Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye.

Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, that rollicking weekly reader-interactive feature of this humor-based newsletter. Today’s subject is The Crippling Fear of Death. Specifically, I am seeking true anecdotes about a time you thought you were a goner. You may interpret that however you wish. I seek the unusual, oddities with interesting specifics: Times — justified or not — when you thought the end might be pretty damn imminent. And were wrong. The dead need not apply.

Funny is good, but not necessary.

My best anecdote occurred in 1980, when I was an editor at The National Law Journal. A story came across my desk about a coal mining company in West Virginia that was threatened by a workers’ strike because they were allegedly violating all sorts of conservation laws, most notably that they were reducing a handsome mountain into a gigantic mutant thumb recovered from a deadly chemical fire, and befouling nearby rivers into toxic soups of goo.

I began making phone calls, but getting nowhere with the mining company. They really didn’t seem to want a story, for some reason, but they also didn’t want to cooperate in telling me how environmentally pristine they were. One day I got a furtive phone call by a man who didn’t identify himself by name. I cannot remember the pseudonym he used … it was odd, something like “Dmitri.” He said he was a mid-level exec at the mine. He was half-whispering real fast, kindoflikethis.

Dmitri wanted me to Dmeet him, on a specific day and time, onsite, at the “active workings,” which is mine lingo for the place the actual digging was being done. He said he would introduce me as a relative, and secretly show me the bad. He seemed particularly insistent that I not tell anyone about his identity, which was fine with me because I actually didn’t know anything about his identity. He said I couldn’t bring a notebook because I’d be sussed out if I were taking notes. He said he’d be there when I arrived, and would know me on sight.

With the approval of my newspaper, I got permission to go. I flew to a city (Charleston, I think), rented a car and then drove many miles to the mine. From the distance, it didn’t look like a mine, it looked like a mountain with a monk’s tonsure. The entire top was bald of life, unlike the mountains nearby.

It turned out that to get to my rendezvous point with Dmitri, I would have to drive something like 15 miles up a dirt road that spiraled the mountain as it drew near to the top. I started on my journey. At the bottom, the dirt road was about 20 feet wide. It kept narrowing as I drove. It also was gradually become less road and more dirt.

After driving maybe four miles, I began to notice something. The dirt was beginning to scrape the bottom of my small rental car. The middle of the road was getting higher than the tires. Dmitri had not warned me about this. Dmitri, in fact, had warned me about nothing. Dmitri, in fact, had been weird. I knew nothing about him. And then is when I realized I was going to die.

Cellphones had not yet been invented. I was out of contact with the world. I was on a mission hostile to the powers that ruled my environs. I was on a road that would likely soon incapacitate my car. I could not turn back. Three men who were large, which miners tend to be, could easily cow-tip my little car off a cliff 50 feet deep.

I stopped the car. The sides of the road, at this point, gave me maybe two-foot clearance on either side. The turf on the sides was crumbly. There was simply no way to turn around and high-tail it out of there.

Have you ever driven two miles in reverse in an unfamiliar car on a nine-foot-wide path, on the side of a mountain, while fearful for your life? It takes about an hour. I did it. I was soaking in sweat.

I got back to the city, and back into a plane, and back to my home base in New York, storyless. I was humiliated, especially since I soon came to believe Dmitri had probably been legit. I cannot remember precisely how I learned that, but I did.

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That’s your task today: What is a time, rightly or wrongly, that you feared for your immediate demise?

Rachel has one. It is gentle, but eerie. As a young woman, she was walking with a group in a pedestrian tunnel in a station in the London Tubes when a strange, haunting sound came from a person coming toward her group. He was whistling the creepy refrain from the Steam song: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey, hey, Goodbye.”

In that instant, at that particular time in history — not long after 9/11 — she realized he was probably a suicide bomber. She braced for the worst.

He wasn’t. He just kept walking, weaving through the crowd.

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I’m inclined to give you wide leeway for how you interpret this challenge. Any thoughts on it — particularly funny ones — will do, so long as they fit the bill. For example, I am going to repeat a bit of practical-joke lore that fits the bill. If you know of something like that, send it in:

Scene: a bar in Bangor, Maine. At one end sits a big-city Midwestern hick, and a local. The hick tells the barkeep that he’d like to try fresh oysters for the first time in his life. He pronounces them “eye-sters.” The bartender opens six of them, puts them on ice, and slides them over, with cocktail sauce and a slice of lemon. The hick looks at them warily, gulps, and sloshes one down, right from the shell.

The local guy gives the ‘tender a wink, and says to the hick, with a horrified expression, “My GOD, man, you didn’t eat that thing whole, did ya?”

“Sure did,” says the hick.

“MAN, DID YOU BITE INTO FIRST?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Good God, that thing is still alive! It’ll chew through your innards and bust ‘em open real good, inside you!”

“Omigod, what can I do????”

The local guy reaches for a pint bottle of hot sauce.

“If you have any chance of killing it, you have to chug this down in two minutes…”

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See you all on Tuesday.