Kaleb Whitby drove into the dense fog on the familiar and unremarkable stretch of Interstate 84 just east of Baker City about an hour before sunrise.

He'd only been on the road for a matter of minutes on Jan. 17 after driving from rural Washington the night before. The 27-year-old was already engrossed in an audiobook and pondering when to eat the prepackaged cinnamon pastry he'd grabbed for breakfast. Then he saw the semi-truck trailer in front of him start to sway.

He downshifted, tapped his brakes and felt his truck slip on the black ice underneath him. He aimed for the back of the trailer as he lost control.

Whitby is a former high school running back and linebacker and a stout 250-pound former professional weightlifter. He's taken big hits before, so he braced for impact.

He struck the tractor-trailer head on. He slid about 30 feet.

The airbag didn't deploy. Whitby's 2008 Chevy Silverado went silent.

Immobilized, he turned to his right and through the rear passenger window saw another set of headlights coming straight for him.

He looked away.

All he could do was pray.

***

By all reasonable expectations of physics and the laws of man, Whitby should have died on Interstate 84 on Jan. 17, leaving his wife a widow and his son fatherless.

Instead, he walked away with a black eye, a few scratches and a grainy cell phone photograph that circled the globe.

Other people might have emerged from the wreckage changed in some way, but Whitby's story isn't one of epiphanies acquired after sweet life-saving salvation. It's a life affirming moment, not a life changing one, largely because of his strong religious beliefs and because his life was going well before the wreck that should have ended it.

***

The eldest of 9, Whitby grew up on his devoutly Mormon family's sprawling 1,000-plus acre farm about 30 miles north of Richland, Washington.

In 2007, Whitby left for a two-year mission in Brazil. He graduated from Brigham Young University in 2012, and briefly chased a career and dream of Olympic glory as a professional weightlifter.

Last May, he came home from the South Carolina townhouse where he'd lived while training. He moved back, along with his wife, two dogs and 2-year-old son, looking for steady income and to help his father and three uncles run the acres of alfalfa and apple trees, cattle and beans. The farm has sustained four branches of the Whitby family tree for decades.

The morning of the crash, Whitby was on the road to Council, Idaho, to track a shipment of about 160 heifers the family had recently purchased. It was their first time working with this seller, so Whitby planned to follow the shipment to its ultimate destination in Colorado, where the cattle would be fed up before their eventual slaughter.

He was driving the first pickup of his own, a 2008 extended cab Chevy Silverado he bought in July. He'd already tacked more than 15,000 miles on the odometer driving to and from the nearby Tri Cities area and other work trips. The farm boy is a confident, comfortable driver; he's been navigating family trucks around the farm since even before he could see over a steering wheel.

As he saw that second set of headlights coming toward him through the fog, Whitby immediately thought the worst -- this was the end of all of that. Who would look after his wife, Camille, five months pregnant with their second child?

He remembers thinking he was going to die, wondering if this was his time. The second semi crushed him from behind. "It was loud, and it was hard," he said. Yet he felt surprisingly cushioned. Whitby didn't go crashing to the ground. "I was along for the ride," he said.

The wreck, the last in a multi-car chain of accidents that stretched over a quarter mile that morning, crumpled the Chevy's extended cab into a capsule-like shell. The impact cocooned Whitby inside amid shattered glass and his scattered belongings.

Whitby took quick stock of the situation and realized he was fine. His biggest fear was yet another truck barreling down the road to finish the job.

He wasn't going to wait for that possibility, and fumbled for the Leatherman pocketknife he carried in his pants pocket. The force of the crash had popped the knife out of his pocket and between his T-shirt and black soft-shell jacket.

Whitby was upright, but uncomfortable. His right leg began to go numb because his legs could barely move. He found the knife and started cutting the seat belt in an effort to dislodge the steering wheel wedged into his right hip.

As he worked, emergency crews and other stranded travelers discovered the remarkable scene. Whitby thought he could get out of his truck without the Jaws of Life. He saw a gap at his feet.

Another trucker laid on the highway, slick with diesel fuel, and reached up into the wreckage. He pulled Whitby's left foot up and then out of what remained of the Silverado.

One foot free, Whitby was able to turn his body and face the driver's side door. He eventually slid down until he was on the pavement. He crawled on all fours through the tight space next to his pickup, then stood to run from the tunnel created by the trailers on either side.

All told, it took about 30 minutes to extricate Whitby from the crumbled truck.

Before his escape, trucker Sergi Karplyuk asked Whitby if he could take a picture with his cell phone. He thought Whitby's survival was a miracle and wanted to share the moment with the world.

Nobody would have believed him otherwise.

***

Whitby is a matter-of-fact guy. Once he was safely out of his truck, he called his parents to ask for a ride home. He'd been in an accident, he said.

He went to Saint Alphonsus Medical Center as a precaution, one of a dozen people treated there for various injuries from the chain of ice-related accidents. He rode in the front seat of the ambulance.

Alisa and Jeb Whitby drove their own pickup to get their son, using back roads to get past the highway closures. The trip, which usually takes around three hours, took almost double that.

On the way out of town, the family stopped at the Baker City Subway. Whitby ran into a law enforcement officer he recognized from the wreck scene and asked the man whether he could retrieve his personal items from the truck. The officer looked at him in awe: You're the guy in the truck?

Back home, Alisa Whitby sat her son down at the kitchen counter and cut out the shapes of two semi-trucks and a pickup out of scratch paper. Now, tell me again what happened, she said to him.

Whitby slept like a baby that night, just like most nights. His wife did not.

At first, Camille intentionally avoided the now-famous picture of her husband -- the one showing a young man wedged into the crumpled remains of a pickup, two tractor trailers looming on each side.

"I knew it was bad," she said. "Smashed between two semis, it's not going to be good."

"It's unreal how bad it is."

Every time she sees the picture now, she pauses. She reaches out to pinch her husband's freckled arm: "Yep," she laughs, "he's still here."

At first, Whitby didn't understand what all the hubbub was about. Gradually, as he helped his father feed cows in between calls from the media, the scope of the wreck dawned on him. He talked to CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and Japan's FUJI TV.

Maybe the little things don't matter to him as much as they used to -- such as his well-worn boots that are somewhere in the wreckage of his truck, along with the gym bag that carried workout clothes and reminders of his weightlifting days. Maybe he won't sweat the small stuff quite so much.

"I make sure to say thank you more often," he said.

But he's not scarred by his near-death experience. He's not reliving it or paralyzed by it. He's not a different man, just one with a heck of a story.

About 24 hours after the accident, he did what he does every Sunday morning: Drove his family to church.

Whitby and his wife both teach Sunday school at the same church he attended as a child, seven miles from home. He leads the teenage boys' class and started Sunday's class as he would any other, with a familiar question:

"How was your week?"

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@cityhallwatch