WYMAN TOWNSHIP – Everyone at the Eustis biomass plant where Sheree Brown works was telling her, “I told you not to pick up hitchhikers,” Brown said Thursday. They weren’t referring to normal hitchhikers.
Brown, 40, of Bingham, said she was surprised Wednesday on her way to work on Route 27 in Wyman Township when a moose jumped out at her and landed mostly in the passenger side of the car.
She can laugh now, she said, but at the time it wasn’t funny.
She was going over a little bridge, Brown said, and when she came to the end of it the moose jumped right into her path.
“I was afraid she would come into my side and I would be rassling with a moose,” Brown said, “so I swerved into the other lane. I could see far enough ahead to know that no one was coming. After she was on the hood, I couldn’t see. I was able to drive the vehicle back into my lane.”
Brown was traveling north on Route 27 at about 8 a.m. Wednesday, and when she struck the moose, which went airborne and came down on the windshield on the passenger side of her 1995 Subaru station wagon, Franklin County Sheriff’s Deputy Aaron Turcotte said Thursday.
The moose, which Turcotte estimated to be about 650 pounds, sheared the roof of the car back several feet, and the moose’s legs got twisted on the door frame of the passenger’s side, Turcotte said.
The moose was still alive for a brief period, Brown said, but all she could think of was getting out of the car before it started thrashing around.
It died shortly after the collision, Turcotte said.
“Thank God it did die,” he said, because if it did start thrashing, Brown could have been seriously hurt.
As it was, Turcotte said, Brown had scrapes and cuts from the glass.
“If it had been 6 inches more to the driver’s side, the accident would have been much more severe,” Turcotte said.
Brown had her seat belt on, Turcotte said, which also prevented her from getting seriously hurt.
It was a big joke around the Boralex Stratton Energy plant Thursday, she said, where she works.
“Everybody at work tells me, I told you not to pick up hitchhikers,'” she said.
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