Dialogue: More went down than All Blacks

By ROANNE PARKER

How was your weekend? Yeah, okay, apart from the game. Well, while you were all being whipped into a frenzy of anticipation of the whipping we didn't manage to give the Wallabies, some other stuff was going down.

As she drove up to a house party in the Puhoi Valley on Friday night, the loose surface and the narrow stretch of road scared Anne-Sophie and she tightened the slack in her seatbelt. The road had been re-metalled that day, although there were no signs to warn of that as she swerved slightly to miss a pair of possum eyes shining in the dark.

The back wheel slipped over the edge of the road. The car slid and then started to roll down the steep, tree-covered bank. The first roll was very slow, almost slow motion, and as the car came to right itself Anne-Sophie was shaken, but okay.

Then the car gained momentum and rolled again, faster and faster, until it smacked into a tree and, as we later discovered, an old fridge.

Terrified to move and set the car off again, and still conscious, the first thing she did was to reach through where the window had been and pull off some bark to check if the tree was alive - likely to hold firm and stop the car continuing down the next 40m of hillside - or dead.

The tree was alive, and in one of many coincidences that show it wasn't her turn to die, her mobile phone was still at the far end of the squiggle cable she had plugged it into to recharge. She slowly wound it in and phoned her husband, who had come up the road an hour before her.

"Where are you?" he asked

"I'm in the trees," she replied hysterically.

"You mean you're in the bush?" he asked, well used to correcting her French-accented English.

"No, I'm in the trees. I can see only trees, no ground, no road."

He grabbed his climbing gear and jumped into his car with a friend. They reached the spot and he harnessed himself up and took some straps with him down the 12m drop.

They tied the car to a few more trees to make it less likely to fall away and the emergency crews arrived to cut her out. Anne-Sophie and James were choppered to Auckland Hospital and during the long night of tests she told everyone who came near her that, no, she had not been drinking or doing drugs, and, yes, she was wearing her seatbelt.

She was in shock, of course, and utterly terrified, but she escaped with an assortment of bruises.

(As an aside worthy of a TV commercial, another woman admitted that night had had a much less dramatic crash on an ordinary city road, but had not been wearing her seatbelt. She died.)

I picked them up on Saturday morning and offered to drive them home, but Anne-Sophie was white, shaking and grimly determined to go to see the remains of her uninsured BMW, which had been winched up the hill and towed to Warkworth.

I took them both up to the house where the party was to have been and where James' four-wheel-drive, trailer full of tools and two dogs were waiting. They set off to the tow yard but when they got there the bloke was off at another smash in Puhoi. On the way back to the house they discovered that accident and had to wait for an hour to get through.

Two rainy hours later, they went back down the hill to try again to see the wrecked car. The bridge had several centimetres of water running over it since the river was swollen, but it was no worries for a big truck like James' so they went for it.

At that second a huge surge of water came over the bridge, swamping the car. James helped the tired, bruised and shocked Anne-Sophie on to the roof and struggled to get the dogs up, too.

The crew from Puhoi River Canoes saw them from their headquarters across the road and ferried back and forwards over the raging water in canoes to get them all to safety.

They sat, sodden and bereft, and had a cup of tea with their rescuers and watched for the water to abate. Instead, it continued to rise until it was up to the roof and the truck and trailer and all of James' tools for work were swept away until arrested by a rather large power pole.

On Saturday night, you might have seen James tell the TV3 news reporter that, yes, there was an awful lot of water in Puhoi and you can see the a couple of centimetres of red roof over there and well under that was the rest of his truck.

You wouldn't have heard the rest of it, though, but I thought you should - even if it's just to assure you that there are worse things than losing the rugby.