Woman, 88, survives six days in wrecked car

VANCOUVER, Wash. – An 88-year-old woman, trapped in her car for six days after driving off the road on the way home from the grocery store, sustained herself by wiping condensation off the windshield with a towel and sucking the moisture, her son says.

Mary Lillian Anderson was treated at Southwest Washington Medical Center and sent home Thursday.

She was rescued Wednesday by a truck driver who peered inside the car after he noticed it stuck in blackberry bushes just off Interstate 5. He says he was braced for the sight of a body.

“She was sitting right there, staring back at me,” said Andrew Thompson, who delivers propane in Clark County. “She looked very happy.”

Anderson disappeared Jan. 6 after she misjudged a corner, drove across a broad, gravel-covered shoulder and tipped her car into a steep drop-off filled with blackberry bushes.

Her 1997 Cadillac Seville was hidden from view but within earshot of I-5.

She was reported missing Jan. 7 when her neighbors at the Whipple Creek Condominiums noticed she hadn’t come home.

The Clark County Sheriff’s Office issued a missing persons report but did not conduct a search because they didn’t know where to begin, Detective Rick Buckner said. When Buckner found no activity on Anderson’s credit cards or bank account, he feared she was dead.

Sometime Monday or Tuesday, a deputy pulled a car over in the gravel turnout a few feet from Anderson’s car, but blackberry bushes and other brush blocked the officer’s view of her car.

Thompson said the height of his truck’s cab gave him a perfect view Wednesday of the cranberry-colored car down the embankment.

“If there had been leaves on the trees, I don’t think she would have made it. I wouldn’t have been able to see her,” he said.

“The lady is just very, very lucky to be alive,” Buckner said.

Thompson said he tried to open the car door but found it wedged shut.

“I yelled back to her that I was going to get help,” he said. He climbed back up the bank, called 911, and then went back to the car. In time he was able to wrench open the door, and he waited with Anderson for rescue crews.

“She held my hand,” he said.

One of Anderson’s sons, Rob Johnson, of Pendleton, Ore., said his mother’s groceries were out of reach in the trunk. She kept herself distracted by harvesting water and by praying, talking to her guardian angel and counting to 500 and back, over and over again, he said.

“We’re very thankful to him,” he said of Thompson. “He’s definitely sort of an angel.”