In the summer of 1974, my brother Ken and I both worked as general laborers at a metal electro-plating plant in Portland. I had just completed my freshman year of college; Ken, his sophomore year. Our jobs consisted of routine manual labor, doing whatever the foreman told us to do (including painting, masonry, electrical, plumbing, fiberglassing huge wooden vats, welding, and other odd jobs for which we had neither training nor experience).
One of those jobs was spray-painting the facility's ceiling, which was 20 feet high. Which meant that either Ken or I had to work from atop a 14-foot-tall scaffold (Ken says he thinks it was taller). Somehow—I'm not sure how—I was elected to be on the scaffold, while Ken was in charge of rolling the scaffold from place to place across the concrete floor. Inconveniently, the floor had several drainage channels running through it, each about a foot wide and a foot deep. In order to roll the scaffolding across each channel, Ken had to lay heavy iron plates over them, creating a bridge that the scaffold's wheels could cross. Most of the plates had cleats welded to their bottom side to help keep them in place atop the channels, but one did not.
About halfway through the job, one of those metal plates slipped out of place, the scaffold's wheel dropped into the ditch, and the scaffold tipped over. As I was falling, I remember feeling as if time had slowed way down, and I was watching the event unfold like a movie playing frame by frame. While watching this slow-motion movie with a kind of detached bemusement, I eventually realized that I was going down and the concrete floor was coming up, so I had better prepare myself for impact.
How does one prepare for falling off a 14-foot-tall scaffold onto a concrete floor? One assumes the fetal position, of course. But don't ask me how I figured that out; it just happened, like someone or something else was controlling my body—and I was passively watching it happen.
In the midst of all this, I heard Ken say, sheepishly and without a hint of irony, "Oops."
When my body hit the floor, I went unconscious for a minute or two. I felt no pain, but I remember being surrounded by activity—people gathering around me, shouting at each other, kneeling next to me, shaking my shoulders gently, asking me questions. By the time I finally started coming to, I could hear a siren in the distance, and the next thing I knew I was being loaded into it on a gurney, while drifting in and out of consciousness.
Then I was lying on a bed in an ER bay, my head in a fog bank from pain meds, and Ken was coming toward me—in a wheelchair. "What happened to you?" my mouth tried to ask.
"Not sure," Ken replied. "They think the scaffold wheel might've broken my nose."
"They put you in a wheelchair for a broken nose?" I slurred. "Do I get a wheelchair, too?"
Ken grinned, despite his chagrin. I could tell he was feeling badly about the ordeal.
"I'm OK," I reassured him. "Or I will be, anyway."
"I hope so," he replied meekly.
The damage wasn't as bad as it could have been. I had broken a bone in my hip, which would require months of physical therapy. I also had a long, scary-looking contusion on my left forearm, and the doctor told me that an X-ray revealed a bone cyst that, if I had landed on my arm just right, would have shattered into a thousand pieces. Which would have left me with a useless left arm—and an end to my burgeoning career (OK, avocation) as a drummer.
What could I do to heal the cyst in my left arm? "Swim...lift weights...keep drumming," the doctor told me. "Eventually it should fill in and not be an issue."
Whew. Even though my hip would hurt for years to come and the scar on my arm would never disappear, I still had a shot at a relatively normal life.
Ken went back to work a few days later (sans wheelchair), but I was off for six weeks, limping around my parents' house in utter boredom while everyone else was at work all day. When I finally did make it back to work, the foreman told me he'd been so stressed out by the incident that he'd had a heart attack.
We spent the rest of the summer treating each other with kid gloves.
P.S. The plant was forced to close in 2003 due to unsafe conditions and environmental hazards.
