Water Hazards (Near Drownings)
My first brush with death by water happened when I was all of five years old and in kindergarten in Cranbrook BC. I remember dad sending Derrick and I to school in the morning with “two-bits” for a very delicious, and the highlight of y day, carton of chocolate milk. I was walking with a friend and we made it a part of our walk to school to walk through a certain back alley and being winter, we would jump on the ice on the mud puddles and enjoy the cracking sounds, if not the wet feet. On this particular day, I found the mother of all mud puddles and found myself jumping up and down on the ice of a puddle the size a volkswagon, while my friend stood to the side laughing. As fate would have it, I managed to break through the ice and found myself waist deep in freezing water. That was only the start of my troubles because every time I tried to get back on solid ground I would slip back in until my friend managed to get me by the hand and pull me out. Being far more intelligent than I, he ran for help while I threw a little pity party and eventually I met my dad as I walked towards home. A fresh lunch bag, a warm change of clothes and a ride to school put me in better spirits though I didn’t smile until I got two bits for my chocolate milk!
The raft at Champion Lake
My next memory of near drowning was during the summer of ’81 while playing with some kids on a raft at Champion Lake. The raft was tethered to a log and every time more than a few kids climbed up in it, it would flip over, and we enjoyed a modified version of “King of the Castle”. At one point, I got the rope tangled around the rope as it flipped and I was pulled quite unwillingly on to the underside of the raft, though nobody noticed and in the seconds that my life hung on what little oxygen I had in my lungs, I ended up with swallowing water just as the flipping of the raft brought me around again like a rag doll. Kids being kids, no one took me very seriously and I was carelessly flipped back into the water though the rope had lost its deathly grip on me. I was able to swim a short distance, get to shore and thank my blessings.
Saved by a Cow
The coming of cold weather in Ymir in the late 1970’s and early 80’s signaled the freezing of our waterlines and the need to haul our household water from the river. We use to chain up Dads 4x4 Chev all the way around and back into the river and fill 45 gallon drums with buckets and then park in the shop at night. To this day, I bare the scars of rocking a frozen barrel with the top chiseled off with the result that I partially amputated my middle and ring finger tips. Mind you, I took the middle finger tip off in a motorcycle accident many years later anyway.
I was all of 13 years old and my biggest responsibility when I got home from school in the winter, was to take our cows and calves through the bush, down the railroad and to the river and water them. As the snow grew deeper, their hooves made long deep holes in the snow, nearly impossible to walk in and I developed the practice of riding my favourite cow, “Calfie” to the river and back. One day, as we approached the river, it had frozen over with about a 4” layer of ice and I managed to bust a small hole for them to drink from. Being impatient, Calfie decided to walk around the other cows and approach the hole in the ice from the other side. In an instant she broke through the ice and the current carried her downstream as she broke the ice in an attempt to keep her head in the air. Me, not being any smarter than my cow, decided that I should also jump in and try to save her, though it didn’t occur to me at the time that she weighed a thousand pounds and I weight a tenth of that. No matter, I jumped in and submerged in freezing water, my lungs exploding with the shock, and I grabbed her halter. It was about then that our roles switched and rather than I saving her, it became evident that she not only had to save herself, but the skinny teen hanging onto her nose as we continued down the river, her leaping up on the ice and it breaking under her weight. Finally after several leaps, the ice held her weight and she managed a leap onto the ice and onto the edge of the river, depositing me cold, wet and nearly dead on the edge of the ice. Now abandoned by my only ride home, with adrenalin coursing my veins, my winter boots full of freezing water and a fear of death, I was motivated to my feet and I trudged home on the railroad and up a difficult trail, after standing bare feet in the snow to dump my boots off. Whatever doesn’t kill you…
Rafting on Railway Ties
In the late winter of ’78, a work crew came down the railway and replaced the rotten railway tracks. I would visit their worksite in the evenings and as I spied the discarded railway ties, I had an epiphany. What if, I thought, I made myself a raft and went down the river? My dreams included leaving home, floating down the mighty Salmo River, joining the Pendoreile, the Columbia and finally somewhere in the states I would flow out into the Pacific and maybe even, with a strong wind, I could even make it to Hawaii if I had a sail. With grand plans like that, it wasn’t long before I was stealing the old railway ties and hiding them beside the river, though I remember their was still snow on the banks and the spring runoff had just begun, with fast currents and white water. Nonetheless, I brought a hammer and a bag of borrowed nails and some old planks and my first boat took shape. After several days of planning I decided to have a trial run, and directly after school I ran to the river, climbed on and used a pole to push off. As quick as I hit the water, two facts emerged, or rather submerged, One was that I wasn’t a good swimmer, and the other was that railway ties sink like rocks. With that information, I found myself standing on a raft as it was pushed down the river on top of the rocks. I was waist deep in the curly deep and swimming for my life for about a hundred and fifty feet when I finally caught an overhanging tree and managed my way to the rivers edge and finally up the bank with my bruised shins and ego and the realization that my plans for the day didn’t include the Pacific Ocean.
My first Row Boat
My older brother Derrick and I started working young. He got on as a labourer at a ranch when he was about 13 and when he started showing me the yields of such labour, I wanted a piece of the action. But being practical, he invested his hard earned money on tools and books while I, completely impractical, spent mine on candy and gifts for others. We were making $2.50 an hour at the time and doing dangerous work with no Workers Comp coverage though it never occurred to us at the time. In the summers, we would help out at the auctions and for whatever reason, we went in together on an old 13’ lapstrake rowboat which had seen many better days. This was a step up from my railway tie raft because there was a successful history of floating with this boat and there were even fish guts on the inside to boaster our confidence. So we initiated a plan to throw it in the river, load it with gear and see how far we could get in a weekend. Mind you, we packed enough for about a year and we had boxes, and bags and groceries and guns and axes and fishing poles but of course no life jackets due to lack of space. On the appointed hour on a Saturday morning we carried all down to the river and pushed off, to great success. This was the life and we enjoyed several miles of peaceful observations of the various flora and fauna before the unthinkable happened. We came around a corner only to discover, there blocking our path was a tree across the river and log jam. With no chance of retreat, we hit it square on and the nose of the boat dove under the log with water flooding in. Never once to sense fear before we were nearly dead, Derrick managed to get on the log while I handed things to him and we were able to save our supplies, though we accomplished it at the risk of being swept under the log jam and likely drowning in our attempts to get back out. Fortunately mother came to get us and our stuff and we never told dad about it.
My Second Rowboat
My brushes with death by water were not limited to my youth. Far into adulthood and into my late 30’s, my younger brother Wes and his friend Leigh invited me to spend a weekend on the other side of the mighty Columbia near Genelle. Our only means of transport was an 8’ car topper of mine, one that I had spent countless hours rowing my young sons around in. So one the appointed time and date, I arrived with the little wooden boat and we loaded it to the top with all of our gear, one dog, a couple of handmaid grenades and a lot of gunpowder, fuses and a few guns. For good measure I even threw in a couple of cast iron dutch ovens and we cast off, me at the oars, the waterline a scant 2” from the gunwales. The river is about 800 feet wide at that point and 200 feet into the crossing, we were already long past where we wanted to get to. Things were going okay until 600 feet across when we were suddenly broad sided by a 3’ wave which came over the edge of the boat and we began taking on water. It was only by the efforts of the three of us and the dog that we leaned to the high side to stop the inflow and as we spun out of control, I took to the paddles again and we crashed into the rocks ¼ mile from where we wanted to be. And aside from having to dry out a few things, we went onto make a good camp and have a wonderful weekend, complete with blowing a bunch of things up and playing various war games.
About now, you are probably thinking that I would have seen a pattern and developed a fear of drowning. I often say that my sole purpose on this earth is to provide an example for others of what not do to. And so, I will continue sharing my stories in the interest of making the world a better place. It was a hot summer day in the early 90’s and I rented a boat with my wife and another couple for a nice leisurely boat ride and picnic up Kootenay Lake. At one point I was sitting on the aft end of the boat with nothing but my jeans on when it occurred to me how funny it would be if I “fell” in and pretended to be drowning. So with no more of a thought than that I slipped into the water and watched with great interest as the others continued up the lake, no more the wiser and about the time they saw me waving for help, I was having trouble keeping afloat. My attempts to tread water and to swim quickly taxed my partially inebriated body and as they came around to pick me up, I came desperately close to going under. The lesson, kids, is not to play around with water and especially, despite what you see in the movies, try to swim with jeans on.
It was a cold winter day late in the 90’s and I had a meeting in Vancouver on a Saturday. I headed off after work on Friday in my company suburban and was doing fine until my engine boiled over on the Sunday summit about 40 km west of Princeton. It was about midnight and I was stalled on a hairpin corner , the only lights being my blinking hazards. Assuming that I must need water, I emptied out a windex bottle, cut off the top and headed for the creek several hundred feet down the icy snow bank. Once there, I discovered ice for 6 or 8’ with a small stream moving down the middle of the creek. And so, on my belly I lay inching myself out, filling my bottle and inching my way back several times until I discovered that I had blown a frost plug and the water was running down the road as I put it in. I grabbed my overnight bag and the next car to come along pulled over and offered me a ride. I climbed in the back of a Toyota Corolla with two kids and had a crazy ride with a Slovakian driver and his father, at speeds close to twice the posted speed limit. It didn’t help that his muffler was shot so I could barely hear him talk but it was a white knuckle ride under any definition. They deposited me in Princeton where I hired a tow truck and then spent the night and got on my way in the morning. I never drive by that spot without wondering what would have happened had I fallen through that ice that night and been swept down that freezing torrent.
One final story on my near drownings. Growing up near Ymir BC, we did a lot of fishing with dad and year after year we returned to Hall Creek which hosts a large deep canyon about a half mile up from the highway. Across that canyon, there once was a bridge, though with the passing of time the bridge deck had rotted away and all that remained were the original 3 logs spanning the distance. When us kids were young and too fearful of heights to cross this divide, my Dad would scoff, pick us up and walk across one of the logs while we squealed in terror. Eventually, like an initiation to manhood, we overcame our fears of falling 40’ to our deaths and were able to walk across ourselves. As a young father I even carried my sons across once to prove I could. But then came a day a few years back that I headed across noting that only two rotten logs remain, and for reasons I can’t fully explain, I froze halfway across and could not go another inch. Fear of heights for the first time in my life took over me and I began to tremble as I gingerly packed up, my knees knocking and I had to muster all of my moxie to get back off of there without falling to my death. I have been back but I have never tried that crossing since.
Childhood
When we were kids, we moved from a trailer court in Robson to a farm in Ymir. It was 10 acres of our own space and it was surrounded by mountains on all sides with a valley down the middle. Running roughly down the middle of the valley, beside the railroad, the Salmo River provided us with countless adventures and on the other side of the river from a farm was a turn in the river that ended in deep pools of aqua green water against the face of a cliff we called Red Bluff. The pool was a popular swimming hole in the summer and us kids enjoyed a wonderful oasis of land on the acre of land before the river rejoined the railway and carried on its way to the Pacific. On this oasis, we had a forest of cedar and cottonwood trees and a small stream fed a pond where we were able live out a thousand childhood adventures. The one I relate now involves swimming across the river with my older brother Derrick and attempting on a whim to climb the face of Red Bluff. It was 60 high and nearly as wide as we scaled the first few ledges and we jumped back and forth scrambling ever higher, using our toes and fingers to hold on. About 40’ up the face, it dawned on us in our wet clothes, dust clinging to us like mud, that this may not have been the best idea. We came to a stop under an overhanging ledge, either side blocked and the prospect of going back down unthinkable. This dilemma stalled us for several minutes and in those moments, an unforgettable lesson was learned about biting off more than we could chew. I can’t quite remember how we got off that bluff that day but I will never forget the lesson, though God knows I’ve been doomed to repeat it many more times in my life.
At 15, I stumbled onto infatuation for the very first time. I became so possessed to impress the object of my desire that I climbed nearly Haystack Mountain (Okay I named it that myself) on a cold winter day, determined to cut off limbs from a tree and make a big “M” in the snow, so my beloved could wake up the next morning and spy it from her front door. I left home at the crack of dawn with nothing but one of my mother’s good butcher knives which I carried as I walked and ran up the mountain. A couple hours later I came over the top of the mountain, did the deed (breaking the butcher knife in the process), and proceed down the south side. Such was my enthusiasm that I started running across the frozen snow, and as I went down steep slopes, my feet floated as I leapt with strides 20’ apart. This went on and on and a second wind gave me increased stamina and I was now running down the side of the mountain dodging trees and floating for what seemed like unhuman durations of time between steps. It was at this time that I touched off from between some trees and glided off only to look straight down into a vertical mine shaft and in the time it takes one to realize they are about to die, I prayed my glide would carry me to the other side. Fortunately I did glide across the open earthly orifice and landed squarely on the other side. I took the time to crawl to the edge of the mine, find some rocks and throw them in, never to even hear them hit bottom. I carried on, found the highway and home and was very disappointed to find my “M” was too small to see with anything but binoculars!
Guns and Knives
Beginning young, Derrick, Wes and I had an uncommon fascination with weapons starting with primitive rocks, fists, slings, clubs, whips, spears, slingshots, bows and arrows and graduating to knives, swords, guns, and gunpowder. Derrick being older was the head of the club if you will forgive the pun, and Wes and I were usually at the wrong end of his weapons. Derrick inspired us with his talent for homemade knives, David and Goliath slings, long bows as well as dead fall traps and “pig stickers”. Many a nightmare has come to me as I sleep, remembering the terror of running unseen through the bush, Derrick behind me somewhere slinging rocks as big as softballs through the forest like cannonballs as they would ricochet tree to tree breaking off limbs in their trajectory. In fact, the “sproing” of an arrow being released still causes Wes and I to pull our heads in and take cover.
With that as a basis to my narrative, I will relate a number of issues where I, and my brothers crossed the line between recreational use of weapons and nearly killing each other.
There was a time, as teens, when my parents were busy working, dad on the road as a truck driver and mother selling Fuller Brush, that us boys were left home everyday after school. Now in theory, that meant we would get off the bus and I would feed the cows, pigs, chickens etc while Derrick would clean the house and Wes would stay out of our way… In reality, the moment we got home, Derrick would begin bullying us and I would defend myself while Wes stayed out of our way. It wasn’t unusual for Derrick and I to come to blows, usually with me taking the brunt of it, but nonetheless enjoying sweet victory the few times I landed a solid right. One morning, with the knowledge that we would be unsupervised after school, I left a horse whip hidden in the studs of the shed and after school, knowing Derrick would be coming out to bully me, I waited beside the whip. As surely as a moth to the flame, Derrick came to me and started pushing me around. I gave him just enough time to justify the horsewhip and then out it came. Several weeks of repressed anger boiled out of me and I whipped him repeatedly, reducing him to a fetal ball in the yard while I struck him over and over again, making him beg for mercy and promising e to leave me along forever. As I walked away triumphantly, whip in hand, I felt the tables slowly turning my way.
Another time, I remember feeling so helpless to his bullying that I went to my parents closet, took out a gun, loaded it and waited for him to come looking for me. In minutes, he came into the bedroom only to find himself staring down the barrel of a rifle. Somewhere between him telling me it wasn’t loaded and me telling him it was, I didn’t pull the trigger, though my finger rested on it, only a spring loaded firing pin between him and death.
Now this might seem unusual but not given my childhood. Factor in a day after school with the Rutherford brothers. Dan and I decided to go hunting for grouse with a .22 and while we went down one side of the river, Brady went down the other. This worked out fine until Brady, bored with hunting alone started ricocheting bullets off the rocks around us. The thought of being struck with a bullet fragment gave us cause to get behind a big rock which of course gave Brady a big target to shoot at and fear of being shot kept us pinned down. With the passing of times and number of shots, it got old really fast and having grown up reading Louis L’Amour western novels, I decided to return fire, only by now I was aiming for him which resulted in a truce, though any of us could have been killed that day.
Now this would all be fine if my gun stories ended in my teens but even into my twenties, I tempted fate by buying a 12 gauge Winchester Defender… the ones used by cops, bankrobbers and me. I generally travelled with it, camped and hiked with it and kept it with e at all times for many years and one year, we all ended up at a family reunion in Salmon Arm. Thinking nothing about it, I laid it beside myself in my tent and fell asleep. Around midnight, relatives from far away started showing up and through the voices, I heard my cousin headed to wake me up. Thinking I’d give him cause to pause at the door of my tent, I pushed the barrel through the opening and pumped a round into the chamber for effect, my finger on the trigger. In a heartbeat, he grabbed the barrel of the gun and my finger missed the trigger by a hair width as I pulled it out and wrestled for control of my gun. That’s another good lesson about how fast you could accidentally shoot someone!
Oh and speaking of getting shot at. One summer younger bro Wes and I went with a friend Leigh to Panther lake for a hike and we camped the night under the stars. In the morning, I looked up the cliff across the lake and announced that I was going to climb to the top of the mountain. Wes and Leigh enthusiastically joined me and we set off, both of them loaded for bear including Wes’s 30-30 and Leigh with a .400 magnum handgun. Well an hour into the climb, they announced that was far enough and I, determined to make the top carried on. I had a rope and I went from ledge to ledge including around a tree that took up the whole ledge. It was at about this time that bullets started to ricochet around me and I found myself facing two armed jokesters shooting at me from the camp. There are few feelings of helplessness like those of a man pinned to a cliff, rock fragments hitting him in the face and the more I yelled and waved my arms, the more they aggravated me with lead. In the end, I managed to get over the cliff and carry on to the top of the mountain.
Wildlife
So who hasn’t been attacked by birds of prey, treed by bears, bit by snakes, stabbed by deer antlers and ran head first into a moose? Memory has all but erased a hundred encounters with dangerous animals but the ones that remain clear as a spring day shall be told.
As a kid, I had the sprint of a Gazelle and I prided myself in the ability to run down mountainsides and through bush like a rabbit. Often, a game trail would open up and I would be running full tilt only to come head on with bears and deer with one memory of my family leaving the farm and after the gate was locked, Dad remembering some forgotten item. I volunteered to run back home and get it and on my way back through what we called the upper road, I ran head on to a buck deer, both of us at full speed. In an instant, he leapt up while I dove down and we cleared each other by a whicker. I still remember his black hooves just missing my face as I dropped!
Another time, I was fishing with dad up Tamal Lake which is in Kootenay Glacier National Park and we had walked about 4 miles from my truck. It was then that I realized my lunch was forgotten at the truck and I left Dad my fishing gear and told him to eat huckleberries while I jogged back down the trail. Retrieving my lunch in a brown paper bag, I was jogging back up the trail, and puffing like a horse, when I happened to see two young bear cubs on a log just off to my right, accompanied by a yearly bear cub. That, on its own didn’t alarm me though the next image, forever frozen in my mind did. There on the left I heard a grunt and up the bank in the huckleberries stood up a full grown sow. Our eyes met for the length of time that it takes one to whisper that age old expletive predicted by the word “Oh” and then she dropped out of site and all that I saw was the parting of the huckleberries as she charged down the hill at me. It is at moments like this that one’s mind absolutely stops thinking and instincts born in caves come to the front. As that bear slid down the bank onto the trail, I doe-see-doed with her and found myself holding a very rotten limb that was laying by the trail. Primitive screams followed and as I swirled the limb around my head like a club, the bear paused between deciding how to kill me and looking at her cubs, all of which showed great amusement at the goings ons. And in that second, no that fraction of a second that she pondered the welfare of her offspring, I did exactly what the books say not to do. I fled like a squealing pig, flapping my arms to increase my speed, my feet moving just like Road Runner. And that’s the way I passed my father just a bit up the trail, he yelling for me to come back while I hurriedly stuttered my case. And it was the next day I bought my new 12 guage shotgun.
Another wild life story involves wild cattle chased in to trucks off of free ranges in Alberta. Of dozens of harrowing experiences, two stand out as worth repeating. I left home at 17 and married at 18, with my first kid by age 19 and one day I woke up as a slaughterhouse worker in Ponoka Alberta. I started out on the killing floor shooting and sticking pigs, cows and the odd goat with part of my responsibilities including cleaning tripe (emptying cows stomachs and washing them), washing down carcasses and doing emergency C-sections on condemned cows. On one particular day, I was busy washing blood and guts down the drain when the boss walked up to me with a 4-10 shotgun with a slug in it and said he had a special job for me. He pointed to a cattle liner backing up to the shoot and told me there was a bull coming in. And as sudden as he told me this, the bull started charging back and forth colliding with each end of the trailer, terrifying me. My job, he explained was to stand in the chute and when they lifted the door, to shoot the bull dead. Good luck he said as he patted me on the back and sat on the top rail. Now this may sound very exciting but at the time, my knees knocked, my teeth rattled and I was shaking like hypothermia. Knowing nothing about lead slugs, I imagined myself missing and just as I would get sprayed with ricocheting birdshot, a 5,000 lb bull would mow me down, escape into the plant and create mayhem. Never one to shirk my responsibilities, I took my place in the chute, crossed my chest and waited for the door to open. And when it did, there, coming at me at full run, was the largest oldest Hereford bull I had ever seen. And with no more thought than it takes to pull a trigger, I drew a mental bead on the X that intersects his eyes and ears and I pulled it. Boom went the shotgun, boom boom went my heart and when all movement had stopped, there lay a dead bull right at the doorway. Shaking, I walked up to the bull, put my foot on its head and saw the hole where the bullet had entered, dead center where I had aimed and big enough to put a finger in and pull out grey matter. And we hooked a chain around the bull, pulled him in to the plant with a chain hoist and cut his head off. If I remember correctly, his dressed weight was 5300 lbs and for the first time ever, his head would not fit in a 45 gallon drum. Some things you never forget.
Another time, in the meat packers, I remember an occasional steer coming in off the range and you could tell by the look in their eyes that they were going to be difficult. A touch of their hide confirmed it and I remember these wild steers by the tightness of their hide, stretched to ripping with the stress they felt. One day, a wild steer like this came in and I put it in the chute, shot it and when it went down, I opened the chute to hang it for bleeding. And just as I went to throw a loop of chain around its foot, it came alive and jumped to its feet. Its eyes wild, spitting mucus from both nostrils it took off in the opposite direction right through the double doors and down the hallway to the cutting floor where several men and women spent their day. I reloaded my gun and followed in its wake, finally using my yellow apron to scare it back to the killing floor where I found it throwing stainless tables left and right, hearts and livers of its former companions flying everywhere. And then in the mayhem, it spied my 70 year old boss across the room and charged him while he screamed at me, “Shoot it, Shoot it!” But too late it hit him and began to smear him along the wall, my gun aimed at a spot behind its ear, its head shoving him against a wall. “Shoot it!” he screamed again and I pulled the trigger, dropping it like an ugly bug. We quickly cleaned up the mess and put the animal on the line but nearly 30 years later, I still remember that shot.
One more wildlife story… I was working nightshifts and headed home at the crack of dawn on a rural highway south of Nelson. I came on to a Hostess bread truck with his hazards on and as I pulled up, I noticed a deer on its knees beside him. I got out of my vehicle to assist and the driver was upset and asking me to put the deer out of its misery. I asked him what he had to do the job with. The list of murder weapons included his lunchbox, two screwdrivers, a claw hammer and my jack knife. Taking the claw hammer I walked up to the deer, grabbed it by its antlers and gave it a mighty whack between the horn only to have it get to its feet and start swinging me in circles while I continued to deliver blow after blow with little effect. The poor animal’s fate was sealed because it was coughing up big froths of blood and after several minutes, I exhausted it enough to stick my jack knife in the joint articulating its head and neck and sever its spinal cord which caused immediate death. The things a country boy does.
Motorcycles, Vehicles and ATVs
Many was the time that I spit in the eye of death with my father, I remember when we first bought the farm at Ymir and no matter what he would do, I was there like a shadow learning all I could about driving tractors, digging holes, falling trees and shooting animals. In this one particular instance, he had supplied me with a winter jacket from the Army and Navy. Quilted green canvas covered thick grey filling not unlike dryer fluff and as he cut down an old apple tree, I stood beside him watching. As the tree fell, he swung the chainsaw to the side and struck me in the upper arm, grey fluff spraying in the air as I held the wound. “Get the hell out of the way!” he yelled. Peeling my coat off, we were both relieved to find my arm in tact, though my jacket never healed. When I was about 12 years old, Dad decided that our old pig, a very fat sow that weighed over 800 lbs, should go see her boyfriend down the road. Being naturally helpful, I waited by the barn door as Dad backed up the pickup and as I lowered the tailgate and stepped out of the way, he backed up pinning me between the wall of the barn and the tailgate, right across my spine. In the time it took me to scream with my last breath, the truck paused with what little void my body filled, and as Dad looked in his mirror and saw the gap, he accelerated to close the distance, nearly severing me in two. When he finally saw my body slumped between the barn and tailgate, he pulled ahead and released me and as I hit the ground, I rolled to the side, breathless for several minutes. “Get the hell out of the way” he yelled. Another time, we had cleared some forest and were using the tractor to skid the logs out of the way. I became Dad’s chokerman and he would yell at me, “Put a moly Hogan in ‘er Laddie” as I connected various chains and cables to the hitch. With my life in my hands, I would bound to the side and dad would accelerate, skidding the logs to a landing we had made, though this time, I got caught in some limbs and as I tried to extricate myself, he backed over me. As he drove over my legs, I saw him look down and see me laying underneath him. “Get the hell out of the way!” he yelled. “I can’t!” I yelled, “You’re on top of me!”and he put it in gear and drove off of me. I limped away alright but for the bruised shins and ego.
It was a beautiful sunny day and we were out for a drive; my ex wife and 4 young kids on a Sunday afternoon in our full sized camperized chevy van. After lunch down by the river, we piled in and headed onto the highway from the Birch Bank picnic grounds and as I rolled up to the stop sign, I looked both ways and pulled across the northbound lane turning left into the southbound one. In the fraction of an instant that it took my right foot to go from my brake to gas pedal and push harder, a full size truck sped by me at top speed in the southbound lane missing my bumper by the thickness of the chrome. God only knows where he came from or why I didn’t see him but had I pressed that gas pedal any harder, my family would have been obliterated that day. Since that day, there has never been a misfortunate event that has happened to me that I didn’t accept, gladly trading it for what could have happened that day.
July 31, 2001
Dear Diary,
Oh God... You won't hear the panic in my voice or see how I still tremble as I write this but I wasn't kidding about going down the skyway with no trailer brakes... Fact is I came as close to dying as I ever have and I can count the times like this on one or two fingers... and to make matters worse, I had Skyla and my niece Krystaline with me... takes a big breath... It started at 1:30 yesterday.. My four kids and I all were at my brother Derrick’s by 12:15 pm to help him move but Derrick is always late... anyway he had a whole team help and we loaded my trailer to the sky... the back of the suburban was stuffed too and by 3:30 I headed out with Sky and Krystaline... We grabbed a pop at the Esso and I filled my tires with air... (Krystaline had to pee every 10 minutes thereafter and peed herself a few times... but then so did I but I'm coming to that...)
So anyway as I drove along the way I noticed that when I decelerated the trailer would sway and push me a bit side to side... it's kinda scary but I adjusted my speed to about 45 miles per hour and we were plugging along... we got to the top of the skyway and I geared down and we made it about 12 miles before all hell broke loose... we were coming around a gentle corner on a steep hill when the trailer decided I was going too slow and tried to pass me... Unfortunately when its connected to your bumper this means that you are going sideways at 50 miles per hour.... I found myself staring into a dry creek bed with 3' boulders into it 100' off the highway...Well I told the girls to hang on for their lives and as they squealed in terror I tried to get it under control. There were cars and a big truck coming at me in the other lane and I made a quick decision to drop it into high gear and stomp on the accelerator.. That "snapped" the trailer behind me into line but gave me more speed than I needed to make the corner and as soon as I let off the gas I found myself sideways again.. this time I was staring at the rock bluffs and I wasn't sure we had more than a few seconds to even live.. Anyway as the cars in that lane went into the ditch to save their own lives, I had to go through a number of lightning speed manoeuvres to keep it on the highway.. I 'snapped" us straight several times with the gas pedal and did the best I could to keep this snakelike train of an automobile on the road.... in what seemed like a lifetime later found us pulled over with 1/4 mile of Derrick’s things strewn over the highway... It was terrible... terrible. I spent the next hour picking it all up and throwing the things too badly damaged over the bank... He lost a barbecue, filing cabinet, tool chest, buffet, shelf, end tables, hundreds of expensive CD's were scattered down the highway along with two drawers of paperwork out of his filing cabinet... Fortunately I was blessed with carloads of good samaritans who helped pick it all up and carry it to me... As I finished tying it down and was taking a last look over the bank, Derrick came along... I was still so shaken but he was good about it... just glad no one was hurt or killed…
My finger amputation is actually kind of funny... It was at least 15 years ago... probably 17 and I was fixing up a motorbike and instead of putting all the guards back on, I gave my 4 year old son a ride which made me slide back 6 or 7 inches on the seat... wouldn't you know that I reached down to shift without looking and because I had slid back, I put my fingers into the chain and sprocket instead of the gear shift. That wasn't the worst part! I was turning around in the neighbours’ barn yard when it happened and I parked the bike to let my son off and... and.. AND... a bloody chicken gobbled up my fingertip right in front of me... imagine me running around trying to catch this chicken hoping if I could get my finger tip back that maybe a Dr could sew it back on... but alas I couldn't catch the chicken.. it escaped into the general population of chickens and I have been forever fingertipless on my left middle finger. Its kind of funny because I have all but forgotten about it until I pick up a guitar or a flute or something and come up short... that always makes me laugh.
