Actually, it wasn't. There were two priors but they were a few winters back on the ice and don't count because everybody slips on ice. Nothing unusual in that. The one I'm talking about now was a whopper, the mother of all falls, one completely unexpected, seriously designed to shatter bones and put this poor sucker in a home. One second I was up; the next second down. Here's how.
We have maple, apple, and Norwegian spruce trees behind our house, gnarled and ancient, and last winter's seven foot blizzard snapped thick limbs off those old trees as if they were cheap chopsticks. The following spring my brother, Joel, came up from Maryland to help me turn those broken limbs into firewood. We got out the chainsaw and went to work. Two guys, yo. "Ice Road Truckers", "Axe Men" -- Catch us on the Discovery channel, yo! The limbs on the ground were the easiest. Cut here. Cut there. Yo, y'all! Fireplace logs!
One piece remained: a substantial limb hanging from the trunk by a wooden hinge created when the limb snapped. We cut through the hinge but the limb hung up on a tangle of smaller branches. So I carefully worked it down to the ground where, since we were on a small rise, it began to roll. Slowly but inexorably it rolled. Either it was going to take me down at the ankles, or I'd have to jump over it. Which I did. Up and over it. Just as I was in the midst of congratulating myself for being so nimble at such an advanced age, I was suddenly airborne and hit the ground smack solid on my right hip. Full on. My brother said it looked like I'd bounced about six inches. It felt like a ten pound sledge hammered into my hip. I was certain I had broken it and about half the bones in the rest of my body, but I lay there cautiously wiggling everything I could wiggle until I convinced myself nothing was broken. Everything worked. Hold the 911. Still, it hurt, and, when my brother made to help me up,I let him. I walked around in circles for awhile trying to walk it out. Then we finished cutting up the log and went back to the house.
By this time it was painful to put my foot down. My hip sported a bruise the size of a hub cap and the color of rot. But I was absolutely certain that nothing was broken, and, to prove it, I'd walk up the seventeen steps to our second floor.
Just let me sit here a minute.
Time's up! Move it out!
And so I started up the steps determined to get to that landing way far up there higher than it had ever been before. Someone had moved it. Obviously. I do not need to belabor how awful were the next few eons of my life except to say this: pain shot through me with every step, but I could not stop. To stop would be to never again be able to take another step, and I had to get to that landing, didn't I? It didn't occur to me that this was ridiculous. It just had to be done, that's all. So, I did it, and it turned out nothing was broken after all.
But why did I do such a thing when I didn't have to? Masochism? There was no pleasure in this pain, though there was a flush of satisfaction upon reaching the second floor landing. Still, I wouldn't call it masochistic. The root of it goes deeper than that. It made me think about my father.
My father was a cripple. He suffered from a deforming condition known as Paget's. Nowadays an injection can cure it, but my father was born in 1900 when nothing could be done. He had been a straight and handsome man, but, by the time he died his legs were terribly bowed, his head was too big for his body, his shoulders dropped. He walked with the aid of two metal canes and had survived terrible internal damage brought about as his body closed in on itself. His organs, jammed into a smaller and smaller cavity, stopped working properly. Still, at the end of his life, the man remained on his feet working twelve hour days. I never once heard him complain, not about anything really, and certainly not his condition. A doctor told us that when my father walked it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. Yet, not only didn't he complain, my brother, sister, and I never thought of him as a cripple! I was truly puzzled when my wife, Jamie, held a picture of him in her hand and said, "I didn't know your father was crippled." "What're you talking about?" I asked. "Look at this," she said and made her point by getting me to look hard. My father really was a cripple. I'd never thought of him as that before. How much pain and dismay he must have felt! How hard it must have been for him to maintain his dignity! How could he not be angry? At whom? At God? He just didn't talk about it.
Many years after his death I walked across a substantial piece of Alaska with a local trapper who was preparing his line for the winter. We were a good twenty miles in when we separated for a week. He went down the line, and I roamed out from where I was. I'd bought a new pair of LL Bean hiking boots and prepared for the trip by running in them. But I came down with some kind of bronchial mess and couldn't get those boots worked in the way I would have preferred. I wore them, anyway, and, before we cleared our first stretch of these dreadful hummocks which slipped from side to side, I regretted it. There was no way to get good purchase. I never imagined the terrain would be that difficult. Mike, the trapper, moved ahead so quickly I couldn't keep up. He'd say, "I'll meet you in the saddle of that mountain", point, and disappear. By the time we reached the first line cabin twenty miles in, my feet were raw and bleeding, so I opted to stay where I was while he went ahead. I wanted to experience the solitude.
I warmed up some spruce pitch, rubbed it on my feet then bandaged them until I could barely get my boots on again. It worked well enough for me to hobble around and get a decent look at where I was, but I couldn't help but wonder how in the world I was going to hike the twenty miles back to the village? It didn't occur to me that I wouldn't do it. I just wondered how? I should have stayed off my feet while Mike was gone, but how many times would I ever be alone in the middle of Alaska? I wanted to take advantage of it to see as much of it as I could. By the time Mike came back a week later, the top layers of skin on both my feet were gone, and I could barely stand. If I could have taken off those damned boots and burned them I would have, but I couldn't do twenty miles of no trail in my stocking feet. Mike didn't think I could do it at all, and said he'd send a medevac back for me. "No, you won't," I insisted, "I'll get out." I was not about to have anyone come in and get me. "If you're not back in three days, look for the chopper," he said, took off, and disappeared around a bend in the river in less time than it took me to tie my boot laces. That river turned out to be a godsend. I walked in it as much as possible to numb my feet in the cold water. Without that water I couldn't have walked at all.Fifteen miles down, two days later, I had to leave the river and follow an old, grown over cat trail (made long ago by a Caterpillar bulldozer) the rest of the way to the village. I had never been in such pain in my life. I wore a backpack and carried a rifle which only made it more difficult. I banged my fists on my thighs and screamed at myself to keep going. If I stopped I'd never start again. Move! Move! Move! One skinless foot shuffling after the other. Move it! Move it! Your father didn't stop, and neither will you! When he walked, remember, it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. Remember? "You have a pack on your back," I said to myself. "Is that what this is all about? My father?"
Maybe. But I'm more comfortable giving you fact than conjecture.
I gasped with relief when I finally spotted chimney smoke. I'd made it, and that night Mike, his Athapaskan wife, and a couple of pick-up trucks packed with local tribesmen took me out and got me numb drunk.
I left those boots behind and haven't seen them since.
