ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 22, 1997 TAG: 9704220045
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
The five women friends were riding in Teresa Ross' Mazda sedan the morning of March 29, a Saturday. They were on the Blue Ridge Parkway, on their way to hike Sharp Top at the Peaks of Otter, when the car hit a wet spot in a curve and spun out.
When she first realized the car was flipping over the side of a mountain, Judy Wickline remembers thinking, ``This is it.''
She was riding in the back seat, passenger side. She and her girlfriends all work in the pharmacy at Revco on Williamson Road, with the exception of her best friend, Amanda, who used to. The women regularly eat out together, hike, bowl.
``We rolled four times, I kept my eyes closed," Judy recalls. "I could feel my legs out of the car scraping the mountain, and I tried to hold them up, but I couldn't.''
It's worth noting that Judy and Amanda Wickline are not only best friends, they're mother and daughter.
So when 19-year-old Amanda crawled out of the car door on the side of the mountain and looked back at the car, she freaked. Her mother was still inside, sprawled amid the broken glass, the car door resting sideways on her legs.
``You looked at her and you thought, `She's either going to die right here, or be paralyzed,''' Amanda says.
The other three women stood shakily nearby, assessing their bruises and cuts. It was one of those too-fast, too-chaotic moments, like the blur of childbirth or the aftermath of a sudden death. As soon as it was over, they had trouble recalling the order of events. But the emotions were fresh.
`God-sent' strangers
It was as if they were there, just waiting for the car to roll down the hill.
The Wicklines don't know who they were. A tractor-trailer driver, a buddy of his and a woman had been in the front cab of the truck on Virginia 695, a few miles northeast of Montvale. The truck was white, they're pretty sure. It hauled a silver tanker of some sort.
Apparently, the truckers saw the car tumble 250 feet down the mountain, landing within 10 yards of the road. Judy, a religious woman, calls them ``God-sent.'' Next to God, she says, they are the reason she's alive and healthy, albeit still bruised.
``One guy was screaming, `I'm not going to touch her' - afraid of lawsuits,'' Amanda recalls. ``But the other guy went right to work, then the other man and the woman helped him out.''
The strangers lifted the car off Judy's legs, carefully so as not to dislodge the car, which was balanced precariously on the hill.
When Amanda said she was running - somewhere, anywhere - to call 911, the truckers made her sit tight. They'd just passed a house a mile back. They said they'd drive there and make the call, which they did.
And then they disappeared.
The brilliance of green
Within minutes, a neighbor ran to the scene, a cellular phone in hand. A physician, as it turned out. Dr. Michael Bisgrove tended to the women until the rescue squad arrived.
Judy had suffered two broken vertebrae, cuts and low-blood pressure problems from blood loss. She was the only one hospitalized, for four days and three nights.
The 45-year-old feels a strong need to communicate two messages: The first is to thank the four strangers who risked lawsuits and physical harm to help.
The second is to point out the things you don't notice in life until you come close to death: the brilliance of the green in grass, the roominess of your modest home, even the privilege of being able to wash the dishes.
Pharmacist Yvonne Barrow, who rode in the front passenger seat, will never forget the amazement of the state trooper who worked the accident. She remembers him scanning the mountain, then the car, then telling his co-worker, awestruck: ``They fell all the way down from there, and all five of them are alive.''
There is no other way to explain it than this, she says: ``We're being saved for something.''
LENGTH: Medium: 79 linesby CNB