My truck plunged into a ravine – and for six days I was trapped, alone and afraid

Pinned inside his vehicle, Matthew Reum waited for help to come. But no one knew he had gone missing …. Matthew Reum was driving home late on a dark, foggy night in Indiana when his headlights landed on what looked like a deer. As he swerved, his truck barrel-rolled down a ravine, into the creek beneath Interstate 94.

It was 20 December 2023, and Reum, a boiler-man, was 27. He was flung between his seat and the ceiling, losing consciousness as the airbags activated and the windows shattered around him. He remembers coming to and finding he was wet, it was dark and “not miserably cold, but it’s winter,” he says, “so it’s probably 30F [-1C]”. He knew he didn’t have any food or water in the car, but wasn’t too concerned. Someone must have seen him swerve, he thought.

Unable to free himself from the truck, he sounded the horn, but it was silent, as was the vehicle’s onboard emergency call system. He searched for his phone and called out to Siri, both to no avail. He then began yelling for help. “In my mind, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do in a situation like that,” says Reum, a fan of TV survival shows such as Man Vs Wild and Naked and Afraid. “There’s a lot of small things I’ve picked up and my mind’s just scrolling through them, trying to find what I need to do to survive. I probably do that for the better part of an hour.”.

No one came that night. Matthew Reum visits for the site of the crash for the first time. At first, no one even knew Reum was missing. Since graduating from high school in 2014, he had worked at power plants, refineries and steel mills, often taking jobs out of state and staying away for months at a time. “Most holidays, I would either spend working, because you get great money, or I would be out travelling and enjoying life,” he says. The year before, he had gone camping by himself for Christmas. “I’ve always liked being outdoors, just that sense of peace and calm.”.

He was off work for the holidays when he crashed, so colleagues didn’t notice his absence, and friends and family knew he had planned to attend a funeral in Missouri before heading to Colorado for a ski trip. “No one knew where I was,” he says in his book about the ordeal, Still Standing. “No one would think to come looking.”.

As it dawned on him that help might not arrive imminently, or at all, he also became more aware of his injuries. “My face is cut up, and I’ve got window glass all over me,” he says. “My right hand is already starting to swell – I don’t know if that’s sprained or broken, I just know that it’s hurting, but I’m also trying not to let it get the best of me.”.

The truck had landed engine first, the engine hood crumpling inwards, obstructing his view out of the windscreen. His legs were trapped, with the steering column and dashboard pushed towards his lap. “There is stuff digging into my shin – I can’t tell what, but I can wiggle my toes on my right foot,” he says. “I notice I’m not really able to feel part of my left leg any more. I’m thinking, this is just a horrible dream. My brain is still in disbelief.”.

Despite his predicament, Reum focused on keeping clean and hydrated. “I figured if I stayed on top of those, I’d be able to survive until someone found me.” On the second day, it rained. “My truck had a sunroof, which had shattered during the wreck, but there was a sunscreen that I realised I could fold to direct the rain.” At first, he drank the rainwater by cupping it in his hands, “and that is the worst water I have ever tasted. It’s everything that’s been washed off the highway: diesel and rubber from car tires, and dirt and mud and animal matter. It tasted like death.” He changed tack, using a spare pair of sweatpants as an improvised filter, then giving himself a sponge bath.

On the back seat, there was a toolkit. “I start pulling and yanking at all the bits of the dash that have broken off, tearing it off and throwing it outside my truck. If it had a nut or bolt on it, I was trying to take it apart – not just to get out of there but to give myself a little bit more room. It was also giving me a sense of accomplishment, helping my mental and emotional state just to have these little victories.”.

But for every triumph, there were failures that left him feeling defeated. He could hear hundreds of cars driving across the bridge above him, but wasn’t able to alert them. He considered amputating his own legs, to escape the truck. “A lot of my lowest points coincided with when I didn’t have any water, which can wreak havoc on your brain. It felt like I made more progress and was more hopeful when it rained.”.

As the days passed, “there was definitely a sense of panic”, he says, “but I’ve not had the best circumstances growing up – a lot of the time, that panic and emotion have to be put on the backburner while I figure out what to do”. In his book, he writes about how he was diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) as a teenager, a condition common among those who spent their childhoods in eastern bloc orphanages, as Reum did before he was adopted from Kaliningrad, Russia, when he was three.