4
Roadside Assistance
When Steve Smith fell asleep at the wheel, he woke to a life-saving—and life-changing—realization about guardian angels.
Hypnotic heat shimmered above the pavement of Highway 21 as it wound through a remote and rugged stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains in northern North Carolina. On this sweltering afternoon in July 1996, Steve Smith knew he ought to pull off and rest.
Driving alone, he was still forty minutes from his home in Mouth of Wilson, a tiny hamlet just over the Virginia border. The temperature outside was well over a hundred, and he struggled to stay awake behind the wheel. He’d been on the road only a couple of hours since saying good-bye to friends after lunch in Pinehurst, a hundred miles to the south. But he had every reason to be tired: The group of men had risen early to play eighteen holes of golf while the morning air was still cool. They’d played the day before too.
Summer was playtime for Steve, and he made the most of it. The rest of the year he was employed as athletic director and basketball coach at Oak Hill Academy, a Baptist prep school nestled in the mountains. The enrollment was small—just 150 kids—but the standards were rigorous, for students and faculty.
Above all, his passion for basketball and his commitment to excellence drove him to work hard on the job. And it paid off. Over the years twenty of his “boys” had gone on to play in the NBA. While during these months he conducted camps for youth from all over the region, these still left ample time to enjoy one of an educator’s biggest perks: summers off.
It was around 3:00 PM when Steve’s 1994 silver Jeep Cherokee climbed a steep grade just south of Roaring Gap. The white-hot sun cast deep shadows in the thick forest of oak, hickory, red maple, and dogwood trees. At the hill’s summit lay a scenic overlook he’d driven past hundreds of times, a place tourists often stopped to snap photos of the sweeping landscape below. That day he briefly considered pulling over for a quick nap before the homestretch. The thought of trying to rest in a blazing hot car, with the comfort of his air-conditioned house less than an hour away, persuaded him to press on.
“I can drive all night with no problem, but I always get sleepy in the afternoons,” he said. “That day I remember being extra tired. I told myself I should stop, but I didn’t. All I could think about was getting home.”
He began the descent, the hillside rising to his left and falling steeply on the passenger side to the narrow valley below. Nine-tenths of a mile past the summit, Steve fell asleep—just as the road curved sharply to his right.
The Jeep crossed the oncoming lane and rode up the steep embankment, then rolled sideways back down and eventually came to a stop upside down in the middle of the road. Steve woke up as soon as the vehicle left the pavement, startled, to the sounds of breaking glass and buckling metal. It happened too fast for him to react or even think.
Dazed, he simply hung on and waited for the world to stop spinning. Once the Jeep came to rest, he unhitched his seat belt and set about trying to open the driver’s side door.
“I’d banged my head pretty good and was totally out of it,” he recalled. “All I knew was I had to get that door open to get out. It didn’t sink in that the roof had collapsed, so there was no way the door was going to open.”
Just then he heard a voice speaking to him from the rear of the vehicle. He turned and saw a woman down on all fours on the pavement, looking at him through the shattered back window. Her face wore a concerned but not panicked expression. She told him matter-of-factly to come toward her, saying it was the only way out of the wreckage.
“She was an average-looking woman, about forty years old, with dark, shoulder-length hair,” he remembered. “She just calmly told me I had to get out that way. Without any hesitation, that’s what I did.”
He squeezed through the space between the seat tops hanging above his head and the crushed ceiling now below him, the whole time moving toward the woman’s face still framed in the rear window. Arriving at the back, ready to climb out onto the sizzling pavement, he reached for his golf clubs.
“I wasn’t thinking very clearly. But I’m a golfer, so right then it seemed pretty important to take my clubs with me, and my duffel bag with my stuff inside. The woman told me to leave them. She said, ‘Your car looks like it might be on fire. You need to just get out.’”
Suddenly he could smell smoke. He abandoned the clubs and luggage and crawled out the rest of the way. He stood unsteadily and saw that the Jeep was indeed smoking. He turned toward the spot where she’d been kneeling—to thank her and to suggest they should get a safe distance away. Then he spun around, looking in every direction. His rescuer had vanished like a heat mirage. He was the only person present. The only car on the road was his.
“If you could see the countryside along this stretch, you’d know what I mean when I say there is no way she just walked off into the woods. It’s too remote. She was there one minute, as solid as anybody, and then in the time it took for me to crawl the rest of the way out and stand up, she was gone.”
Remembering the smoke—and that he was standing in the middle of the highway—Steve hustled away from the wreckage. As he turned to look back at the scene, a thunderous explosion shook the air. The Jeep burst into flames.
He staggered back, scanning again for the woman who had suddenly appeared and just as suddenly vanished. Without her, he’d be trapped inside, struggling to open a jammed-shut door . . . and no doubt engulfed in flames.
“I’m sure I was in shock,” he said. “I knew that if it hadn’t been for that woman telling me to crawl out the back, I’d have died in the fire.”
Before long a pair of cars came upon the accident and stopped. Steve asked them if they had seen the woman. No one had. Somebody called 9-1-1, and soon thereafter state troopers arrived, along with an ambulance.
Steve suffered two fractured vertebrae—the C3 and C4 on opposite sides of his spinal cord—in what usually is a debilitating injury. Upon seeing the X-rays, his family doctor said, “You have a broken neck. It’s a miracle you’re not paralyzed.” Yet after ten weeks in a neck brace, Steve would walk away from his brush with death experiencing only a little numbness in his left arm.
“Years earlier I’d been called on to give a message at the school chapel,” he recalled. “The topic was angels and how they’re here to protect us and help us. Some of the kids asked me whether I really believe angels exist. I said yes, even though I had never seen one. Now I don’t have to just believe it—I know it.
“I’m only telling what happened that day on the mountain. And I’m sure some people might have their own ‘logical’ explanation. But as for me, I’m absolutely convinced there are angels protecting us. I probably wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t had one protecting me.”