If you have a weak stomach, perhaps you should not read this blog. Driving back to Skopje Macedonia from Osijek Croatia Thursday evening proved eventful and more than a bit scary. As you drive through Serbia, the major highway ends in Leshcovats and then you have a winding small two-lane road to navigate to the Serbian-Macedonian border.
Thursday had been a LOOOOONNNNGGGG and intense day. Meetings until late the night before, meetings again from early that morning . . . and some of them concentrated . . . now a car full of students and their bags heading back to Macedonia with me for Easter break, since I qualify as a free ride, e.g. missionary from the West. The stress of the day was further compounded by the fact that we drove almost to the Hungarian border, before getting our radars properly adjusted and realizing that we were heading in the wrong direction - Skopje is SOUTH not NORTH of Osijek . . . (I know this soounds funny to you, but until you try driving in the former Yugoslavia and understand that road signs rarely exist, and when they do they are politically oriented, meaning that Croatians refuse to give one directions to Belgrade! I ain't as stupid as this post makes me sound).
So finally we returned to Osijek, got on the correct road for home and began to drive as fast as the little Peugeot would go. Enter Leshkovats and exit the major road. It's dark, and there are police every several kilometers, and the speed limits are set unnaturally low = SPEED TRAP! Now if you are an American driving in Serbia, you do NOT want to talk to the police. We (rather America/Clinton) bombed their country for 80 days! Thus one tenaciously drives the cotton-picking 35 miles per hour that the posted speed limits demand.
In my rearview mirror now appears a raving maniac driving a semi who in typically reckless form for this part of the world is passing one car after another. I watch all of this unfolding in my mirror. As this massively foolish maniac decides to pass the car following me . . . on a curve no less . . . there appears another semi in the oncoming lane, which caused almost all involved parties to wet their collective pants, and more concretely, the maniac behind me swerves into the too small space between me and the car he was passing, in order to avoid a head-on collision with the approaching semi who apparently had completely forgotten that he has BRAKES!
The wedging of a semi between my little blue car and the yugo following me brought the semi so close to my little blue car that I could see the toenails of the dead mosquitoes plastered again the grill of the semi. I was certain that he would make contact with the little blue car I was driving and that we would plunge off into the ravine below and I screamed out appropriately horrified predictions of our immediate demise in a mixture of Macedonian, English and Russian. Stress always brings my Russian back to me. The result in the car I was driving was instant; everyone braced themselves.
Amazingly the anticipated contact did not occur, though I still do not understand how this did not happen. But as often happens with adults, my terror turned to rage as soon as I realized that I was not going to meet Jesus in the next 30 seconds after my broken body was consumed in a very painful fiery crash. I then railed at the mad man in the monster semi who was still on my bumper . . . in three languages. Unfortunately we had arrived at an extremely windy part of the road and there was no possible way even this maniac could pass me. But soon a tiny stretch of straight road appeared and predictably he roared around us. Suddenly I realized that the monster madman who was endangering our lives moment before was now our best friend. Because he was speeding toward the border and the police would find him a juicy target, far more than us. So I pulled in behind him and doubled my speed toward the border!
After about five minutes of following this MSD (mad semi driver) his truck swerved frantically and then suddenly in my headlights appeared the rear half of a large dog! And in another 10 meters the front half of the dog appeared in the center of the road. My reflexes held us in good steady and we hit neither half of the dog, which is really good, because it certainly would have wrecked the car! He literally tore the dog in half! The semi driver never hit his brakes once . . . he just kept plowing on into the raining night.
There were lots of new creative names bouncing around in our car as the students sought to label this MSD. Finally the name that stuck was “The Mad Dog Killer.” Of course we shortly arrived at the border and TMDK had to get into the semi lane and we flew right past him into the car lane. We did not see him again that night. And whoever said that life in the Balkans was now safe, was truly out of their heads.
I was thinking about how fragile life is, how we all live on the edge of existence most every day, it occurred to me that as always, our lives are in His hands – all the time – everyday.
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