Just curious to see the answer. What would you consider your most intense moment. I could be comical, terrifying, dramatic, any moment that is burned into your memory, stored as an "I am going to tell the heck out of this story" file.

Several:

• the first time I saved someone's life;
• the first time I jumped out of an airplane;
• the first time I fell off a cliff;
• the first time I saw Elizabeth (now my wife);
• the first time someone shot an RPG at me;
• the sound of my son's first breath.

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Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
- Goethe

Jump in with both feet!
- Me, indulging my inner eight-year-old

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"Are you a mad-hatter that just types what he wishes, or have you actually any physics training?"
Occam's Ghost to Grant Hutchison.

When I was in the Army in a feild artillery battery (M198 towed howitzer), we'd spend quite a lot of time training out in the field. This meant lots of moves (packing up the howitzer and associated equipment, loading it up on the truck, and moving to another location), and some of those would be at night. We would have to practice night discipline (basically no lights whatsover, and driving W/O headlights). One night move, we were pulling out of a position (I was the driver, every one else was probably asleep in the back of the truck) in the dark (not even a moon), and I ended up driving laterally across the side of a hill, which got steeper and steeper, I thought the truck was gonna roll for sure, right on top of me.

Getting hit by a truck while riding a motorcycle when I was 19 was probably the most intense moment. Came into a blind Y intersection, looked over my shoulder and saw a headlight about 3 feet away. Fraction of a second later I went flying and the bike went under the truck. I was so lucky.

Truly a life-flashed-before-my-eyes-in-slow-motion moment. I really thought that was it - - the end. Thing is there was no panic, no freakout, just a "This is going to be really bad" feeling of resignation.

A fellow skydiver who came within a couple seconds (literally) of going in last summer said the same thing. He was basically resigned to impact and was thinking "I wonder if this will hurt?" when his automatic opener fired.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

One of my most intense moments was a night or two before my pre-lims in grad school. I was over at a friend's place and I got so nervous and worked up over it that I actually hyperventillated - the only time in my life I have ever done so.

Another graduate school experience was intense in a different way, but not a "moment". In my last year, I had a period of about four to six weeks where I was running 24 hour long experiments with another student. I would be up for 24 hours, crash for maybe 8 hours, do about 10 hours worth of work, sleep, and then do another 24 hour session. We did this two or three times a week for those four to six weeks. Given that, and the fact that Providence, Rhode Island doesn't get a lot of sunlight in the middle of winter, and by the end of that my body clock was so completely messed up that I had almost no clue as to what time of day it was, like a very extended period of jet lag. It took me several weeks to get back in sync.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Lol, I so know that feeling of "Oh this is so going to hurt" from my first jetskiinig accident. My most intense, terrifying moment was my second jetskiing accident, trying to correct the mistakes I made from the first. In order to get good air and have a soft landing, it's best to put your feet all the way to the back and kick down so the nose of the waterbike is pointing up. Should you fail to do that, a ten foot flat fall can be really painful. The ocean was way too choppy so I was just tooling around the inlet at dusk at an unusually hot day in March. I saw a boat wake, a tiny boat wake, and figured I would practice, positioning feet and jumping. I approached, stood up, hit the wake, and just as I kicked down, my feet were yanked out from under me, smashed my face on the handlebars, and the shock made me pull all the way down on the throttle. Confused and half silly from the face-plant, I can't find the coordination to take my hand off the throttle as I was, by this point, holding on for dear life. When I hit choppy waters, I finally get knocked off and find myself, skidding and bouncing on my back along side the jetski. Crushing panic crippled me when I finally snapped out of my daze and realized that I came to a stop a good 20 feet from the jetski and there I am bleeding in bullshark infested water. That was the longest swim of my life!
The humor was when I got to shore and discovered a banana peel smooshed into the foot rest.

Slapstick at its finest!

__________________
Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
- Goethe

Jump in with both feet!
- Me, indulging my inner eight-year-old

*** *** ***

"Are you a mad-hatter that just types what he wishes, or have you actually any physics training?"
Occam's Ghost to Grant Hutchison.

A few moments of terror come to mind:

As a 17 year old I had a summer job at an aluminum smelter erecting and dismantling scaffolds. These are the kind built from identical 5 foot tall sections at opposite ends and held together with cross braces. One day we had to take down a scaffold that had been built around a 50 foot tall steel smoke stack above the edge of a 50 foot tall roof. It had been there for months, and the top two sections on one side had rusted together. My partner's solution was that we would send down two sections at once, which meant that each of us had to stand, unrestrained, while manuevering a large awkward piece of steel, on about 2 square feet of board with a hot steel stack at our backs, all 90 feet above the ground. Very intense, and it still creeps me to think of it. Kind of like standing on top of a telephone pole.

While riding my bicycle I was hit by a car pulling over to park. The front tire collapsed against the curb, the forks folded back, and I tumbled forward, rolling in the gutter between the curb and one of the car's tires. All I could think was that I needed to stay small and keep my legs from getting under the tire. When I came to a stop, I immediately jumped up and went straight for the driver's door. If he hadn't been white as a sheet and trembling so badly, I would have hurled him into the traffic. Adrenalin can do that for you.

Another time I was riding my motorcycle in the rain, at high speed, and came onto an old wooden deck bridge. The back tire spun out on the slick surface, and the bike started to slide. My only thought was to just make it across the bridge before completely wiping out. As soon as that back wheel hit the pavement on the other side of the bridge, the whole machine straightened out and I continued on. The adrenalin rush passed a few moments later, and I felt I'd aged a few years.

I've done a lot of flying on the west coast, mostly as a passenger, but also as pilot of my own plane or a rented one, and I've seen my share of ugly weather. The most memorable was as a naive 19 year old who was renting a plane on a beautiful clear winter day to see the sights around Whistler, north of Vancouver. But such a day usually means an Arctic high has moved into the province, and a flood of air flows down the coastal valleys to the ocean. We call them arctic outflows. I simply did not appreciate how strong these winds are, and how violent the turbulence is. I was part way up Howe Sound, between the lovely mountains, in what started out as "choppy air", when it felt like a great huge hand had grabbed the plane and thrown it down, then a giant foot had kicked it up again, and again, and again. One instant the airspeed was in the red, the next the stall warning was blaring. I got the plane turned around and it ended as suddenly as it began, but I certainly learned something that day.

In my early 20s, a guy in college picked a fight with me and got in two terrific blows. He was a lot bigger and stronger than I was, about a 100 lbs heavier. I thought he was going to kill me! My adrenaline kicked in and I hit him in his face with the back of my elbow, twice, with everything I had. Hurt him, too, pretty bad (he was bleeding a lot) which was enough for him to realize perhaps he'd picked a fight with the wrong fellow.

It took me about 10 minutes to calm down, and was shaking a lot until then. I ran all the way home.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. Human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

Scary as anything when it happened, but really funny now:
I was on a student ambassador trip to Australia. Our tour manager told us
"On Moreton Island, there are drop-bears. They are like giant koalas with sharp teeth and claws. If they fall out of a tree and onto your head, they will kill you."
So, naturally, we were all very scared, especially my friend Sam.
Sam, Angie, Nick and I were all walking back to our lodge from the restaurant at the resort where we had had dinner. As the island was a bird sanctuary, there were many trees hanging over the path. Sam held Angie's arm out of fear. Nick said
"Oooh, Sam, the drop-bears are going to eat you!"
"Stop it, that's not funny."
He started making monkey noises.
"You're not funny, Nick, cut it out."
He snuck up behind her and shouted
"BOO!"
Sam took off running and didn't stop until we reached a floodlit area fifty feet away. Angie's arm had almost been pulled out of it's socket.
"That was really rotten, Nick." Sam said.
We heard a twig snap behind us just then, and everybody, even Nick, took off running. We didn't stop until we were in our hotel rooms.
The next day, our tour manager told us that...
Drop-bears are a myth!

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

It would be impossible for me to pick just one, because what was an intensely pleasurable moment cannot be easily compared with a moment that was intensely embarassing or intensely painful--or the manic rage. Or intense depression.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I had an accident when I was 13 years old and almost lost my arm.
I find it too difficult to describe what happened, but there was lots of blood, stiches and a few operations and skin grafts.

I was digging footers for the largest building on site with a 310 backhoe (no encased cab, or this wouldn't be a story), I ran across an abandoned PVC line, probably 5" in diameter(though it was abnormally think/dense) so I just broke through it with no problem, obviously, and kept going. As I moved on, I went back to were the PVC was to get my finish grade, took the pull but something very odd happened, the piece of PVC that linked between both sides of the footer was only attached on one side, so when the bucket came across it the second time it sheered off with a tremendous amount of force (likely do to the fact that it was in type C soil, which compacts a lot, meaning I was carrying it with me until it reached maximum tensile force) it launched at me at such speed I couldn't even react, and I could tell that it was aimed directly for my head. The very tippy corner of the pipe just barely caught the edge of the base of my stick (the area where the arm attaches to the machine) and boomeranged about 30 yards away. The impact actually left an indention in the steel deep enough to feel. Had my stick not been exactly where it was, perhaps just a half inch to the right, I'd have likely been decapitated.

I'd consider that pretty intense.

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Driving 120 mph on I-35 in the middle of Austin, Texas with five cop cars chasing me.

Everything turned out better than I thought it would at the time.

Sounds like an episode of Cops or America's Wildest Police Chases.

Probably the half-hour I was driving 130kph in an 80 zone, in the woods, at midnight, distracted, despondent, and wondering what an unbelted head-on with a tree felt like. It's not a memory I'm fond of dwelling on.

I'm feeling much better now, thank you.

(Just as an aside, if you feel like you might be needing someone to sit on you, your family doctor is your very best friend. It's hard to get those first few words out, (took me two visits and all my will to raise enough courage), but you'll only have to do that once. He/she's got your back.)

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

My siblings say I'm part cat because of the number of close calls. The intensity is very short-lived in those kinds of moments because it happens so fast; just a fraction of a second of "Dang, did it again."

I got hit by a car when I was about 9 or 10 while delivering newspapers. Heavy fog, pulled across the road, never saw it coming.

Got hit by a motorcycle when I was about 12. He was doing 90 or so and I pulled in front of him on my bicycle. I saw him coming but didn't realize how fast we was going. I thought "I'll just cross now before he . . ." BAM!

Had a Wil E. Coyote moment climbing The Cheviot. It really can happen just like in a cartoon. I was going down, a really long ways, and just stuck out my arm and caught a little knarly branch of a tree growing out of the side of the rocks.

Really defied the odds by falling about 35 to 40 feet out of a large tree when I was about 12. My uncle saw it happen and thought I had to be dead. My sister was standing right there watching and couldn't stop laughing.

Those are a few of my past brain farts. I think I still have a life or 2 left.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Sit on you?

Most Intense moments :

* Year 1991 when Mt. Pinatubo erupted, Me and my cousins are having our summer vacation in our province in Pampanga here in the Philippines, when suddenly at 10AM , rocks , pebbles are falling from the sky, then afterwards , it became smaller and smaller until it is raining sands all over our roof, the whole town. We were so scared , all of us , the Volcano is emitting tons and tons of these pyroclastic materials . It was 1PM in the afternoon but its already dark , like midnight. The sounds of the blast , the eruption which also makes the ground shakes is one of the Most Intense moment when I was a teenager back then.

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Jean
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"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einsteiin