May 06, 2020 / By mobanmarket
FAIRFIELD, IA — After trudging around in the mud for hours, falling face down in it once and laying there for two hours before she gained the strength to pull herself up, a 72-year-old woman from Nova Scotia spent more than three days stranded in her car in southeast Iowa Thanksgiving weekend. To make Terry Harnish’s predicament worse, howling winds tossed about a foot of snow around before she was rescued.
Harnish stayed alive by periodically snacking on marzipan cake and drinking from a bottle of kombucha. She turned her small Nissan on and off during the long ordeal, though she first had to scrape it free of the mud that encased it. The ignition balked at the muddy key, so for several hours, Hornish lay in the cold back seat in her wet, muddy clothes.
Her ordeal started early Thanksgiving afternoon, when she left Maharishi University of Management, where she was staying during a visit to friends in Fairfield. She made a wrong turn on gravel road that eventually turned to greasy mud that sent her little car spinning.
“I journeyed by some farmhouses, and then went over a hill and another hill, and realized it was all mud and not paved,” she told the CBC News Network in Canada. “I was fishtailing through the mud. Thank heavens I’ve been a driver since I was 11, and I could [maneuver] through the mud.”
Hornish soon realized that no amount of prodding the car was going to get her on the way. The Nissan was buried in mud up to the axles. So, despite having only recently been through knee replacement surgery, she decided to walk out of the bog to one of the farmhouses she had passed. She kept getting stuck. After the first fall, the one that flattened her for two hours, she fell again, this time while trying to wipe mud from her shoes to make the walk easier.
If she was going to be rescued at all, it would be in her car, Harnish told the Des Moines Register.
“I knew getting back to the car was my best bet,” she said.
By the time she made it back to her car, it had been almost 12 hours since she left the university. It was around 1 a.m. on Friday.
Hornish spent two more days and nights in the car. She ran out of gas on Sunday, fortuitously the same day a group of snowmobilers discovered her car.
“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,” Hornish told CNC. “They looked inside the car and screamed, ‘Oh my god, she’s alive!’ “
By that time, relatives in Hubbards, Nova Scotia, where Hornish lives and is a beloved local storyteller, were frantic. Hornish’s friends had notified the Fairfield Police Department, which tried to trace her cellphone with no luck. Hornish hadn’t taken it with her.
Officers from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and Iowa State Patrol joined the Fairfield officers in a search, and a national missing persons alert was broadcast. The car was just too far off roads that are traveled in the winter, Fairfield Police Lt. Colin Smith told the Register.
Harnish told the newspaper that though “a bit concerned,” she never lost faith that her “angels and God would save me.”
“But I’m glad those boys came along,” she said.
Word spread quickly on social media that the Hubbards woman was missing.
“She’s so personal in her lively discussion with anybody that she meets that you just immediately fall for her,” Hornish’s niece, Robin Morrison, told CNC. “It’s no surprise to me that hundreds of people, within hours, were on the Terry train making sure that she’s safe. Because she’s that person that gives that extra all the time.”
Morrison figures her aunt got another good story out of her harrowing experience.
“My aunt Terry is a beautiful storyteller, and my immediate thought was, well, that’s going to be one for the books,” Morrison told CNC.
File photo via Shutterstock
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