Bullets I have dodged..

When I was a kid used to go hunting with my father out in east Texas. It was just outside my momma's family's town of Alto, just south of where HWY 294 intersects with the Neches river. I believe that section of land became a hunting club later on.
A few years later, when I was a teenager, I drove down there all the way from Fort Worth with a buddy to hunt mushrooms in his '63 Impala. Got back there on these old red dirt lumberjack roads, and was heading back to HWY 294 on one that ran right next to the Neches. The river was running high and red from heavy rains.
The further I got down that road, the muddier it got until I reached a point where I couldn’t hardly turn back, and it made no sense to keep going.
I would fishtail for a stretch, barely slip my way sideways up a hill by red lining the engine, and coast back down. I would look out the drivers window inches away from the 10 foot drop to the river. I made my buddy get out of the car. There was no need for us both to die, our bodies bobbing to the surface like the hand in Deliverace, in the middle of Corpus Christi Bay.
It was a miracle we made it out of there, and I discovered why there was more than one rusted out carcass of a car back there in the thickets stuck on an old lumberjack road.