Woman, 72, survives 4 days in her snow-covered car on fruitcake and kombucha
Terry June Harnish was looking forward to a fun Thanksgiving with friends after traveling from her home in Hubbards, Nova Scotia, all the way to Fairfield, Iowa. Before she made it to her destination on the holiday, however, the 72-year-old woman took a wrong turn that led to a bigger detour than she could’ve imagined — more than three days trapped in her car alongside a rural road.
Although she has been driving since age 11, according to what the Canadian told CBC, she seemed to be unprepared for the unpaved roads that led her past a number of farmhouses. Suddenly she found herself fishtailing through mud, and after she got out of that situation, she went over an embankment and got stuck.
“I was up to my axles in mud,” she told the outlet, leading her to step out of the car to try to walk to get help. After hours of unsuccessfully walking and falling through the mud, she ended up back in her Nissan at around one o’clock in the morning.
“My car keys were so encrusted in mud I couldn’t get them in the ignition,” she continued, “so I lay there on the seat soaking wet all night, shivering up a storm.”
Harnish’s dilemma only got worse. Temperatures dropped and a blizzard began, which deposited 11 inches of snow by Sunday. After scraping the mud off the keys her first morning in the car, she started up the car and ran it to warm up for short periods of time. With no access to a gas station, and a very limited supply of food or drink, the woman had to use her resources very wisely.
“I had a fruitcake that I’d bought that morning — a Christmas fruitcake — and two bottles of kombucha,” she said. “That was it, for four days.”
Harnish also didn’t have a working cellphone, making it harder for the Fairfield Police Department to find her even though her friends had filed a missing person’s report.
Finally on Sunday, two boys on a snowmobile unexpectedly came to Harnish’s rescue.
“I’d put my hazard lights on when I heard them approaching and my headlights. And they stopped their snowmobiles, and they were just teenagers,” she said. “They looked inside the car and screamed, ‘Oh my god, she’s alive!'”
Harnish has yet to respond to Yahoo Lifestyle’s request for comment. However, she shared with the Des Moines Register just how fortunate she feels to have survived.
Luckily, she’s known around her hometown of Hubbards as a professional storyteller who often shares her own personal journeys. Now it seems she has another miraculous tale to share: “I was thinking ‘Oh boy, this is going to be a new Terry Tale.'”
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