm 68:20
This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. Psalm 34:6
What persecutions I endured, and out of them all the Lord rescued me! 2 Timothy 3:11
Chapter 20
Midnight in the New York City subway
The first time I drove into New York City I took my car, and I soon learned to regret it. I love my independence and freedom of choice and never gave it a second thought. I wanted to be in control of my schedule between several appointments with investment firms on Wall Street. I must admit, I am also a bit uneasy about learning the subway, bus, and train routes and getting on and off at the right spots to make an appointment, and in those days we did not have Google Maps to guide us. You would think that would be easy enough, but I come from a place where all roads are in one square mile increments, and you can see one, two, or three miles in advance as to where you can turn in one direction or another. An underground maze has its limitations.
Once through the Lincoln tunnel, I was on the Island of Manhattan and what is greater downtown New York City. I found the address for my first meeting and drove around to find a public parking lot or building. I found a building marked Public Parking and drove in. I then saw the sign. $25 per hour. Per hour!!! The area’s bedroom apartments are $10,000 per month! The cheapest menu item at the restaurant was a $45 piece of chicken.
As Dorothy declares to her dog in the Wizard of Oz movie, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” After shelling out $75 to retrieve my car, I was
convinced this was nothing like Kansas and was glad to drive out of that big city.
The next time I went to New York City for meetings, I arranged to stay with a friend who lived in a high-rise apartment building just off Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. And I learned to take the subway into Manhattan.
After meetings all day with investment firms on Wall Street, and a late dinner meeting with a client, I headed to the subway to head back to Brooklyn. It was now near midnight. The subway was no longer running its busy schedule, so I descended to the vacated subway platform to wait for the next train, hopefully within 20-30 minutes.
I was the only person on the subterranean train platform at that late hour. There might yet be one more train going by, which the signs indicated there would be.
I was soon not alone anymore. Four young men, walking together, approached my position from another entrance to the subway. They were 40 yards or so away from me. It was clear they were not there to wait for a ride on the subway to another destination. They focused on the briefcase I was carrying.
I made a quick decision.
I set the brown catalog case down and walked 50 feet away, went to a wall, and leaned against it casually. I acted disinterested in my catalog case and made sure I did not stare directly at these approaching men. By paying attention to them with only peripheral vision, I noticed they had stopped walking, were looking at each other, and trying to determine what kind of trap they might be getting into. If the briefcase was chained to my arm they would likely have torn my arm off to steal the case.
I left the catalog case completely unattended, which was very strange to them. They had seen me with the case as they entered the subway loading platform and then watched me easily walk away from it. That had them spooked. The next question they had to resolve was what kind of person walks away from their valuables. They obviously did not have a category for that kind of person. It seemed too strange and unusual. It would likely cause them to become fearful this was a trap, entrapment by law enforcement, and they were leery of walking into such a trap.
All of these questions were easy for me to answer. If they were looking to injure me to steal a briefcase, I would forego injury and let them have the case. If they were going to chase me down for my billfold, I could move a lot easier without the large case than if I was lugging it along. It is an easy priority decision. My life was more important than the case. Their fear dictated their next move.
They walked past me and exited the subway station, leaving me alone. I walked over and collected my catalog case, boarded the arriving subway, and was safely off to my place in Brooklyn.
Some of my experiences that required quick thinking and only one chance to do it right reminds me of the man David, son of Jesse, before he became king of Israel, now 3000 years ago. Faced with a dire and dangerous situation, David faked insanity. The entire chapter of I Samuel 21 is worth reading. Here is how it ended.
“When David realized that he had been recognized, he panicked, fearing the worst from Achish, king of Gath. So right there, while they were looking at him, he pretended to go crazy, pounding his head on the city gate and foaming at the mouth, spit dripping from his beard. Achish took one look at him and said to his servants, “Can’t you see he’s crazy? Why did you let him in here? Don’t you think I have enough crazy people to put up with as it is without adding another? Get him out of here!” (The Message)
And he lived to tell about it!
Friends, nieces, nephews, Doctors, nurses, and neighbors have all wondered if the stories they have heard Tony Guhr tell from time to time could possibly be true.
Here are a lot more of these adventures they have yet to hear about!
To clear the air and document the facts in these several cases, here is his own account and supporting details of some of those hair-raising near-death experiences.
Here with Uncle Tony, Gavin and Aaron have no doubt about any of their Uncle’s fish stories!
