Words of Wisdom

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been… August 26, 2010

Fifteen years ago I almost died.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this past weekend marked the anniversary of my near-death experience, that day in my life in which I faced down the reaper. As I mentioned earlier this week, we were involved in a traffic accident last Saturday. Later that day we talked to our parents to let them know we were fine and mom told us, by an interesting coincidence, it was the fifteenth anniversary of the life-altering event that came to be known in our family as “The Wreck.”

It was August of 1995, the first day of school. I was a dashing, 17 year old high school senior, a football player and the frontrunner to be valedictorian of the class of 1996. The prior year I posted the highest ACT score of anyone in my class (32) and was looking to take the test again as a senior just for fun (nerdy, I know) to see if I could ace it. My sights were set on attending Vanderbilt once I left the hallowed halls of Beebe High School and then settling into a probable career in math and science. Needless to say, I was a little full of myself.

But, just when you are expecting a fastball down the middle, life has a funny way of throwing a curve. Whether it is divine providence, a convergence of random variables or, as the great prophet Dylan might say, “A simple twist of fate,” things never seem to go as planned.

Note: I have no recollection of that day, nor for that matter, of much of the years surrounding it, so this narrative is built entirely upon the various versions of the story that I’ve heard over the years.

Like many teenagers, I had a close circle of friends in high school, but probably unlike many others, we had a self-given name, the Turkey Mountain Posse. This group designation came from the area where our gang spent many of our weekends, an off-the-grid camping spot at the end of a barely cleared path just off Turkey Mountain road. Our Posse consisted of a bunch of small town, Arkansas country boys who liked country music, pickup trucks and played football together for the mighty Beebe Badgers. We were quite a crew and did pretty much everything together.

On that fateful day, some of us made the decision to drive over to a nearby town and watch a preseason scrimmage game between one of our conference rivals, Vilonia, and Harding Academy. We loaded into two trucks for the short trip, with four people in my parents’ 1985 4-Runner and the others in a second vehicle behind us, and took off, whooping and hollering like small town 17 year olds do.

There is a small community between Beebe and Vilonia, a country crossroads of sorts, going by the name El Paso. At that time, there was a two-way stop at the one major intersection in El Paso and we were cruising down Highway 64, the road not burdened with a stop sign at the crossroads. As the story goes, we were blasting Hank Williams Jr. (“A Country Boy Can Survive,” to be exact) with the windows down and excitement in the air when the unthinkable happened. Memories turn fuzzy at this point and nobody is quite sure what happened next. Did we see the semi truck blow the stop sign? Did we have any opportunity to react? Nobody knows for sure. All that they remember, at least from what I’ve heard, is “A Country Boy Can Survive,” and the sinking feeling that I was dead. According to them, one of the strangest things about the situation was that, with the exception of an ear that had to be put back together surgically, there was nothing visibly wrong with me, but it was obvious that my condition was serious.

Directly behind us were our other friends, one of whom happened to have an ancient (but, at that time, state-of-the-art), brick-sized cell phone that he used to call for help and to let my parents know what happened. By another stroke of something, whether luck or providence, a doctor who was also heading to the game happened by and told the emergency personnel to rush me to a hospital in Little Rock, rather than closer ones in Conway or Searcy, where they would be more capable of handling my injuries.

For the next week I laid in a purgatory coma, hovering somewhere between life and death in ICU with my friends and family always close by, hanging on every word regarding my condition. The diagnosis: massive head injuries. The prognosis: iffy.

At some point I finally regained consciousness, though I’ve been told that for days afterwards I would sleep as much as 20 hours per day. Following this great awakening, I moved into inpatient rehab, where I spent the next several weeks undergoing speech, occupational, and physical therapy, relearning how to do many of the things I had done without thinking over the previous 17 years. If you’ve ever been in a rehabilitation hospital, you know that the vast majority of residents are elderly, so as the exception I garnered a good bit of special attention from the staff.

Eventually, probably some two months or so after the accident, I was able to rejoin my classmates full time. My football career was obviously over and I dropped a few spots in the class rankings, but I was back to stay. Uncertainty regarding life and the severe learning disability that immediately follows a head injury caused me to abandon my Vanderbilt dream and instead accept a full scholarship at Harding (which I summarily lost, mostly due to the failings of my damaged brain). The losses hurt, but I eventually understood that those things don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Relationships, with family, friends, and a higher power, are what truly give life meaning. With the realization that my brain will never work the way it once did, I learned humility.

A few years ago, if someone asked me whether or not I wished things had turned out differently, I would have replied with a definite yes, of course I wished I could have avoided this event. Now, I think I see things differently, maybe a little more maturely. It is part of who I am. If it wasn’t for the wreck, I probably would not have met my wife or have my kids. I may not have the sense of humility that I do now and I may not appreciate life and the people around me as much as I do.