As a thirteen-year-old, I was flunking school and getting into all sorts of trouble everywhere and to the point that one Sunday evening in late September 1981, my mother literally broke down sobbing in the middle of a church service on account of me. She made quite a scene, too, and I felt horrible because I knew I was hurting her. But thankfully, I changed course.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that fully embracing Christianity is the only way to good citizenship. It’s more complicated than that. Yet, it definitely worked for me. What is interesting, though, is that it was a life-changing injury that precipitated my sowing of wild oats. And predictably, it was the consequences thereof that initiated the rapprochement with Christian praxis that straightened me out.
In retrospect, I believe observing my mother’s sorrow helped turn me around. Yet, what I needed most of all was a hard whack to the head. And I got it at the Frederick County Sherriff’s station. Because while there, I took a good look at the guys locked in the tank and concluded that, the way things were going, their present was to be my future, and it scared me. But I’m jumping ahead. First comes the life-changing injury.
On May 31st, 1971, Memorial Day that year, I was in a lawnmower accident, which took all of the small toes on my right foot to varying degrees. To be clear, my father never let me near the mower when it was running. What happened is that when he killed the engine, I proceeded to walk over and, upon reaching it, my right foot went a little under the deck and unfortunately there was enough motion in the blade. Despite the fact that everything was by the book, entropy still came out ahead.
I was three when the accident happened. Even so, I can recall the details as if it was yesterday – the overcast sky; the color scheme of the mower and its position mid-distance in the backyard near the south property line; the feeling of something like a heavy, electrified spike being driven into my foot; my father picking me up in his arms and running frantically to the house; the blood on the floor in the back of my parent’s station wagon; what I was crying to my mother and what she was saying back to me as we sped to Frederick Memorial Hospital; the confusion in the ER; being given something sweet and then waking-up from anesthesia under a plastic canopy; seeing mom on the other side of the canopy and hearing her attempt to calm me as I tried clawing my way through to reach her; and many other things. By every measure, Memorial Day, 1971 is etched in my memory.
But returning to my father, he had frozen-up mentally back at the house in West Hills, which is why my mother was the one rushing me to the ER. A neighbor of ours, though, brought him there a few minutes later. And I remember seeing him walk-up to where I was lying on the gurney. However, what I don’t recall observing was something that happened amidst the commotion, but which mom later related to me when I was older. Being extremely animated and my right leg twitching violently due to nerve damage, the cover over my foot slipped-off. When dad saw the wound, mangled toes and all, he immediately passed-out. Fortunately, a nurse was looking his direction just as he was collapsing. “Someone catch that man,” she yelled, saving my father from hitting the deck. Again, there was a lot of confusion.
All of which brings me to the hardest part to understand. I was taken to Frederick Memorial Hospital because that was the place to staunch the injury. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred. Again, the damage to my right foot went no further than the small toes. Everything from there back was pristine – literally. Yet for some reason, the surgeon working on me was at a loss. When he met my parents after the fact, he confessed:
“It was a dirty wound. I didn’t want to risk gangrene setting in…So, I cut most of his foot off.”
Mom rose to the occasion that day. In retrospect, I believe dad was psychologically in shock. The surgeon’s action, and the way he explained it, may have been the proverbial straw.
My father always has had a strong sense of duty. And true to form, in his mind, he was at fault since he was the one operating the mower when the accident happened. But he wasn’t. There was nothing he could have done differently that would have prevented it. Again, everything was by the book. What matters, though, is what he thought, and dad wasn’t coping well with the burden he had errantly placed upon himself.
The truth is that the lawnmower accident put me on an entirely different path than the journey I would have taken in this life by rights. I never wanted to be a chemist. It only was something into which I stumbled. What I wanted was either to be a professional athlete or to have a military career. The latter option was eliminated immediately. Yet around 1979 when I was eleven, running became painful, and by the early 1980s, it was clear that the former was out of the question, too.
Photographs from the late 1970s through to late 1980s reveal the degree to which I was physically inactive as a consequence of the pain. You see, I’m naturally thin and lanky. Even today (I’m in my mid-fifties.), I don’t have to exercise and I eat what I want and yet I stay slim. In sum, all I need is to move around. But you wouldn’t know it by those photos from the late 1970s to late 1980s. I looked soft.
Things, of course, are better now and I’m quite ambulatory thanks to carbon-fiber – the material of choice for both fly-rods and prosthetics. Yet regarding the latter, the technology simply didn’t exist when I was coming of age. For this reason, I was more or less atrophying from the outside in.
So why was I a full-on discipline problem in school and summer camp and why was I generating so much business for auto mechanics and contractors in Frederick, Maryland such that, by June 1982, my circumstances screamed ruin? Well, try keeping a Jack Russell terrier or a Norwegian elkhound entirely house-bound and see what happens. But to the point, being unusually self-aware for an early adolescent, I wasn’t coping well (just like dad). Existential angst: the realization that much of what I wanted was lost and that there was neither anything for which to exert myself nor a clear way forward – that was the reason.
Yet, if anything good came from the accident and its aftermath, it’s that it forced me very early in life to come to terms with the problems that I intuitively knew were present in Christian praxis. Because those guys locked in the tank that September Sunday evening, 1981, functioned as a foil. They made Low Church goodness appear quite desirable, and I began to look past the sentimentality and appreciate the underlying ethos. Consider it the artillery barrage that opened the Whack-to-the-Head Offensive.
I needed it, too. Among other things, it was invaluable with respect to keeping me in The Faith, and devoutly so rather than nominally. But like warfare, while it might make for interesting reading today, it was a hell of a thing to experience. Life truly is a Russian novel.
Article 1 Introduction
Article 2 Ecclesial Postmodernism
Article 3 Men
Article 4 The Odds
Article 5 Argument from Beauty
Article 6 The Trinity in the Taconics
Article 7 Not By Spirit Alone
Article 8 A Tough Sell
Article 9 A Tight Fix
Article 10 Catch More Fish!
Fieldsports and The Faith Vignettes