Incident in Ketchikan

I have always been uneasy about railings on high places. I don't like coming close enough to one to so much as touch it, much less depend on it for my safety, no matter how stoutly built it is.

The other day, N., the older of the two sons of our neighbors and good friends right up the road, G. and C., was attending a dinner party up on a bluff in Ketchikan, in far-off Alaska, where he and his brother P. both work on a salmon fishing boat. N. was walking along the edge of a path or narrow road that skirted the edge of a high cliff, along which ran a wooden railing. A couple came up from the other direction, heavily laden with groceries, and he asked if they needed any help. They said, "No," and meanwhile he stood aside to give them room to pass. In the process he pressed against the railing, and it had rotted, and it gave way. He had only imbibed a beer or two.

A heavily muscled young man in good health but not designed to take flight, N. fell like a rock for 10 or 12 feet and slammed hard into a pile of timber. The next thing he knew he was in a hospital in far off Seattle a day or two later, and eventually he found out the rest of what had happened.

Nails, splinters, or something in the timbers punctured him in a few places in his mid areas, but that didn't keep him from bouncing off the timber and rolling over and over much farther down the steep precipice, 25 or 30 feet, picking up so much momentum during this "ragdolling" that at the bottom of the cliff his carcass flew over a retaining wall and crashed down on the hood of a Toyota pickup, mashing it, and from there he rolled over onto the street, finally coming to a halt, while beginning to create a pool of blood.

Naturally that created a lot of anxiety on the parts of his brother and his hostess. They sped down to the bottom of the cliff and were relieved to see that somehow he was still alive and was even trying to sit up. P. made him lie still till help came.

The Ketchikan medics patched him up as best they could, but said there was nothing else they could do, and they sent for the means to send him on to Seattle.

That was a little over a week ago. His mother and father went out there to bring him home. Yesterday he came over here to lollygag and to play some chess, and he didn't look any the worse for the wear to me. The resilience of the young! He has some fractures, and a small hematoma on one side, and he is on painkillers, and also he has to obey doctor's orders that are requiring him to forgo his normal freewheeling lifestyle, at least for a while.

He said he was still marveling over his escape from worse, and well he might. But then he said something like, "I've never had anything like that happen to me before!"

I am always a little amazed that young people never think about what they're saying when they reflect on some out of the ordinary incident and say with great wonder, "I've never had that happen to me before!" Of course they haven't, when they're only 20, or even 28, as in the case of N.

So I couldn't help saying, "Neither has anyone else had that happen to them."

N. and my wife seemed to think that that was worth a couple of laughs.

Meanwhile I am thinking particularly about the owner of that pickup. I would be very interested to hear what he thought when he saw his vehicle and found out what had happened. "An unconscious man flew over that wall there and did it!" And I would be equally interested in hearing what that man's insurance company is finding to say about it.

"Yeah! It was Nick!"

N. seems to be only concerned that he has lost weight, as much as 25 pounds -- as if a few weeks of dedicated partying won't bring all that back in a hurry.