Even as a small child I remember bumping my head alot. My earliest rememberence of this blurry series of cranial mishaps came even before kindergarten. Eating ice cream at Grandma and Grandpa's house was always a big treat, even back in the days when I was eating in a highchair. This was also about the time I learned of ice cream headaches. Throwing my head back and howling was enough to pitch me over backward onto the floor, chair and all. As a toddler, I remember borrowing all of the elastic headband things that my sisters used to hold their hair back. Pretending to be an Indian, with all of these headband things strapped to my forehead, I ran whooping throughout the house, just like the Indians on TV would do. Since there were so many of these headband things on my forehead, some of them slipped down over my eyes. Running hither and yon, I tripped on some unseen object (probably my feet), and crashed into the edge of the coffee table. The resulting, copius head-wound-type bleeding ruined every one of those headband things, much to my sisters chagrin.
There is in my memory a brief hiatus in the string of injuries I had started with the infamous Head Band Incident (This is not to say they didn’t occur so much as I just can’t remember them.). This lull ended quite abruptly one fine June day in 1964 when I suffered a karmic fall from a sycamore tree while trying to steal baby sparrows from the nest. The ensuing broken left femur and lacerated chin provided me with the experience of six weeks on my back in traction, and another four weeks in a cast that extended from my armpits down the length of my left leg to just short of my toes. Not letting a little thing like this keep me down (literally), I was eventually up and lumbering around in this plaster leisure suit. In retrospect, I imagine I looked something like a cross between the Mummy and Frankenstein. The resulting pressure on my abdomen from standing in the cast was diagnosed as the cause of a mysterious bout of vomiting, so I was required to stay off my feet. This two and a half months of forced immobility resulted in a pair of severely atrophied limbs. After removing the cast, the doctor thought it would be a good idea for me to start riding a bike in order that I might avoid wearing braces on my incredibly skimpy legs. So I did, and quickly collided with the back of my Aunt Betty’s maroon, ‘64 Dodge Dart that was parked in front of our house. The patching I got from my friend, Doctor “Damned Two-Wheel Vehicles” Johnson, came complete with a nifty pressure bandage wound turban-like around my head. It was said that all I needed was an American flag, a fife, and a drum to complete the ensemble.
I started first grade walking on crutches with this serious looking pressure bandage wrapped around my head. It made for a lot of ‘fun’ kickball games and childish ridicule. I continued riding the bike I had borrowed from Lonny Bitzer. It was too small for me, but it had two ‘damned’ wheels, so I eventually got pretty cocky on the thing. Too cocky, in fact: Taft, CA. is pretty well known for very few reasons. One of them is the size of the tumbleweeds that occasionally roll through town. One of the larger of the species found its way onto our street one fall day. It looked pretty spindly, so I decided that I would ride my borrowed bike Evel Kneivel-style right through it and send it shattering into a million pieces. Tumbleweeds are pretty resilient. This one launched me like a rocket straight up into the air. I remember being pretty high up, the street seeming to get narrower below me. Surprisingly, I recovered from the ensuing landing fairly quickly and got back on my bike, muttering six year old oaths at the demon weed as I wobbled away.
I have, after much contemplation, come to the conclusion that the reason I was able to shake off this pair of post-femur breaking launch and splash down episodes was due to the high pain threshhold I had gained from The Nurse at The Hospital during The Traction Episode. She spent much time, and seemed to gain fiendish delight in, torturing me in the name of medicine while I lay helpless with a fractured femur and festering chin stitches. She was a wicked, rough old bitch who had me do pull-ups on a bar suspended over my bed while she changed the sheets underneath me. She wouldn’t answer my buzzer at night, causing me to pee on myself. Upon discovering this aberrant behavior, she would sternly reprimand me for being so “messy”. I’ve heard children wondering where the legs go when Dorothy and Toto land Auntie Em’s house on the Wicked Witch of the East. Glenda and those munchkins have us believing that she’s dead. Well, she isn’t. She’s very much alive and still working at Memorial Hospital in Bakersfield, California because witches are immortal, you know.
As a child I was always experimenting with cause and effect relationships; like what happens when you put a board on a fulcrum with a rock on one end and then you jump on the other end. “It hits you in the head.”, was the observation I made during this experiment. Several stitches over my right eye was the resulting prognosis made by my friend, Doctor Johnson. Many years later, while studying physics, I happened upon a description of Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “Whenever one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body exerts a force on the first body; these forces are equal in magnitude and oppositely directed.” I pondered this concept only briefly before coming to the conclusion that if Newton had been beaned by a six pound chunk of quartz instead of just an apple, he might have deleted the “...these forces are equal in magnitude...” part.
I was never really big on playing sports, but that never stopped me from being enthused about the game of hitting rocks with a pick axe handle to see how far they would go. Neighborhood friends also found great satisfaction in this seemingly harmless pasttime. Stevie Kranyak was particularly adept at batting rocks, and was in fact, the first switch hitter I ever knew. I found out about switch hitting by standing on the wrong side of him as he pasted a line drive all the way across the street. His follow through pasted me to the ground, adding to the bump that my Aunt Betty’s Dart had permanantly afixed to my forehead and drawing yet another draft of blood. My father, apparently afraid of the pointed questions now coming from the staff of my friend, Doctor Johnson, figured that this latest opening in my flesh could be mended with a butterfly bandage. He was right and the resulting scar caused by Stevie’s scathing swing and my inattention to his left-handedness is probably less obvious for this first aid than the stitches my friend, Doctor Johnson, would have cussingly installed.
As time went by, the usual cuts, abrasions, and contusions a healthy boy will incur during normal play were interspersed with the unusual events that only someone cursed with a bump-prone head can appreciate. I faintly remember walking to school one day, totally engrossed in a book, when a telephone pole stepped in my way and cold cocked me in the forehead. My cousin Liane found this to be particularly amusing. She was walking right next to me and could have warned me, if her pentient for witnessing such amusing sights hadn’t interfered with her family-held duty of warning me of such imminent danger.
The next catastrophe that befell the region above my torso was after we had moved to the other side of town (which really wasn’t much of a move given the diminuititve size of Taft). I had acquired my own Stingray bike and was steadily increasing proficiency in it’s operation. I’d learned how to ride long wheelies, and it was this very activity that was the reason for my next demise. That, and the fact that I failed to put lock washers on the nuts of the front wheel axle. Dropping off the curb in a full wheelie right in front of my house, the front tire popped off and rolled across the street. The now-bare forks bit into the pavement, and milliseconds later so did my chin. It was, in fact, the first part of me to touch down. I remember hearing my friend Glenn, who was riding next to me, say, “Ooooo!”, as though he knew the excruciating pain I had just experienced. I got up off the ground in a bell-rung stupor, blood dripping onto my shirt, and headed for my house. Seeing my sister’s boyfriend coming out of the front door, I managed a feeble, “Help?”, before pitching face first into the lawn, out like a light. When I awoke, I was on my bed. My sister’s boyfriend was holding a towel to my chin. My sisters were running around frantically giving my mom reports on my condition while she calmly put on her make-up in another part of the house. I suppose that for her these events had become pretty mundane.
I heard my friend, Doctor Johnson, even before he entered the emergency room. He came in cussing, cussed while he stitched me up, and I could still hear him cussing long after he had left. That night, with a jaw that would only open a matter of millimeters, I sat down to a steak dinner prepared by my mom. Fortunately, the baked potatoes mashed up pretty well and I was able to take some sustenance that evening. “Why steak?”, I still ask myself.
Even as an adult I’m not immune to connecting my head to immoveable objects with a certain degree of force: I have never been very good at finding things in big stores. One day I was walking through a hardware store diligently trying to find some object by looking down each aisle as I walked by. I never did find what I was looking for, but I did find one of the concrete-filled metal support poles that held up the roof. It nailed me right on the Dodge-Dart-pick-axe-handle bump, completely blinding me and sending me to the floor. All I remember as I went down was some unseen guy saying ,”Ooooo!”, as though he knew the excruciating pain I felt at that moment. (There is no way he could have known the pain I felt at that moment.) I blindly picked myself up off the floor. This still unseen person asked me if I was okay. I lied that I was fine and started taking a few wobbly steps as my vision began to return. Stumbling around the hardware store, bell-rung and vision blurred, I tried my darndest to remember why I was there. To this day I do not know what it was I was looking for. I have probably since purchased it for I’m certain there was a need for it, but even if this is the case, I'm sure I never related it to the TKO I suffered at the hardness of that concrete-filled metal pole.
Climbing has been a consuming passion of mine for more than half my life. An odd sport to indulge in considering my track record. I'm a fair climber, but even the best can't always avoid the objective dangers. Phil, Mike and I retreated from the West Ridge of Forbidden Peak in the Washington Cascades due to my not wanting to lead what had to be lead with what little equipment we had. We rappelled the coulior leading to the start of the ridge. I was standing at the mouth of the coulior waiting for Phil to pull the ropes. As I stood up from putiing something in my pack, A glittering object with a hummingbird sound appeared before my face. I had only enough time to turn sideways as the fist-sized chunk of ice nailed me in the forehead. A glancing blow, it still knocked my sunglasses off my face and sent me reeling. The physical damage was superficial and we continued with our descent. Back at work that Monday, my boss asked me what happened to my face. I related the event to him. His response was "Appropriate name for a peak."
I am currently in one of the lulls between thumpings. I figure that now that I am older, I won’t have this problem anymore. Then again, with my track record, I can’t help but feel that this lull will eventually end and I’ll soon be adding to the bumps that grace my skull.
