Escape

At the beginning of November, 1995, I traveled with two friends to upstate New York with no specific destination. In our early 40s, two men and one woman, we planned on touring the Finger Lakes region. There was no sexual connection. We were friends and we hadn't been on a trip in a long time, mired as we were in middle-age, young kids, work, sick parents, marital problems and other life pressures---we planned on escaping from all that, if just for a few days. There was also a slight pretext in my going: though the Finger Lakes were more Central or Central-West, Western New York had a high concentration of Lockwoods. In fact it was the U.S. location with the most Lockwoods, and the second highest in the world, after Yorkshire, England (I believe Liverpool was third highest). So aside from the sheer need to get away, I was on a quest to find my roots, ancestral home, etc. I was even shown a place on a New York State map called "Lockwood Corners" a mere blip in minute-sized type.   

In the town of Homer, NY, we entered a library of the kind that were popular in the 1800s and early 1900s, like a gaunt historic house. I was standing upstairs on a creaky wooden floor in a narrow aisle of old hardcover books, and the place was completely silent, a profound silence that felt as if I were alone in the universe, in a private space where everything around me had cut out like turning off the sound in a movie. I held a small hardbound volume in my hand entitled, "The Queen's Garland," a collection of Elizabethan love verses more gelded and platonic than bawdy but a charming book nonetheless. A book sale was taking place downstairs so I would be able to buy "The Queen's Garland" and take it home with me.
I perused its pages and stopped at: 
                                             
                                       The blackbird and the thrush
                                       That made the woods to ring,
                                       With all the rest are now at hush,
                                       And not a note they sing. 

and while lost in the silence and the ancient book, I became aware of snow. Snow was falling outside the library window---flurries at first, but as the minutes passed and I paid only slight attention, the snow became more than a harmless flurry. Those earlier flakes, spinning in the November wind, had felt like a gift out of time in the silent library, but now the snow had evolved into a full-blown weather event. My friends and I quit the library and drove north to Lake Ontario where the sky was a vault of iron but dry, and dry ground, too, as if a switch had been thrown to stop the snow. But after about 10 minutes on the frigid shore of the lake, the snow returned accompanied by gale force winds that caused us to vacate and drive east on the East-West interstate towards Syracuse. Nature appeared confident in its malevolent display of wind and snow as though it had done this countless times, even sending us a friendly reminder now in early November. A white out. Traffic crawled in the flash storm, cars stalled, and others skidded off the road onto the highway shoulder sometimes denting the guardrail. We joked and tried to make light of a fairly scary phenomenon. We scanned the radio static for a weather report or snow emergency warning but only heard Johnny Mathis crooning:

                     "What a moment to share, it's wonderful, wonderful
                                  Oh, so wonderful, my love."

The entire sequence of events---from shadowed muffled library interior with a few snowflakes to a raging winter storm---had the flowing illogical logic of a dream.

We passed the night eating and drinking at a brewery in Syracuse, and the following Sunday, a lovely fall day, we drove along the lakes and stayed in Ithaca and Monday hiked some of the Gorges, another fine blue autumn day. And yet with everything we did that weekend, the threshold of terror in the silent library as I stood on the second floor with a hardcover book in my hand and the few snow flakes whirling outside the window is what I remember most.

Early Trauma

By the time I'd turned five years old, I hadn't lived through any significant trauma except for being born and also having a ring surgically removed from my stomach at the tender age of two-and-a-half of which I only possess a few dim memories.

And then, at age five, there was the ambulance.

The ambulance pulled along the curb in front of my house one morning or early afternoon (I seem to recall a noon hour, somewhere in that time of day). A red light flashed and revolved on the ambulance roof, a steady swirling blood pulse. My mother stood at the door with a worried look on her face, as if she'd been expecting the ambulance and not just idly watching out of curiosity like one of the neighbors. And because of her look and the time of day and the ambulance I knew something was wrong, an alteration in the normal everyday order of things. The rear door of the ambulance was yanked open and two men lifted out my father on a gurney, and then conveyed the gurney with the injured body of my father through the front door and into our living room. My mother asked me to move away as the men lowered my father's body onto the couch. He was in pain and seriously drugged (though I had no idea what it meant to "be drugged"), and his lower leg and most of the foot were bandaged except for the toes. There were a few random drops of iodine on the bandages---a color a little darker than the skin of an orange, maybe closer to a blood orange---which otherwise were clean and white.

From what I gathered---maybe not at the time but had it explained to me later---was that a rope from one of the pulleys on the wet rollers in the paper mill had snapped and coiled around father's shin and lower calf, and then the tension and speed of the snapped rope actually turned him upside down and jerked his upended body, like the tarot hanged man, toward the hot rollers and certain death. A co-worker had cut him down before he reached the searing roller stacks, but the burn had been severe and left him unable to walk, and that explained the ambulance ride, the hospital ER, and the ambulance ride home. Dad was out of commission for sure.



I had never been presented with a sight that scared me as much as this one did. His being injured and incapacitated were bad enough, but there was the added looming insecurity of seeing a parent vulnerable and unable to take care of you because they couldn't care for themselves. Luckily, my mother was present to take care of my father and brother and me, but mother was short (4-foot, 10-inches) and walked with a limp from post-polio. Would "she" be able to manage? I couldn't articulate my feelings in those terms. All I remember was confusion and fear.

My father used to tell me horror stories about the paper mill, stories of first-aid he'd administered for co-workers: A guy with his leg sliced down the middle so that you could see the femur bone from a machine appropriately named a slitter; pulling another guy out of the roller stacks after one hand and forearm had been crushed, requiring amputation and prosthetic limb; workers dropping dead of hard attacks or getting badly burned, scorched, or blinded, or writhing in seizure on the concrete floor. One story had circulated that in a different mill, a large one, a worker had met his death after falling into a paper beater.

In the days that followed his injury, I watched my father as he attempted to walk on crutches---a skip and a hobble, or a trip and a stumble, the choppy rhythm of forward motion. At first he stayed close to the walls, pressing a shoulder or an outstretched arm and hand for support. Because of his 6-foot, 4-inch height, the crutches were probably too short and may have been giving him trouble. What I do remember is that, as he began to recover, he discarded the crutches prematurely and hopped on the good leg and stayed close to walls and furniture to assist with his balance. I believe the slight added
pressure and increased mobility helped the bad leg to heal more quickly. He was only 23.

I cannot recall how much time elapsed until my father could walk normally again, but it seemed like a long time---days, weeks. And he wore the scar on his shin for the rest of his life---a Rorschach blot about the size of a daisy and the color of raw liver.