As the F-150 continued its graceful arc in front of the propane truck, I felt calm and exceptionally alert. My eyesight seemed to be functioning at a much higher level of intensity than normal as it took in the smallest details of my environment. I saw the intricate ice formations on the metal armature of the passenger’s-side windshield wiper, and the three-dimensional effect in the colorful wrapping of the gift box next to me.

Not only could I see with vastly greater granularity than normal, I had time to ponder what I saw. My mind, it seemed, was making more time, as needed, so that the information flowing in could be processed into thought and memory and turned into actionable intelligence.

We were now sliding backward at about fifty-five miles per hour, while also drifting slightly east, because that was the last steering move I had made before losing control. I studied the vectors as though they’d been drawn in marker on the windshield. It appeared that our present course and speed would carry us across the path of the propane truck before it hit us, and we would slide off the east side of I-91 North, facing south, where there was a width of shoulder, and also, I noted with newly enhanced peripheral vision, a snowy, uphill bank that would absorb the impact on my side of the truck. At this point, about two seconds had passed since I had lost control.

The question was, would we hit a guardrail first? If we did, which seemed likely, as we were in mountainous terrain, we’d bounce back into the road and be struck by the cars behind the truck. And yet, although our lives, as well as the lives of other travellers, depended on this point, it appeared to my mind merely a matter of fact-checking. Either there was a guardrail or there wasn’t. Whether we lived or died as a result seemed to be of no greater consequence.

Turning to look out the back, I removed my hands from the wheel altogether. Muscle memory balked at this, and was swiftly overruled—steering could only interfere, at this point, with the path we were already on. I met the dog’s eyes first, and saw that they were two shades of brown, and how the red part in the droopy corner was wrinkled and blackish. My mind seemed to settle itself with these details.

As my gaze swung up to the rear window, passing over Rose (now smiling at a scene in the movie), my peripheral vision caught a guardrail, but I couldn’t judge its distance because my center vision was unexpectedly occupied by a metallic square on Rose’s lap that looked like the tongue of an unbuckled seat belt. Her seat belt was unbuckled. She must have undone it when I went to get the Skittles.

That stopped time completely, and I was replaying the memory of tossing the bag and saying “Early Christmas present” when we hit.

In Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Peyton Farquhar, a Southern planter, is lured into a trap by a Yankee scout and caught trying to sabotage a railroad bridge. Sentenced to hang from it, the condemned man, neck “in the hemp,” peers down at the swirling waters below, troubled by an unidentified clanging sound—“a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil.” Bierce, who had known terror as a Union soldier at the Battle of Shiloh and elsewhere, dryly informs the reader, “What he heard was the ticking of his watch.” Farquhar’s eyesight has grown similarly acute; after his seemingly miraculous escape from the gallows, Bierce’s hero notices, on the far shore of the river, “the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf—saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig.”

In 1892, two years after Bierce’s story first appeared, in the San Francisco Examiner, Albert Heim, the Swiss geologist (not Aribert Heim, the Nazi), published “Notizen über den Tod durch Absturz,” or “Remarks on Fatal Falls,” the first empirical study of the unique psychophysiological state of seemingly imminent death, in the yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club, after delivering a lecture on the subject to the club. The paper was based in part on Heim’s own experience of a nearly seventy-foot fall in the Alps, more than twenty years earlier, when he was a student, the protégé of the great Swiss geologist of the day, Arnold Escher von der Linth. As he fell, Heim noticed both a distortion of time and high-level mental processing. He reflected on a lecture on Alpine geology he was to give in five days. “I thought of taking off my glasses and throwing them away so that the splinters from them might not injure my eyes,” he writes.

Over the years, as Heim spoke with others who had also survived potentially fatal falls—not only Alpinists but workers who had fallen from scaffolding—he found that their experiences closely resembled his own. “Mental activity became enormous, rising to a 100-fold velocity of intensity,” he goes on. “The relationships of events and their probable outcomes were overviewed with objective clarity. No confusion entered at all. Time became greatly expanded. The individual acted with lightning-quickness in accord with accurate judgment of his situation” and exhibited an absence of “paralyzing fright of the sort that can happen in instances of lesser danger”; instead, he felt “calm seriousness, profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and a sense of surety.” Heim, a talented artist and writer, inclines toward mysticism in the second half of his paper—he sees roseate clouds and feels inner peace, and experiences what would today be called a panoramic life review, a highlight reel of one’s own Olympics. He undermines his scientific objectivity somewhat at the end of his paper when he says that his experience gave comfort to his mother, who had lost two of her other sons to fatal climbing accidents. He wanted her to know that they felt no pain in their deaths.

Heim did, in fact, deliver his geology lecture five days after his fall. At only twenty-three, he was chosen to be von der Linth’s successor as professor of general geology at the Swiss Polytechnic, in Zurich. He became a celebrated scientist, publishing more than four hundred scholarly papers, and practicing muscular outdoor geology. He married Marie Vögtlin, the first female physician in Switzerland, and over the course of their long, busy life together they campaigned against alcohol and tobacco, bred Swiss mountain dogs, and touted the societal benefits of cremation, among other enthusiasms.

Albert Einstein was a student at the Swiss Polytechnic, matriculating at age seventeen, in 1896. He graduated four years later. He attended Heim’s lectures (on the geology of mountain ranges, among others), and remembered them in later life as “magical”; he was less kind about his physics professor. Einstein’s first paper on special relativity, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” was published in 1905, and it included the theory that time is not a constant flowing stream but a kind of web that can expand and contract relative to the motion of the perceiver. In theory, we all move in our own time. Whether Einstein heard Heim’s lecture on his fall (“Time became greatly expanded”) is unknown, but is not unlikely. Einstein later said that the theory of special relativity was inspired by his watching window-washers from his desk at the Patent Office in Bern, where he worked, and imagining the sense of weightlessness a worker would feel if he fell from atop his ladder. That brought what Einstein called “the happiest thought”—that acceleration alters the effects of Newton’s laws of gravity, which led to the idea that at the speed of light, energy and mass become interchangeable. In theory, this too too solid flesh does melt.