By Kailtin Manry - Daily World writer
A child was trapped in Prairie Creek and could not get out.
The vision awoke him at 3 a.m. It gnawed incessantly at him. Foss tried to ignore it. He was tired and wanted to sleep.
But the vision would not go away.
Around 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Foss and his 22-year-old son, Clifford ?Jesse? left their Amanda Park home, stopped for coffee and then headed a mile and a half down Highway 101 to Jesse?s shake mill.
When they passed Prairie Creek, Clifford Foss looked for signs of trouble, but seeing nothing, discounted his premonition.
Then they passed Milburn Creek. A three-foot section of guard rail was bent back on the opposite side of the road. Muddy tire tracks pointed toward the creek.
They kept driving. Accidents happen and are cleared away in the middle of the night all the time, he reasoned.
?Did you hear an ambulance last night,? Clifford remembers asking his son.
?No,? was the reply.
?We better go back,? the elder Foss decided.
He turned around and parked beside the guard rail. Jesse hopped out and peered down into the 20-foot ravine. A black, mangled pick-up truck, partially obscured by trees, was at the bottom of the shallow creek. A man hung halfway out the driver?s side window, covered in blood. He yelled for help ? and Jesse Foss scampered down to him.
While his dad drove to the nearest neighbor and called 911, Jesse stayed by the injured stranger, asking him questions and doing what he could to help.
The man was Allen Edgar, a 46-year-old Olympian on his way to Neah Bay for a commercial fishing trip.
He told Jesse he had been sitting in the bottom of the ravine since 2 a.m., when his pick-up drifted to the opposite side of the road and careened through a guard rail. It literally flew across the ravine before smashing into rocks and falling to the creek bottom.
He had a collapsed lung, a fractured arm, femur and vertebra, a broken nose and several lacerations. His breathing was shallow.
He wanted a cigarette ? and his cell phone so he could call his wife, Jesse said.
Grays Harbor Fire District 4, the Hoquiam Fire Department and the State Patrol rushed to the scene. They cut Edgar from the truck. He was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle in critical condition. Still in the Intensive Care Unit, today he is in serious condition.
Edgar?s wife, Julie, was not available this morning. But Wednesday, before the Fosses had been identified, she told The Daily World she wanted to recognize whoever found her husband for saving his life. He was unconscious at the time and attached to a ventilator.
?We?re extremely grateful that he would take the time to pursue what he saw,? she said from the hospital. ?Most likely, without his or her help, my husband may have not survived. ? We?re just very grateful. If he wouldn?t have been found, who knows how long he would have lived.?
Volunteer Emergency Medical Technician Mike Shepard said it?s difficult to tell how long Edgar would have survived if the Fosses hadn?t found him. The accident was impossible to see from the road and more than 100 cars had probably driven by before the Fosses stopped, he said.
?I just think back ? echoes from the past,? Shepard said. ?I?ve seen things like that before. Probably 30 years ago, a car was in the ditch on the other end of 101 toward Hoquiam and that guy didn?t make it because he had been there 18 hours. ? It?s remarkable he?s alive.?
The Fosses said they don?t consider themselves heroes. Upon seeing the wreck, anyone would have helped, they reasoned.
Foss said he?s had premonitions before, but never about anything this serious. Even though he was asleep when it came to him, he doesn?t think of it as a dream. A dream is fantasy, he said, but a vision is based on something real.
The eldest of his five children also has ?the gift? and called him Tuesday to say she had a vision of him standing in a shallow creek fighting brambles.
?It?s like the Sasquatch. Who believes in that? I don?t,? said Clifford, who is divorced and out of work due to a disability. ?But if you?ve seen it, it?s there.?
Clifford Foss says he?s not a very religious man. He doesn?t go to church, but he believes in God. And the vision that made him stop, he says, was heaven sent.
?I believe the Holy Spirit or something sat there all night and gnawed on my ear to do something,? he said, standing at his son?s mill just down the road from the ravine. ?It?s done this other times in our lives and we?re not obedient. It will sit there and pick on you until you?re obedient. It did. It convinced Jesse and me to look (in the ravine). If I hadn?t had visions all night, I wouldn?t have seen it. We would have been like the other 150 cars. All there was was a beat-up guard rail.?
Source: http://www.thedailyworld.com/articles/2 ... 01news.txt
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