and That's When I Knew I Was Dead.
Not everyone with a story to tell has had a near death experience. But, I've heard a lot of stories in my lifetime, and told a few, and a much more common experience is that moment when you know you're dead, exaggerated and metaphorical as it may be. Who hasn't said, "... and that's when I knew I was dead!" Or, "My wife is gonna kill me when she finds out!" Or, "My parents are gonna murder me if they hear about this!" That moment when the bottom falls out, and all hope of things turning out smoothly is gone. In an early Frank Zappa song, he writes, "You tore a big hole in the convertible top. What will you tell your Mom and Pop?" That's the moment. It rarely results in death or even near death, but at the moment that isn't what you are thinking, and that's certainly not the way you tell the story. These moments are often the result of bad judgment, such as sneaking your father's Randall knife along on a boy scout campout, and breaking a half inch off the tip trying to stick it into a tree. But they can be completely out of your control, such as rounding a corner along the pine woods trail back to the cabin from the river, carrying the two huge salmon, and encountering the black bear. My personal favorite, a stand-out moment of abject horror if ever there was one, was when the grizzled Federale Capitan, at some desolate hole-in-the-wall outpost along a desert highway, discovered the three fifty-pound bags of steer manure that were in the fold-down rear seat of Pat's family station wagon, unbeknownst to us. Not that first moment. Wait for it. As he pointedly and gleefully shouted, "Que es esto?" at us over and over, no doubt assuming he had made the biggest drug bust of his career, he held out his hand. And an open switchblade was already there, anticipated somehow by the younger M16-carrying Federale at his side. El Capitan slashed one of the bags, still rhetorically demanding, "Que es esto?," reached in for a large pinch of the product, held it to his nose, and took in a big forceful snort of it.
And that's when we knew we were dead.
My earliest recollection of such a moment is from so long ago that it is more of a story that I tell than it is a memory I recall. My family had travelled back East to visit our aunt and uncle and their family in New Jersey. It may have been the Christmas after we first discovered my Dad's cancer, which would make me 13, or a few years earlier. I'm not sure who the baby was, David or Stephen or John. But there were five or six rambunctious kids in each family, and probably some neighbor kids, tearing up the place while the parents tried to have a nice visit. There was a blizzard complicating matters, and it was a constant struggle to keep the kids out of the bad weather, and balance that with keeping them out of the house where they could burn up energy. Only one of the dozen or so kids was any older than me.
There was a big hill not far away, across the acre of grounds, and we spent quite a bit of time there with the toboggan and the sleds. As an adult, I wonder about the actual size of that hill, but it certainly seemed big then. The slope, however, curved down into a thin patch of small pines, so you had to steer against the slope to miss the trees, or topple off before you had gone half or even a third of the distance you could travel if you went past the trees. And, as you probably realize, steering a sled or toboggan is more like leaning and shouting and hoping than it is like the toy cars and sleds on wheels that we had back in Southern California. We spent quite a bit of time on that hill that Christmas vacation. There wasn't much else that could keep that many kids occupied.
On one particular trip on the toboggan, we gleefully pushed off and got to bounding down the slope, roughly, with some bouncing and careless leaning, and every single one of us lost our grip, and tumbled off the toboggan into the snow. Except the baby. Who was originally standing up between two of the larger bodies. In hindsight, we probably should not have been bringing the baby along on these rides, since he wasn't old enough to grasp what was going on, or fend for himself. And, without the steering we were attempting, the toboggan headed straight for the trees. Baby and all. And that's when we knew we were dead. "Mom, we killed the baby." As we scrambled up out of the snow, we watched helplesly as the toboggan raced away from us into the danger. Baby and all. And then proceeded to cruise smoothly through the patch of trees, not striking a single one. Except for the one that had fallen, and was lying across the flight path. But by that time, the baby had toppled over, and was smaller and lower than the toboggan's curled front, and wasn't in any actual danger as it whooshed its way through the branches without even slowing down. Between realizing we had launched the baby at the trees, and seeing that the fallen tree couldn't be avoided, we all had a few bad moments there. But nothing actually happened. No harm was done. And by the time we caught up, the baby was laughing and gurgling and ready to go again. We didn't tell Mom after all.
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