I think it was winter 2001, I was living in the northern suburbs of Chicago.  My apartment complex had a long winding drive that passed a few small ornamental duck ponds that sat in between the buildings. At one point, the road curved around the edge of a pond with only about six feet or so between them.  There was an iron fence separating the pond from the road.

One evening after an exhausting day at work, I was driving through my complex past one of the duck ponds and the road was covered in snow.  All I could think about was getting home and warming up.  Then out of nowhere, an instant strong thought overwhelmed my mind – with so much snow on the road, a car could go straight through the middle of the iron fence and be submerged in the adjacent pond.  This thought was not an image or words, but a concrete finished conclusion – more like replaying a memory than a what-if speculation or daydream.

As soon as I thought it, I immediately discounted it as not realistic.  This drive had curves, snow and speed bumps.  No one goes fast enough on it to have a big accident like that.  Although a car could certainly drift or slide off the road, I could not see how it would make it all the way into the pond from that spot. It would have to do a very strange maneuver to go from the outer edge of the curve – which at that point is headed away from the pond – then make a 90 degree turn and hit the fence straight on.  That path would be exactly perpendicular from the direction it had been traveling.  Based on my limited experience, that was not how cars skidded in snow.  Besides, the plowed snow created little berms on each side of the road, which would probably slow down or stop a car.  Then I thought that the iron fence would further slow down or stop any car that had managed to drift that far.  The whole idea of such a dramatic accident in such an awkward spot seemed ridiculous and I told myself firmly that it just could not happen.

Assuming that my very tired brain had simply cooked up some silliness to make me pay attention to my driving, I was extra careful going the few hundred more yards to my place.  After some rest, the next day I headed back out to work.  There was still lots of snow, but everything was normal in the complex and I did not think any more about the strange thoughts from the previous night.

Another long day and another drive home, took me back to the apartment drive about the same time of day and with the same snowy conditions.  As I carefully made my way along, I could see something was a little different up ahead.  There was something yellow flapping in the wind on the fence, but I could not see it clearly from the angle I was travelling.  Then as I rounded that last curve and looked to my right, my heart stopped and I started shaking all over.

There were two tire tracks in the snow leaving the road from the furthest out part of the curve.  They were exactly perpendicular to the direction of travel.  They continued right up to the fence, or what was left of it.  Now there was a car sized portion of the fence missing.  The tire tracks continued past the fence, through the frozen crust and into the pond.  There was a car sized hole in the icy surface.  The yellow flapping in the wind had been the police tape warning people away from the scene.

My teeth chattered, my mind stopped completely and I felt devastated.  Why?  What was I supposed to do?  I didn’t know any of my neighbors.  I had no way to know which of them I could have warned.  I had not even believed the warning, so why would they have listened if I had spoken up.  Yet, no matter how I tried to rationalized it, I felt responsible.  I felt like I failed and that the consequences were my fault.

I could not handle it.  I did not know what to do, so I did nothing.  I did not tell anyone.  I did not watch the news.  I did not read the paper.  I completely avoided learning the fate of the person who ended up in that frozen pond.  To this day, I do not know the end of the story.

But, I have learned my lesson.  Now I do pay attention.  I no longer dismiss the odd thoughts that intrude on my days.  I try very hard to catch even the small warnings that pop up multiple times a day.  I just hope that the next time I get a life or death message, I will know what to do.  I can’t imagine anything worse that knowing something awful will happen to my loved ones and not being able to stop it.