I wasn't a fan of Stephen King's until I read his non-fiction book On Writing. It's one of the best books I've ever read on the subject and a lot of it has stayed with me over the years. A few years back Beth listened to the audio version while on a road trip and she and I talked a lot about how insightful King is--and what an excellent writer he is. In it, he writes about a terrible accident he was in when he was hit by a car while walking. Many of you know that Beth is in the nascent stages of her own book and, like King, her writing has been derailed by her injury. Just today I was thinking about the similarities in their stories, and so looked it up again to check it out. I thought some of you might be interested in it. It's a long excerpt, but pretty fascinating. And King, whom I always spurned as a B-grade horror writer, tells a compelling, layered, and deeply felt story. The lesson? Never judge an author by his genre!
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When we're at our summer house in western Maine, I walk four miles every day, unless it's pouring down with rain. Three miles of this walk are on dirt roads which wind through the woods; a mile of it is on Route 5, a two-lane blacktop highway which runs between Bethel and Fryeburg.
The third week in June of 1999 was an extraordinarily happy one for my wife and me; our kids, now grown and scattered across the country, were all home. It was the first time in nearly six months that we'd all been under the same roof. As an extra bonus, our first grandchild was in the house, three months old and happily jerking at a helium balloon tied to his foot.
On 19 June, I drove our younger son to the Portland Jetport, where he caught a flight back to New York City. I drove home, had a brief nap, and then set out on my usual walk. We were planning to go en famille to see The General's Daughter in nearby North Conway, New Hampshire that evening, and I thought I just had time to get my walk in before packing everybody up for the trip.
I set out on that walk around four o'clock in the afternoon, as well as I can remember. Just before reaching the main road (in western Maine, any road with a white line running down the middle of it is a main road), I stepped into the woods and urinated. It was two months before I was able to take another leak standing up.
When I reached the highway I turned north, walking on the gravel shoulder, against traffic. One car passed me, also headed north. About three-quarters of a mile farther along, the woman driving the car observed a light-blue Dodge van heading south. The van was looping from one side of the road to the other, barely under the driver's control. The woman in the car turned to her passenger when they were safely past the wandering van and said, 'That was Stephen King walking back there. I sure hope that guy in the van doesn't hit him.'
Most of the sightlines along the mile of Route 5 which I walk are good, but there is one stretch, a short, steep hill, where a pedestrian walking north can see very little of what might be coming his way. I was three-quarters of the way up this hill when Bryan Smith, the owner and operator of the light-blue Dodge van, came over the crest.
He wasn't on the road; he was on the shoulder. My shoulder. I had perhaps three-quarters of a second to register this. It was just time enough to think, My God, I'm going to be hit by a school bus . I started to turn to my left. There is a break in my memory here. On the other side of it, I'm on the ground, looking at the back of the van, which is now pulled off the road and tilted to one side.
This recollection is very clear and sharp, more like a snapshot than a memory. There is dust around the van's tail-lights. The licence plate and the back windows are dirty. I register these things with no thought that I have been in an accident, or of anything else. It's a snapshot, that's all. I'm not thinking; my head has been swopped clean.
There's another little break in my memory here, and then I am very carefully wiping palmfuls of blood out of my eyes with my left hand. When my eyes are reasonably clear, I look around and see a man sitting on a nearby rock. He has a cane drawn across his lap. This is Bryan Smith, 42 years of age, the man who hit me with his van. Smith has got quite a driving record; he has racked up nearly a dozen vehicle-related offences.
Smith wasn't looking at the road on the afternoon our lives came together, because his Rottweiler had jumped from the very rear of his van into the back-seat area, where there was an Igloo cooler with some meat stored inside. The Rottweiler's name is Bullet (Smith has another Rottweiler at home; that one is named Pistol). Bullet started to nose at the lid of the cooler. Smith turned around and tried to push Bullet away. He was still looking at Bullet and pushing his head away from the cooler when he came over the top of the knoll; still looking and pushing when he struck me.
Smith told friends later that he thought he'd hit 'a small deer' until he noticed my bloody spectacles lying on the front seat of his van. They were knocked from my face when I tried to get out of Smith's way. The frames were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken. They are the lenses I'm wearing now, as I write this.
Smith sees I'm awake and tells me help is on the way. He speaks calmly, even cheerily. His look, as he sits on his rock with his cane drawn across his lap, is one of pleasant commiseration: Ain't the two of us just had the shittiest luck? it says. He and Bullet left the campground where they were staying, he later tells an investigator, because he wanted 'some of those Marzes-bars they have up to the store'. When I hear this little detail some weeks later, it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels. It's almost funny.
Help is on the way, I think, and that's probably good because I've been in a hell of an accident. I'm lying in the ditch and there's blood all over my face and my right leg hurts. I look down and see something I don't like: my lap now appears to be on sideways, as if my whole lower body had been wrenched half a turn to the right. I look back up at the man with the cane and say, 'Please tell me it's just dislocated.'
'Nah,' he says. Like his face, his voice is cheery, only mildly interested. He could be watching all this on TV while he noshes on one of those Marzes-bars. 'It's broken in five I'd say maybe six places.' 'I'm sorry,' I tell him - God knows why - and then I'm gone again for a little while. It isn't like blacking out; it's more as if the film of memory has been spliced here and there.
When I come back this time, an orange-and-white van is idling at the side of the road with its flashers going. An emergency medical technician - Paul Fillebrown is his name - is kneeling beside me. He's doing something. Cutting off my jeans, I think, although that might have come later.
I ask him if I can have a cigarette. He laughs and says not hardly. I ask him if I'm going to die. He tells me no, I'm not going to die, but I need to go to the hospital, and fast. I ask Fillebrown again if I'm going to die, and he tells me again that I'm not. Then he asks me if I can wiggle the toes on my right foot. 'My toes, did they move?' I ask Paul Fillebrown. He says they did, a good healthy wiggle. 'Do you swear to God?' I ask him, and I think he does. I'm starting to pass out again. Fillebrown asks me, very slowly and loudly, bending down into my face, if my wife is at the big house on the lake. I can't remember. I can't remember where any of my family is, but I'm able to give him the telephone numbers of both our big house and the cottage on the far side of the lake where my daughter sometimes stays. Hell, I could give him my Social Security number, if he asked. I've got all my numbers. It's just everything else that's gone.
Other people are arriving now. Somewhere a radio is crackling out police calls. I'm put on a stretcher. It hurts, and I scream. I'm lifted into the back of the EMT truck, and the police calls are closer. The doors shut and someone up front says, 'You want to really hammer it.' Then we're rolling.
Paul Fillebrown sits down beside me. He has a pair of clippers and tells me he's going to have to cut the ring off the third finger of my right hand - it's a wedding ring Tabby gave me in 1983, 12 years after we were actually married. I try to tell Fillebrown that I wear it on my right hand because the real wedding ring is still on the third finger of my left - the original two-ring set cost me $15.95 at Day's Jewelers in Bangor. That first ring only cost eight bucks, in other words, but it seems to have worked.
Some garbled version of this comes out, probably nothing Paul Fillebrown can actually understand, but he keeps nodding and smiling as he cuts that second, more expensive, wedding ring off my swollen right hand. Two months or so later, I call Fillebrown to thank him; by then I understand that he probably saved my life by administering the correct on-scene medical aid and then getting me to the hospital at a speed of roughly 110mph, over patched and bumpy back roads.
Fillebrown assures me that I'm more than welcome, then suggests that perhaps someone was watching out for me. 'I've been doing this for 20 years,' he tells me over the phone, 'and when I saw the way you were lying in the ditch, plus the extent of the impact injuries, I didn't think you'd make it to the hospital. You're a lucky camper to still be with the program.'
The extent of the impact injuries is such that the doctors at Northern Cumberland Hospital decide they cannot treat me there; someone summons a LifeFlight helicopter to take me to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. At this point my wife, older son, and daughter arrive. The kids are allowed a brief visit; my wife is allowed to stay longer. The doctors have assured her that I'm banged up, but I'll make it.
The lower half of my body has been covered. She isn't allowed to look at the interesting way my lap has shifted around to the right, but she is allowed to wash the blood off my face and pick some of the glass out of my hair. There's a long gash in my scalp, the result of my collision with Bryan Smith's windshield. This impact came at a point less than two inches from the steel, driver's-side support post. Had I struck that, I likely would have been killed or rendered permanently comatose, a vegetable with legs. Had I struck the rocks jutting out of the ground beyond the shoulder of Route 5, I likely also would have been killed or permanently paralysed. I didn't hit them; I was thrown over the van and 14ft in the air, but landed just shy of the rocks.
'You must have pivoted to the left just a little at the last second,' Dr David Brown tells me later. 'If you hadn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation.'
The LifeFlight helicopter lands in the parking lot of Northern Cumberland Hospital, and I am wheeled out to it. The sky is very bright, very blue. The clatter of the helicopter's rotors is very loud. Someone shouts into my ear, 'Ever been in a helicopter before, Stephen?' The speaker sounds jolly, all excited for me. I try to answer yes, I've been in a helicopter before - twice, in fact - but I can't. All at once, it's very tough to breathe.
They load me into the helicopter. I can see one brilliant wedge of blue sky as we lift off; not a cloud in it. Beautiful. There are more radio voices. This is my afternoon for hearing voices, it seems. Meanwhile, it's getting even harder to breathe. I gesture at someone, or try to, and a face bends upside down into my field of vision.
'Feel like I'm drowning,' I whisper.
Somebody checks something, and someone else says, 'His lung has collapsed.'
There's a rattle of paper as something is unwrapped, and then the someone else speaks into my ear, loudly so as to be heard over the rotors. 'We're going to put a chest tube in you, Stephen. You'll feel some pain, a little pinch. Hold on.'
It's like being thumped very high up on the right side of the chest by someone holding a short sharp object. Then there's an alarming whistle in my chest, as if I've sprung a leak. In fact, I suppose I have. A moment later, the soft in-out of normal respiration, which I've listened to my whole life (mostly without being aware of it, thank God), has been replaced by an unpleasant shloop-shloop-shloop sound. The air I'm taking in is very cold, but it's air, at least, air, and I keep breathing it. I don't want to die. I love my wife, my kids, my afternoon walks by the lake. I also love to write. I don't want to die, and as I lie in the helicopter looking out at the bright blue summer sky, I realise that I am actually lying in death's doorway. Someone is going to pull me one way or the other pretty soon; it's mostly out of my hands. All I can do is lie there, look at the sky, and listen to my thin, leaky breathing: shloop-shloop-shloop.
Ten minutes later, we set down on the concrete landing pad at CMMC. To me, it seems to be at the bottom of a concrete well. The blue sky is blotted out and the whap-whap-whap of the helicopter rotors becomes magnified and echoey, like the clapping of giant hands.
Still breathing in great leaky gulps, I am lifted out of the helicopter. Someone bumps the stretcher and I scream. 'Sorry, sorry, you're okay, Stephen,' someone says - when you're badly hurt, everyone calls you by your first name, everyone is your pal.
'Tell Tabby I love her very much,' I say as I am first lifted and then wheeled, very fast, down some sort of descending concrete walkway. All at once I feel like crying.
'You can tell her that yourself,' the someone says. We go through a door; there is air-conditioning and lights flowing past overhead. Speakers issue pages. It occurs to me, in a muddled sort of way, that an hour before I was taking a walk and planning to pick some berries in a field that overlooks Lake Kezar. I wouldn't pick for long, though; I'd have to be home by 5.30 because we were all going to the movies. The General's Daughter , starring John Travolta. Travolta was in the movie made out of Carrie , my first novel. He played the bad guy. That was a long time ago.
'When?' I ask. 'When can I tell her?'
'Soon,' the voice says, and then I pass out again. This time it's no splice but a great big whack taken out of the memory-film; there are a few flashes, confused glimpses of faces and operating rooms and looming X-ray machinery; there are delusions and hallucinations fed by the morphine and Dilaudid being dripped into me; there are echoing voices and hands that reach down to paint my dry lips with swabs that taste of peppermint. Mostly, though, there is darkness.
Bryan Smith's estimate of my injuries turned out to be conservative. My lower leg was broken in at least nine places - the orthopaedic surgeon who put me together again, the formidable David Brown, said that the region below my right knee had been reduced to 'so many marbles in a sock.'
The extent of those lower-leg injuries necessitated two deep incisions - they're called medial and lateral fasciatomies - to release the pressure caused by the exploded tibia and also to allow blood to flow back into the lower leg. Without the fasciatomies (or if the fasciatomies had been delayed), it probably would have been necessary to amputate the leg. My right knee itself was split almost directly down the middle; the technical term for the injury is 'comminuted intra-articular tibial fracture'. I also suffered an acetabular cup fracture of the right hip - a serious derailment, in other words - and an open femoral intertrochanteric fracture in the same area. My spine was chipped in eight places. Four ribs were broken. My right collarbone held, but the flesh above it was stripped raw. The laceration in my scalp took 20 or 30 stitches. Yeah, on the whole, I'd say Bryan Smith was a tad conservative.
Mr Smith's driving behaviour in this case was eventually examined by a grand jury, who indicted him on two counts: driving to endanger (pretty serious) and aggravated assault (very serious, the kind of thing that means jail time). After due consideration, the District Attorney responsible for prosecuting such cases in my little corner of the world allowed Smith to plead out to the lesser charge of driving to endanger. He received six months of county jail time (sentence suspended) and a year's suspension of his privilege to drive. He was also put on probation for a year with restrictions on other motor vehicles, such as snowmobiles and ATVs. It is conceivable that Bryan Smith could be legally back on the road in the fall or winter of 2001.
David Brown put my leg back together in five marathon surgical procedures that left me thin, weak and nearly at the end of my endurance. They also left me with at least a fighting chance to walk again. A large steel and carbon-fibre apparatus called an external fixator was clamped to my leg. Eight large steel pegs called Schanz pins run through the fixator and into the bones above and below my knee. Five smaller steel rods radiate out from the knee. These look sort of like a child's drawing of sunrays. The knee itself was locked in place. I entered the hospital on 19 June. Around the 25th, I got up for the first time, staggering three steps to a commode, where I sat with my hospital johnny in my lap and my head down, trying not to weep and failing. You try to tell yourself that you've been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it's true. Sometimes it doesn't work, that's all. Then you cry.
A day or two after those initial steps, I started physical therapy. During my first session, I managed 10 steps in a downstairs corridor, lurching along with the help of a walker. One other patient was learning to walk again at the same time, a wispy 80-year-old woman named Alice who was recovering from a stroke. We cheered each other on when we had enough breath to do so. On our third day in the downstairs hall, I told Alice that her slip was showing.
'Your ass is showing, sonnyboy,' she wheezed, and kept going.
I came home to Bangor on 9 July, after a hospital stay of three weeks. I began a daily rehab program which includes stretching, bending, and crutch-walking. I tried to keep my courage and my spirits up. On 4 August, I went back to CMMC for another operation. When I woke up this time, the Schanz pins in my upper thigh were gone. I could bend my knee again. Dr Brown pronounced my recovery 'on course' and sent me home for more rehab and physical therapy. And in the midst of all this, something else happened. On 24 July, five weeks after Bryan Smith hit me with his Dodge van, I began to write again.
As you all know, Beth is back at home adjusting to life in the slow lane--doesn't come easy for someone like her! It definitely is a combination of ups and downs. Today, she cooked her breakfast and then did the dishes and was wiped for the rest of the morning. She tried to cut back on her morphine a few days ago but it was too soon, so she still takes the recommended dosage. She naps as much as she can and takes one or two walks outside--yesterday for 46 minutes--per day. She is coming up against some frustration around her limitations and her inability to do certain things. Often, she waits for Matt to get home to either get something for her or perform a task. She says that she is having to work harder to keep her spirits up and her attitude in the positive realm, and that that definitely came easier at the beginning of the process. I can appreciate that--at four weeks and counting, it must be getting seriously old by now. But the way I see it, it's only a matter of time before she'll be doing stuff like running endlessly along beautiful, pristine beaches and conquering canyons in a single bound. In the meantime, she's doing some writing, some visiting, some self-care, and a lot of resting up for the day when she's ready to be back out there with the sun on her shoulders, doing what she loves most...
