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.