We’re all guilty of sleeping in every now and then, and the rush to throw clothes on and get out the door. But what if that simple action was what saved you from certain death?
Are you familiar with the concept of the ‘Butterfly Effect’? Clayton James wasn’t. Not until an accidental lay-in and a fuss over breakfast meant he wouldn’t leave for school on time. Shoveling cereal into his mouth, and watching the clock reach half-past, already feeling ill at the idea of being late for a school, he heard a sickening crunch. His mum raced to the kitchen window, yanking back the blind. Where the family car was supposed to be parked, instead a tree had entirely crushed it, the rotted trunk visibly snapped from the rest of the tree. Any other day, and Clayton would have been sat in that car.
Years on, Clayton can still recall the day: the panic in his mum’s voice as she called for his dad, explaining with what words she could manage that a tree had crushed their family car, his inability to eat the rest of his breakfast, the awkward conversation his dad had on the phone with his school. “I didn’t go in that day, obviously, not that we had any way to get there. I think the neighbours offered, but I was so shaken up by it. And I didn’t want to leave my mum alone. Not after that.”
The day was spent watching emergency vehicles and tree officers from council turn up, gesture obviously at the fallen tree, and attempt to do something about it. Clayton spent the day, and many, many after, replaying the potential outcomes of his day in all sorts of ways. What if he’d woken up on time? Could he have eaten his breakfast quicker, or entirely skipped it? Maybe if the weather had been windy, but not as windy… would that have delayed the tree’s collapse? “I can’t help, it used to be a nagging thing” he says, “what if’s, forcing this horrible scenarios into my mind and I couldn’t help it. Hell, the tree could’ve fallen in the opposite direction. Then it would’ve ended up in my bedroom.”
“I don’t sleep in, usually. Not then, not really now. Only if I’m ill. If I hadn’t overslept that day I don’t doubt we’d have been crushed. My mum would have told me to put my seatbelt on, I’d be fussing my with school uniform, and we’d hear that same sound. And then we’d be under it.”
His very own example of ‘The Butterfly Effect’, a concentrated case of chaos theory. How one small action, purposeful or accidental, entirely changed his circumstance.
Clayton even says, his life.
Initially a mathematical idea proposed back in 1972, it’s developed far beyond classrooms. Within pop culture terms, or as Clayton first recognized it from a video game he played named ‘Until Dawn’, it is the concept that actions, no matter how small, can lead to grand consequences, perhaps even fatal. Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in one country set off a tornado in another?
“I saw myself in it. I truly believe if I had been sat in that car even minutes before, I’d have died. I watched the clock tick. I knew what time we were usually in the car for.”
It did his anxiety ‘no favours’, as he describes it. At twenty-two he’s only just pursuing his driving license, the unshakeable sense of what might happen nagging at him from the back of his mind. “I’m determined to do it. It’s not a fear of the car. It’s the control, I think.”
When it comes to his driving license, no one is prouder that he’s wanting to achieve than his mum is.
“I was so worried he’d never want to do it. He watched his sister go after her license, and the joy on her face when she passed. But at the same time, she wasn’t there when it all happened.” Claire James recalls, remembering the teary little face of her son in his school uniform, “he used to be so fragile. He’ll hate me saying that, but he was. School was a big thing for him.”
Nothing really felt out of the ordinary that day for her, either. She’d woken up on time, rushed about getting packed lunches sorted, hurried Clayton out of bed when she realised the time, and then spent what felt like hours watching various people in hi-vis rip chunks of tree out of the roof of her car. “It was really surreal to watch. I feel sick now when I think about it, and whenever Clayton reminds me of how close we were to being sat in the front seat. I have half the mind to tell him to pack it in, but its his way of working it through in his head. It’s been some years, but the fear is still there.”
Her car was written off, and driven away on the back of a truck.
“We would have died if we were in there. Which feels weird to say, and even weirder to consider we were moments from death, really. If that tree had come down while we were sat in that car, we would’ve had no chance. The state of my car… I suppose I only ever read the odd article about trees falling over in bad weather, or at worse we’d end up with a neighbours rubbish having blown into our garden. I doubted that something on this scale could happen, that it could have taken us with it.”
Claire James
Claire had no issue getting back behind the wheel, but once they’d made the trip out eventually and bought another car, she changed where the parked it. “Not that the tree was there anymore” she joked, “but I bet my mind would’ve imagined something worse, and I would have assumed our house was cursed. Something like that.”
Her son had explained the ‘Butterfly Effect’ concept to her a few times, but it never really stuck. “I believe in karma, that’s about it. I can get why he thinks of the whole thing in that way. But I think we were just lucky. Or some sense of ‘someone was looking down on us’ or something like that. But I can understand why his mind works like that. Especially as he has the front bedroom. If that tree had a pick of directions, it was either towards the car, or backwards into his bedroom. He could’ve been in either.”
Clayton can only shrug, “It’s how I dealt with things. I truly believe that I was within minutes of dying. I’m better now. For a while I really hated sleeping in that room.” He says he begged his parents to move his bed around the room, until he felt safer tucked against the far wall. “But I got over that. Just as I’m now finally doing my theory test. I want to drive, I really do.”
“I just hope that nothing comes back to bother me again, or if you’ve ever seen Final Destination, I’m so sure that if something was to happen along those lines, it’d happen to me. An entire lorry’s worth of steel just flying through my front windscreen.” he suggests, and makes a face, “Maybe I shouldn’t say things like that, actually.”
Claire says that encouraging Clayton to go back to school was something she worried over, expecting absolute refusal over the matter. “I can’t particularly remember him being worried. One of his school friends stopped by to pick him up, and they parked down the street. I can only imagine he gave the grass verge a glance, but then he was off.”
For Clayton, it was a different story. “It was all a brave face, absolutely. Keep in mind, I’m still assuming the school-run now has the potential to be deadly. I just put a brave face on and marched off, and hoped I’d get there in one piece. And I did, of course I did. But a tree had crushed my mum’s car a day prior so I was rather shaken-up. Understandably. But then I got to school and I remember my mates being nosy and asking where I was, and I got to be like ‘my mum’s car got crushed by a tree’ and they found it awesome, and the teachers were reasonably horrified.”
The James family live in an entirely different home now, the chaos of that morning left to that home once they shut the door for the last time. At least, that’s what Clayton has tried to think. “Reasonably, I’m okay. There’s nothing going to happen to me. That was likely the closest brush with death I’m ever going to have. I’m going to complete my theory test, get my license, get a car. Likely park it in a garage.” While he tries to laugh about it, there is the serious side of it all that he doesn’t think he’ll ever shake. “I really consider my actions now. Or try and put one-hundred percent of myself into everything, because if something as daft as getting crushed by a tree on the school run can happen, then anything can. It’d be like someone getting hit by an ambulance. Ridiculously stupid but weirdly possible. I’ll try not to think about the bigger picture in terms of over-thinking all my actions. I’ll just get it done. And what happens, happens.”
But for the record, now Clayton always wakes up on time, and sometimes skips breakfast altogether. In the future, he might even consider a drive-thru breakfast once he gets his license.