For the record, it's October 2020. It's cold. It's good that it has finally cooled down and I'm happy to see the snow. I stood outside this morning in my shirt and underwear just to get a reminder. I need a little gauge as to the luck and magic or whatever gets one through life. As to whatever gets an unconscious idiot out of a cold-ass river a week before Halloween, I'm also still not sure.
I'll start by admitting that I need to plan my life better. Planning anything in general would be a good start. Although, all that planning might keep you from living your life. OK, that’s bullshit. Plan. Their has to be a benefit. I say this even though I'm a beneficiary of insane unplanned events. No matter how painful. That alter lives. Twenty-one years ago, one would alter mine, and that’s where I was, lying in a river and watching an African king point me in a different direction.
I should add that about year prior to this river incident, a psychic told me I’d end up back in the mountains. In 1998 I was hosting a radio show in Portland, OR with Tonya, Oregon's most popular online clairvoyant, and a conspiracy theorist named Leroy. The show was called The Point of No Return and it was terrible. One moment that remains raised above the amateur radio prattle is the psychic saying that she felt I was troubled by the entire enterprise (often indicated by me tossing down my headphones and saying, "Oh my god I'm troubled by this entire enterprise"), and that she had visions of me going back to Colorado. She said it would be good for me, but it would be accompanied by tragedy.
She didn't want to tell me anymore, and I chalked it up to dramatic flair.
A year later I’m back in the Rockies and the river is cold. That seems like an unfortunate situation, but at least the Animas was shallow. No rafters or whooping tubers; the tributary of the San Juan had been tamed to a gentle brook babbling through town before being tapped in a dozen directions. Farmers, tribes, casinos, a million toilets all got a piece of it, or at least after it washed around the outline of a twenty-five year old radio DJ dreaming about Africa.
It’s amazing that my brain—instead of firing the buttons for me to physically react to the dire situation of a cold water death—decided to take the time to share with me a vignette on a different continent. In my head it was dark, and I moved in from space towards a land mass, then the borders of a country, then a light and, finally, a festival where locals celebrated before a throne. People danced and frolicked, but I had this nervous feeling; something was about to happen. It didn’t seem to bother anyone else. They writhed with one another as I stood alone, pale and cold. I had my own small perimeter. I was suspect. The music stopped. In the fading murmur of the onlooking crowd, a spotlight illuminated me, and the big man stood up from his chair. Everyone stared and waited. The silent disquiet rattled through me. With his long, unflinching finger trained on my head, he popped the tension with one simple command. “GO” he bellowed with both ends of the word sliced tight to the phonetics. In radio we call it a cold ending. No long, cascading fade. It just ends. Sometimes you’re left with nothing to say.
I woke up. Water lapped at the side of my head and ran over my legs. Rocks jabbed in different depths and directions. Nearby city lights glowed a reminder of my expulsion. I was not where I should be. I did not ask the most pertinent question of how I ended up in the river. I dealt with it as if I’d stubbed my toe. Crap. A minor annoyance. I’m in the water, I surmised, I guess I’d better get out. With hypothermia turning off the alarms and making me comfortable with disaster, I lay there for a bit longer. I wiggled my toes. They moved. My hands raised out of the stream to feel my face. That was good, but not my back. Oh sweet, anesthesia Jesus, my back could feel everything.
Initially, and for years afterward, I concluded that a guy walked into my path and I avoided him and, in doing so, careened off the trail. But I knew that wasn't everything. There was a dude, but I kept seeing a trash can. Several years after the wreck I was in Durango again and walked the path. And there it was.
Yes. A guy would walk right in front of me, yell something, and then I'd start flying. Conveniently, and perhaps emotionally, or whatever one does to protect their reputation from dumbness, I'd excluded the fucking trash can. I have have pieced together this: I was mad at the dude who walked in front of me. So, like a moron on a bike doing twenty miles per hour, I kicked the can. It was a vengeful attempt at a good deed, as I'm certain the yelling dude had been digging around in the bin and, in doing so, left the top of the city-issued trash cover jutting into the trail. It hurts just to think about it, but I made the terrible decision to, without slowing, kick the lid into place with my foot. People, please keep all of your hands and feet inside of the moving vehicle. My shoe swatted the top of the bin but it did not budge. Instead, it changed the trajectory of my bike. I hit the railing above the river, and I flew.
I still see two things so clearly. One is what I call the Oh Fuckness of realizing that I was out of control. The second is the flying. My bike hit a barrier and I was soaring. Less like a bird and more like a fleshy bag of mortal terror. I'm nervous just thinking about it. It's slow motion but super fast. I can feel me processing the distance. Not in any kind of standard measurement, but really in more of oh shits. I flew about twelve oh shits.
If I’ve ever done anything right, it's that I went from a dive into kind of a flip. A little slideshow reminded me of getting bucked off a horse as a kid and landing on my head. Don't do that again. Fold your head. FOLD YOUR HEAD. This time I’d land square on my shoulders.
I rested. I dreamt. I awoke to wiggle my toes. I counted my fingers in the moonlight, but I could not see my feet. Were they really moving or was this phantom limb thing paralyzed people talk about? I couldn’t lift them without screaming. I took that as a good sign, or at least a pretty terrible positive.
The African King sat back down and vanished and I marveled at how self absorbed I am. I was struggling to turn over and crawl without getting my face underwater, and the whole time I’m trying to translate my unconscious mind. And I’m in pain trying to laugh at the fact that I’d actually had a dream while lying in a river. I’d also discover all of the many intricacies of muscles and movements. Wincing hurt.
Humans are stronger than we’ll ever give ourselves credit. I think of 18 year olds waking up in a war zone and dealing with the immediate need to kill or be killed. Of course they’re going to be on edge coming back home. Everyone skipping around in the fluorescence of hyper marketing and domesticated apathy. Everyone abrasive to the bigger brain, their expanded horizon of human tolerance and ability. Yet it's always only to survive, not fly. My struggle out of that ditch came in the first-world, liberal arts comfort of medical attention just a friendly passerby away. No one was trying to kill me except me. So I remind myself that if I ever see some dude going way to fast on a motorcycle, or taking some ridiculous risk that I'm too frightened to watch. There’s a chance they've earned those wings. Me…me…I'd been gifted a stark glance at mortality. Cliches are truth and so it goes that life is short. On the edge of one of America’s last free-flowing rivers, I shouted at the rocks and told myself to stand up and go.
I could not. The most immense pain crushed me back to the ground. The helplessness drilled through me top down and pushed me earthbound. I retched against the nerve bath. I wasn’t sure if I even had skin. Had I been fucking skinned? Like those poor bastards of the Inquisition? I’d try to get up again and through me drilled a fiery relish that screamed with intensity down my back and out my feet. Shit, yes, my feet. I caught a glance at those neglected peds and made a quick swipe to touch one before going down. I was pretty sure I felt it. A soft thud on a leather shoe in an imploding structure of intense, collapsing pain. And out.
I’m going to blame the hypothermia for this next move.
Half way up the hill I found the bike. Just a useless bunch of welded steel to a guy who can’t be upright, but I thought I should take it anyway because—and I truly thought this—once I got to the path I could ride it home. Somehow I’d drag that bike up to the path. And this wasn’t a fancy carbon fiber frame, but an old school steel frame with huge clunky parts. It was Huffy heavy. It’s another testament to putting more effort into flying. If a guy with a broken back, punctured lung and a really bad chill can drag a bike up hill, well then maybe he should take some time to see if he can fly. Maybe not off a cliff but, you know, metaphorically.
I’d eventually give up on the bike. That’s when I had this plan that I could use the seat to prop up my torso while using my legs to propel me home. This ended in a fit of loud moaning that would have most reasonable people take me out back and shoot me. It went like this: I laid my chest across the seat and tried to scoot forward. And holy shit. A tornado of fire shot through me. Barbed wire fences from the storm-torn plains tangled with nerves and ripped them into a swirl of agony. There’s a video online where this newscaster falls off a pedestal and onto a bucket. The wind gets knocked out of her and she’s heaving this terrible heave. The engineers don't cut her mic and when they go back to the studio the anchors are sitting there haunted by the Satanic growl of their fallen colleague. That was me. Catapulting rotting orgasms of intense discomfort.
After the worst was over, I gathered that A) I should desert the bike and B) being upright was no longer my thing. I fell to the ground and slept.
The next part still makes me feel bad. A guy found me on the path and woke me up. From my vantage point, all I saw were brown corduroy pants. They were that deep 90s corduroy and something like Vans for shoes. What I recall is him saying “I gotta go because it’s my birthday tonight.” That’s what I remember and I feel bad about it because, in a few weeks, I’d call him out on the radio as a guy who deserted me. Some of my listeners did some investigating and figured out who he was, and he defended himself by saying that I told him I was OK and didn’t need help. Now, granted, I think most people would have alerted the authorities, but Durango is a college town and twenty-somethings passed out on sidewalks is not at all that uncommon. And I’ll add that I have this thing where I don’t like people to think I’m sleeping, so I say all kinds of things in a pseudo-conscious state. It usually never fools anyone, except apparently this guy. I guess I don’t feel bad at all. When you see someone contorted on the ground, insist that they get medical help.
But that guy, that kid man-strolling to his big birthday, was just one part of the aftermath of the accident. For one, my back is crooked and—I kid you not—my freakish monkeyback hair now grows in two different direction. Also, I get what I call phantom back, where I think I’m twisted but I’m not. And then there’s the immediate care. At first the hospital would think I was insured because their records still had me under my parent’s coverage. The first four days I was a medical celebrity. Nurses and doctors and specialists crowded around my morphine cloud to hear me whisper my story. But on day 5, I’d wake up and everyone was gone. Well, except for the man trying to cough up his torso. He and I were sharing a room. I hadn’t had a roommate before that. What I did have was a physical therapist, a beautiful RN and a bone doctor who promised me all kinds of miracle science. By that afternoon I was sitting outside the hospital waiting for my landlord to pick me up.
This is not to say that my family and friends weren’t there to help. They did their best, but my grandpa died while I was in the hospital, so my mom was unable to visit right away. Despite my then-girlfriend Sarah living six-hours away in Denver, she made the trip with her mom, who’d just come in from Baltimore with hopes of enjoying a peaceful visit with her daughter. My sister lived in Durango and she did what she could, but she’d just found out she was pregnant. Oh, and I would become an asshole. I was on a ridiculous battery of pain pills that made it hard for me to talk on the radio. Granted, I shouldn’t have gone back to work six days after the accident, but the hospital bill was around $18,000 dollars. I took to the airwaves to lambaste Mercy Medical Center for charging me 8 dollars for those little shoe store bootie socks, and twelve dollars for Tylenol. When your T-7,8 and 9 vertebrae are smushed, Tylenol are like Tic-Tacs. The hospital said they’d review my bill and get back to me; instead they sent it to collections. touché.
My one regular visitor was a stalker named Melanie. She had one brown eye and one blue eye and claimed that her friend with the Durango police gave her my phone number and address. So that was exciting; her leaving hours of voicemails and trying to break in day and night. She’d eventually use her car to climb up on the roof and come in through an attic window. I’d lay on the couch, passing in and out because of these amazing little pills, while she danced between me and Sports Center. I remember thinking I should be flattered, but would feel slightly spurned when six months later my radio replacement would call to find out how to get rid of her.
Back on the ground, in the late night dirt of my Brokeback Mountain town, not even a jilted stalker would assist me. In the timeline I’d piece together, help wouldn’t happen for about another hour. I’d crawl and stop. Crawl, pass out, crawl. Cry. Whimper. Wake up and wonder if it were real. Try to walk; realize it was very real. Pass out. I’d make it about a hundred yards before nodding off for a solid snooze on the pedestrian bridge behind the old power plant (for those of you who know the town, that’s near the Burger King at Main and Camino del Rio.)
This is where Jesus shows up and saves me. Yes, there is a Jesus and his street lit aura gave me pause. This Jesus had big hair frizzed into the night sky by the street lights. In the sad, tormented yellow of low-cost illumination, I beheld the glow of my savior’s head. His jellyfish follicles spreading into an infinity of hope. And then he spoke.
“Dude, I think this guy is really hurt.” At a very slow speed of sound, my upshot oracle called out to someone else.
“Yes,” I gasped with about the last of me. My vision faded out and then back to the appearance of another apparition. This new higher being also had hair that exploded across my sky. From the darkness he said he’d called the cops but he and his buddy would have to go. They were pretty high they explained. I slept again and then, like the before picture in an anti-drug ad, appeared a clean-cut man with a mustache. He was a police officer and instead of being groovy he was asking me if I was under the influence. I don’t know, of pain?
There is some merit to his question. I had been at a bar before the wreck. I was broadcasting live from Solids, or at least the part that once had been Shooters. Solids and Shooters were right next to each other and, in a college town, printed money seven days a week. After Solids bought Shooters, they wanted to expand their clientele beyond barely legal and fake IDs, so they bought a big run of radio ads for the adult contemporary office set. I was to be live, doing three breaks an hour, from six to nine the evening of October 22, 1999. Things were going well. The place was packed and I was shout talking over the radio about drink specials. For this effort I would be paid $75 an hour which, in average Durango pay, is about two weeks of wages. This was not lost on me. I relished the moment with free beer and excessive banter. It was about then when my one big issue would catch up with me. Not the shattered back thing. That would be a result of something bigger: my zeal to over commit at every turn.
The harbinger of my fate would be the bartender bringing me their cordless phone. He shouted over Heavy D and the Boyz that someone was looking for me and they seemed pretty pissed. I was certain it was station management. In the previous live break I'd challenged someone to an impromptu poetry challenge and my random counterpart had rhymed paid with laid. We were the edgier Hot AC, but Adult Contemporary nonetheless. Ok, well, apologize and promise to do better. But I would not be that fortunate.
It was someone who carried with him far more implications. It was Jack. Now Jack is a real person and, at least in the Four Corners, a bit of a legend. He's also developmentally different and as loud and as offensive as anyone I've ever known. And one more thing: at one point I'd been hired by this shady firm to help care for him. That was back in 1995, but I'd never been able to break off the relationship. I'm going to be honest, spending time with Jack nearly demands compensation, if not psychological support. He knew that he could drive me crazy and I knew that I had no idea how to make him stop, so we made the best of it. After some people at the station asked that I find a way to reduce his visits berating the staff as to my whereabouts, I scheduled for him a weekly sports and weather segment. He would go on the air with Happy Jack's Football Forecast and Weather Prognostications, and that was the only time he was to be at the radio station.
So...so it was to this beloved community figure that I'd beholden myself. And it was just after my first break of the 8 o' clock hour that his portable radio alerted him to my location. I could hear him yelling on a tiny phone speaker across a crowded bar. As the phone approached, I took a deep breath and thought about how I was making 75 dollars an hour to party.
"Jack!" I shouted into the phone.
"Fuck you Jared Ewy!" he greeted me.
I'll spare you the rest, but I'd told him I'd take him to K-mart after the live broadcast and—and this is the over commit here—that he could spend the last hour of the broadcast with me. It was 8:20 pm. My next break wouldn't be until 8:35. My house was less than a mile away. I could easily ride my bike to my house, get my car, get Jack, and be back on the air with enough time to order a beer and conjure the promotional feed.
I remember riding as fast as I could to make it all happen.
"Oh goddamn you're heavy!" shouted one of the paramedics as he and four other guys hoisted me into the back of the ambulance.
"Thank you," I grunted into the night sky, a brace holding my gaze upward.
"You're the radio guy, uh?" the beautiful human in the warmest ambulance announced as a question. "We'll get you back on the air..."
And he put a mask over my face to help me breathe. The corrugated ceiling blinked in and out. Shiny, symmetrical metal bumps reminding me where I was with every re-emergence into the conscious world. But let's hear it for small towns just big enough for a medical facility a half mile from wherever you are. It was a short trip to the beginning of the rest of my life.