The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design (10 page)

From the time we climbed down from the trees to light a fire, we have been developing new and creative ways to make our lives easier. Centuries ago, the hardy Arctic people found that sliding on boards in deep snow was easier than walking, and when motors came along, an obvious improvement was to hook the two ideas together, making the snowmobile.

Even today, intrepid experimenters are finding new uses for the snowmobile. Although five-hundred-pound snowmobiles are not designed to float, and in fact do not float, people have discovered that they can hydroplane across the surface of the water. It’s called “water skipping” or “snowmoboating.”

Gary, forty-nine, did not know how to swim. Yet because he lived in Montana, where a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, he found a way to enjoy water sports. Yes, water skipping had a new convert.

Demonstrating his manliness by not wearing no stinkin’ life jacket, Gary climbed onto his snowmobile, gunned the motor, and skittered across the surface of the reservoir like a waterbug on speed. He zoomed onto the far bank, two hundred yards away. Great delight was expressed by all.

He turned the snowmobile around, gunned the motor like that other great Montana daredevil, Evel Knievel, and roared onto the water for the return trip. He had barely made it fifty feet when the snowmobile lost momentum. His buddies watched in horror as the snowmobile plunged to the bottom of the reservoir, carrying a white-knuckled Gary down with it.

Montana had seen its first drowning victim from water skipping.

Reference:
Peninsula Clarion

 

Snowmoboating falls into a legal gray area. Unlike water-skiers and Jet Ski pilots, snowmobilers are not required to wear life jackets. And laws prohibiting driving motor vehicles into bodies of water don’t apply to snowmobiles. After all, who would? Apparently enough people that a world championship water-skipping event is held every summer in Grantsburg, Wisconsin. The only state to ban the activity, after discovering the sport’s potential for creating new Darwin Award candidates, is Nebraska.

 

 

Ignoring Coast Guard warnings, David ventured onto the icy surface of Saginaw Bay with his pickup truck one chilly morning. Predictably, the vehicle broke through the ice, but the forty-one-year-old managed to avert tragedy and escape from the sinking truck. He reached the shore wet and cold, but alive.

Despite his traumatic experience, and despite a day of sunshine and warm temperatures in the sixties, David returned to Saginaw Bay late the following night. This time he was driving an all-terrain vehicle, and accompanied by a friend. Surprise! The ATV also plunged through the ice.

His companion survived, but David had used up his luck. His body was recovered by the Coast Guard southwest of the Channel Islands. An autopsy was scheduled to determine whether anything besides a desire to win a Darwin Award was a factor in his demise.

Reference:
Flint Journal

The manager of an apartment house was surprised to find the legs of a corpse sticking out of a tenant’s window. Police entered the apartment and found the deceased man’s head soaking in a sink full of hot water.

Apparently, the out-of-work Austrian had returned home after a night of drinking and drugs. He decided to slip in through the kitchen window. The window was fixed at the base and tilted out, giving him just enough room to squeeze his head through as far as the sink before he got stuck. While flailing around trying to escape, he turned on the hot water tap.

Police were not sure why he had not turned off the water, pulled the plug, or—perhaps most important—entered through the front door, since they found the keys in his pants pocket.

Reference:
Kurier
(Austria)

After surf-fishing on Crystal Beach, John was fatigued but unwilling to call it a night. The full moon threatened to disturb his nap, so John curled up for forty winks in the darkest place available: underneath his truck, which was parked on the beach.

The next morning, a pickup truck was reported abandoned in the surf off Crystal Beach. A tow truck driver was called in, and had barely moved the pickup a foot, when he found the body of a thirty-seven-year-old man embedded in the sand beneath it.

It turned out that the truck was not abandoned, after all. As John slept, time passed and the tide rolled back in. The wet sand shifted beneath the truck’s weight, and John was trapped beneath it, unable to escape. The beach became his final resting place.

Reference:
Houston Chronicle,
KLTV, KBTV

“Proof that using a cell phone causes brain damage?”

A high school student accidentally dropped his cell phone from the Dorset Avenue Bridge. Fortunately, the river had frozen over, so the phone landed on the ice, apparently intact. To a dedicated user, losing one’s phone is like losing an appendage. And what loyal friend would not try to retrieve your arm or leg if it had somehow fallen off a bridge and landed on thin ice? The survival of our species depends on mutual support.

Two days later, Bruce, seventeen, volunteered to fetch the phone. He figured that the ice, just an inch thick in places, was strong enough to hold him for the rescue mission. Another friend urged Bruce to give up and go back to shore. “I can do it,” Bruce insisted.

A bridge attendant also warned him to stay off the ice, but as his mother explained, “It’s just something Bruce would have done.” The attendant rushed to his post to call the police. He was on the phone when a bystander told him that someone had fallen in. An officer arrived at the scene moments later to find Bruce partially submerged in the thirty-five-degree water. The officer dashed to his car for a rescue buoy, but when he returned, Bruce had already gone under. His body was recovered the next morning.

Bruce did not die in vain. The cell phone was recovered, as well.

10 F
EBRUARY
2004, N
EW
Y
ORK

Exactly three weeks later, eighteen-year-old Lina, of Queens, jumped onto the subway tracks to retrieve her new cell phone just as the V train was rounding the corner into the Grand Avenue station. She apparently expected to hop right back up onto the platform, five feet above the tracks, but after two attempts, she was still stuck. As the lights of the oncoming train shone in the tunnel, two men tried to pull her up, but she was knocked out of their hands as the train rushed into the station, emergency brakes squealing. She died along with her cell phone.

Reference:
Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Post, New York Daily News

To support his wife and eleven children, Charles Stephens, the fifty-eight-year-old “Demon Barber of Bristol,” needed more money than he could make giving shaves and haircuts. Even his sideline as a daredevil, performing high dives and parachute jumps in England, barely helped cover the bills. He needed something big, something to make his reputation. There was nothing bigger and more daredevilish than going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Only two people had ever done it and lived.

It didn’t matter that one, Annie Taylor, was living in abject poverty or that the other, Bobby Leach, was trying to talk him out of using his heavy Russian oak barrel without first sending it on a test run. Leach’s friend, William “Red” Hill, a daredevil whose sideline was rescuing people from Niagara’s treacherous waters, also tried to dissuade Charles.

But Charles believed that if he strapped his arms to the side of the barrel and his feet to a large anvil as ballast, he would pop up out of the foam at the bottom of the cataract, safe and right-side up. He knew what he was doing, by gum, and he was going to do it.

He launched his ungainly craft early one morning, and floated through the rapids toward Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side. Forty-five minutes after launch, the heavy barrel flew over the edge of the falls. So far, so good…but when Charles hit the water below, the anvil plunged through the bottom of
the barrel, carrying most of Charles to the bottom with it. The barrel became stuck behind the falls. It wasn’t until much later that the barrel’s battered remains floated out into the mist. Attached was Charles’ right arm, still strapped down, with his tattoo visible: “Don’t Forget Me Annie.”

Reference: infoniagara.com

 

 

The Daredevils of Niagara Falls: www.DarwinAwards.com/book/niagara.html

 

Hurricane Isabel whipped shallow creeks into raging rivers, before calming down to a violent tropical storm. What better time for a canoe trip? Especially at two-thirty in the morning, on a moonless night? Enter “Blumpkin,” twenty-one, captain of the James Madison University rugby team, described as “insane, just indestructible.”

He left his own party with friends who “thought it would be all ha, ha and funny” to take the canoe straight down Blacks Run Stream to Blumpkin’s old house.

Winds were gusting to fifty miles per hour, as nearly a foot of rain fell on the Shenandoah Valley. The Boy Scout canoe merit badge says, “If in doubt…survey the water from shore. Do not run any but the mildest rapids unless you have a guide who knows the river. Wear life jackets in all rough water.” Surely Blumpkin noticed that the knee-deep water of Blacks Run was now a flood churning higher than his head. Nevertheless, he launched—and just as quickly capsized. The boat occupants were tossed into the swift, storm-fed stream.

Our “indestructible” friend Blumpkin was sucked underwater twice, to resurface at dawn, one hundred yards downstream, with a Darwin Award clutched in his fist. His female companion managed to reach shore, as did his male companion, who knew it “wasn’t a good idea from the start.”

Reference: www.wina.com,
Daily News-Record, The Breeze