It was a sweltering afternoon in Yellowstone National Park.  I could feel the weight of my daypack pressing down on my shoulders and feel the sweat running down my back.  My family and I were on a vacation and we have been hiking along a path for about an hour.  “Are we there yet?” I asked.     

“Almost,” my mom replied.  When we arrived, there was a deep spring that was on the side of the path.   The spring was clear sky colored blue in the center and tinged with a touch of green.  The water near the rocks were in a dark yellow and orange color.  As the water touched the rocks it turned into a rusty red color.  “Isn’t it beautiful?”  my mom exclaimed. 
 
    “Meh” I said, indifferently.  Afterwards, we sat down sat down in the soft dirt to eat lunch.  I opened my lunch and inside the aluminum wrap was a burrito that my mom had made this morning, which released delicious and exciting smells into the air.  Inside the tightly wrapped burrito was a slice of ham, eggs, and onions.  After we ate our lunch, we began to hike back to our car.  As we walked back, I stepped on something squishy.  I looked down and saw that I stepped in a giant pile of dog poop.  “Blech! Disgusting!”  I shouted.  My sister just laughed.  

After about half an hour of walking, we had dragged our feet back to the parking lot where the rental car had been sitting all day.  When we all had crawled inside, I started buckle my seatbelt but as I reached down, a jolt of pain shot through my hand.   “YACK!” I cried out.  The metal was so hot that my finger swelled up to twice its normal size.  Eventually I used my sleeve and pulled my seatbelt on and we took off. 

My dad was driving the car back to the hotel, my sister was on her phone,  my mom was reading a map, while me with nothing to do soon fell fast asleep with my sister’s soft K-pop music playing in the background. 

I do not know how long I was asleep.  I was dreaming about how awesome the next episode of the anime that I was currently watching was going to be.  I did not know what everybody else in the car was doing but according to what my dad told me afterwards,  he was staring at the scenery when it happened.   I woke up to the sound of scraping against the bottom of the car.

My eyes were still only half open as I stared out the window, to see what was happening.  What I saw looked like a scene from an action video game, where there is dirt and sparks flying off in different directions.  Then I realised that the car was crashing down  a steep hill with nothing at the bottom except for giant rocks.  My mom and my sister were busy freaking out while my dad desperately turned the wheel, attempting to slow the car’s momentum.  As we skidded down the hill, the car was starting to tilt on it’s side.  After a couple of seconds, the car rolled over and then flipped over completely.  Inside, my stomach did a backflip and I nearly barfed up my lunch.  As the car flipped around and around, the top of the car had begun to cave in, as sparks were flying off the metal scraping against the rock.  As the layer of cloth that covered the inside of the car was scraped off, my head was slammed against the bare metal and I blanked out.

After I regained my consciousness, I could not move at all.  My left leg was jammed under a heavy piece of metal.  My right arm was tightly pinned between hood of the car and a part of a door.  My left arm was gushing blood from a wound that was made from a piece of metal that cut into my arm.  What was the most frightening of all though was the fire.  A bright orange blaze reaching about 6 feet in the air was beginning to close in on me like how a pack of wolves close in on their prey.  Already, my forehead was glistening with sweat.  I felt as though my head was about to explode.  The metal around me was beginning to heat up and started burning through the hairs of my skin.  The fire was drawing closer and closer.  As it was about 1 foot away from me, I could almost feel the flames leaping onto my skin.   I kept on thinking to myself this is the end, this is the end, this is the end.    I squeezed my eyes tight, twisted my face, and braced myself  as if I was having a bad dream.  Then I felt the pressure of the heavy metal begin to ease.  I looked up and my dad was standing there, quickly tossing aside the metal pieces.  He grabbed me by the arm and gave me a hard jerk, and then my leg was free.  Only a moment before the fire reached me, my dad yanked me out and tossed me to safety  Seconds later, flames engulfed where I would have been if it weren’t for my dad.

There was a long moment of silence as my dad helped me back up to the top of the rocky slope.  The sun was beginning to set in the distance and the sky glowed in a pretty orange color.  All of a sudden, I started crying, the pain of my bleeding arm disappeared and I gave my family the longest hug I had ever given them.  After a while, the ambulance arrived and began examining us to see if we were okay.  Even though we told them we were all fine.  They still took me to the hospital anyway, to treat my arm.  After a couple hours at the hospital, they determined that the metal didn’t cut through anything important, so they just bandaged up my arm nice and snug.  When we arrived at the apartment the next morning, I just plopped myself down on the couch and slept for the rest of the day.   That is why to this day, I almost never bike, almost never travel, and never want to drive my own car in the future.