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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

HOM: Modification

With two jobs, two schedules, two cars, and one kid, Lyn & I did a lot of juggling. We'd meet at an agreed place, park one car and use the other, then swing back by to get the unused vehicle later on. One night we left my rig up in the old B&B parking lot and used Lyn's car for shopping and running around and ended up down at Lois', where Lyn & Lois started visiting. It was a little late, I was tired and maybe bored & so was Bec. We decided to let them visit while we walked up and got the car at B&B and went home. Laziness being my lifestyle as I have mentioned, Bec & I took a shortcut through Woodland Park, going in the SE corner and then cutting across to take a trail up in the NW corner. I was setting a pretty good pace with Bec following me, and I didn't slow down any when I went up the hill behind Cenex. At that point two things I hadn't anticipated messed up my plans. First, the bright security lights at Cenex (Farmer's Union, in those days) hit me in the face as I topped the hill & blinded me. That might not have been so bad if I'd known that, buried in the shadow right below the crest, there was a big hole dug out in the path, probably five feet deep and half again as wide, with a pipe running across the bottom. My first inkling that something was wrong was when my clumsy foot came down on a big bunch of nothingness. My second was when my face planted itself into the pipe on the bottom. The third was when Bec landed on top of me. Bec was okay, my excess padding kept her from getting hurt. I wasn't. There was lots of blood. There was nose damage, and some cuts around my eyes. The next couple of minutes were kind of blurred. We (Bec, mostly, she had better eyes and less red blur) scrabbled around and found the pieces of my glasses, then we climbed out of the pit. I decided we'd better go back to Lois'. At that point in my life I'd been bloodied often enough that I was pretty sure the damage was all superficial, but probably needed to be dealt with. When we got back to Lois', I opened the door a bare inch and issued the disclaimer: "Don't panic. This isn't as bad as it looks." I needn't have bothered. There may not have been panic, but both Lyn & Lois got fairly excited over the mess I'd made of myself. I got a lot of cleaning, disinfecting, patching and orders to hold still over the next little while. When they got done, we went home, with Lyn dropping me off to get my rig. The only lasting damage was a modified nose that wasn't quite the same shape it had been in previous years and a daughter that didn't trust my leadership any more. This was another of those times when my poor raggedy Guardian Angel was working overtime. That fall could have been a lot worse. I went back up there last week. The site of the old pit is still visible, though it is all filled in. A crooked chunk of rebar still sticks up out of the soil there to snag the next unwary walker. TBC (Me) (Blacktail Books)

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