The Accident

P3150860, originally uploaded by mandy.mantzel.

This trip has helped me realize how living in America in an "advanced civilization" has dumbed down my own common sense. Everywhere we go, we've got signs to warn us of things that we should be able to see on our own. "Caution! Hot Coffee" or "Floor slippery when wet". Well DUH. But I feel like some of these signs I've come to rely on. Sketchy deteriorating buildings are blocked off so people won't wander into them. If it's not blocked off and there's not a sign, then I assume it's fair game.

So on this day, we went to go swim with some turtles. We saw a fale (reminder: it's like a hut over water) that was empty to put our things, so we crossed a teetering log to enter it. I remember someone saying "guys, is this thing safe?" to which another responded "of course, it's no different from any other fale we've been in". And the next thing I hear is "oh... *dirty word*" and I felt the fale shift a bit, and initially I tried to hold still, but when I felt that it was coming down either way, and as I realized that if it collapsed on top of me I'd be trapped underwater (it was just shallow enough for the roof to sink just below the surface) so I tried to jump onto the dock just as it crashed.

I still think it was by sheer luck that we all made it out okay. The way that the fale crashed, it angled just so that a corner of the roof caught on a post of the dock. Had it not caught, I would have been split in half somewhere around my midsection. Half of my body was on the dock, the other half still on the floor of the fale. There was a split second where I just blanked out, and talking to my friends in the accident, they all had a few seconds they couldn't remember. The next thing I heard was "is everyone out? Is everyone okay?" from meredith, who had a huge gash on her head just behind her ear. We got everyone out, and then bags. Everyone had a nasty gash of some sort on their back, head, neck, etc. I only ended up with one on my arm and on my hand (although wounds in the pacific are nasty... and my hand is officially infected). But thinking about what COULD have happened if the fale leaned a hair in any other direction astounds me. We really were lucky. Cameras, ipods, watches, and other important things drowned, but we walked from it. Which still baffles my brain.

So, back to my point. This was one of those moments where my "adventurousness" and my naivety had a face-off. Samoans probably think we're really dumb Americans without any common sense, because looking back, we really had no business climbing into that fale. Now when I go somewhere, like climbing mountains or jumping from waterfalls, I don't just assume that it's safe because there's no sign to stop me.