As we’re often told, so much about life tends to be a matter of perspective .
On any given day, two people will experience the exact same situation and come away with different takeaways on how it affected their life. And there are certain factors in the context of a given situation that make it seem so much different from others like it.
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For instance, the last thing we would normally feel after a tree falls over and crushes our cars is “lucky.”
But it would be hard to feel any other way if we experienced a harrowing incident that befell one Alabama man.
Before the fateful day when he took his car down Old Selma Road, 37-year-old Henri Cheramie had already had a staggering history of narrowly avoiding danger.
According to the Beauregard Daily News , he was able to flee New Orleans just hours before the ravages of Hurricane Katrina would trap residents in the city.
Six years later, he found himself moving out of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Three days later, a devastating tornado would sweep through the area.
And while it seems his uncanny luck didn’t fail him on May 4, that day brought Cheramie mere inches from a likely death.
As The National Weather Service reported , Central Alabama was awash with severe weather conditions at the time as unstable winds gave way to tornadoes while thunderstorms struck throughout the area and massive rainfalls led to flooding.
And it was during these conditions that the middle school teacher was traveling homeward from his newly-acquired second job at Comics and Geeks in Montgomery.
While taking a shortcut near Maxwell Air Force Base, Cheramie said he saw a bolt of lightning arc across the sky and hit a tree.
And then, as he told it, “I lean a bit and go ‘did lightning just strike that’ and the next thing I know, half of my body is out of the sunroof and the top of the car is being weighed down by a giant branch that is bisected just where my face is. I felt like Buster Keaton.”
But while it was incredible that the limbs of the oak tree had just barely missed his head, it soon became clear that he wasn’t out of danger yet when a power line exploded behind him.
This compelled him to yell for help, which prompted a crew of landscapers to try and assist him while one called 911.
And when first responders arrived, Cheramie noticed that they all had similarly wide eyes and gaping mouths. They also couldn’t believe that he had survived.
But despite how scary the experience likely felt at the time, Cheramie maintained a healthy sense of humor about it, saying, “If my giant C-section baby head hadn’t gone through that sunroof, I don’t know where I’d be.”
And while the incident cost him a car, a laptop, and a phone, he’s focusing on the fact that it left him with the one thing he can’t replace: himself.
And it especially didn’t cost him his sense of humor since he jokingly pledged to “sue the tree and sue the creators of Arbor Day” in the description for his GoFundMe campaign to fix up his backup van.
