The Mind Does Funny Things. Installment One

During the summer of my junior and senior years of high school I worked for an outfit called Sno Valley Construction Company. This was six months after I dropped a 22 ounce hammer on my best friends head.

By the way, for you loyal blog readers who remember the incident involving Pat Brogan’s head and my framing hammer, you’ll be interested to know that a certain Seattle based big mouth passed on the blog’s link to Pat’s parents. His father is reported to have uttered, upon reading the blurb, “That’s why the kid was a little strange”. There was also some back and forth about Pat and I hiding some beer in the ravine off of Coal Creek Parkway. Let me just say, for the record, that I have no recollection of anything of the sort.

Sno Valley Construction was located in Snohomish Valley, Washington. This Valley was settled by my ancestors on my mothers side. The story goes that Mr. and Mrs. Cedergreen hoped off the boat in downtown Seattle back when it was a bunch of boat slips and a muddy board walk. Mister (who was carrying some cash) said to Mrs., “How about that hill over yonder,” only he said it in Norwegian. He was pointing to Queen Ann Hill, an extremely posh section of what is now Seattle proper. The Mrs. didn’t like the proximity of the hill to the stench of the ports and insisted they head east. And so, instead of being gazillionares, they were extremely comfortable farmers, with land and houses and children and horses. And the Cedergreens populated the Snohomish Valley.



I remember, as a young teenager, going to the family’s homestead and visiting my uncle Wesley. He had a few horses and cattle and jars of milk in the fridge, fresh from the cow. He would scrape off the hardened cream from the top and drink. I never could.

But I digress. Working for Sno Valley was an education to be sure. We worked four ten-hour days during the summer because the guys liked the three day weekends that resulted. I was on the road by six fifteen Monday through Thursday for the 45 minute drive from suburban Seattle to Snohomish valley. In those days logging trucks and pick-ups piloted by blue collar workers were the only AM traffic. These days it’s BMW’s and Lexus’s heading for Redmond WA, home of Microsoft.

But I digress. Late in June during my first summer I had my first industrial accident. We had been raising a small house that sat across a river. When the river flooded the house would suffer. The owner hired us to jack up the house three feet and solve his problem. We had spent weeks crawling under the house, dragging beams and jacks and rail road ties around and had succeeded in raising the little house three feet. A new foundation had been constructed and things were looking swell. Two of us were working on the skirting that would cover the enlarged space between the bottom of the house and the ground. I was ripping a board lengthwise. It was around four feet long and I had put one end on a post sticking out of the ground and my left hand was holding onto the other end. I was using a Milwaukee 7 inch worm-drive circular saw. It’s a great saw. The problem was, it didn’t have an operational blade guard. I completed the cut, removed my finger from the trigger and let the saw (it’s pretty heavy) down by my side. The still spinning blade, unguarded, hit my right knee.



All I felt was a blunt force thud. I looked down and my jeans had been torn from near the ankle to way up on the thigh. My knee seemed also to have a problem. And this is where the mind does funny things.

I wasn’t certain how I should respond to these new circumstances, when my co-worker gave me a clue. He looked up from what he was doing, took in the situation, got a good look at my leg and responded with, “Ahhhh!!! Shit!” This should have alarmed me, but like I said, the mind does funny things.

He suggested I sit down immediately. I didn’t think that was such a bad idea as, all of a sudden, I was not feeling myself. As I walked to the lawn chair fifteen feet away, I could not help noticing that the bone of my knee cap was making special appearances with each stride. When I sat down it was suggested that an ambulance should be sent for. “No”, I assured my friend, "not necessary." If he happened to have a bandanna handy, I could wrap that around my knee and its (gaping) wound and finish out the day. Then, on the way back home, I would stop in at a doctor’s office and get the thing checked out.

This was met with dumb silence. Seeing that I was not convincing, I said, “All right. Just help me back to my car and I’ll drive to the nearest hospital”. It was at least a half hour away.

The ambulance arrived and I was carted away. I received sixty stitches in three layers. I know because I watched. I still had a latent medical interest from the days when I wanted to be a doctor and worked as a candy striper in hospital wards. I had yet to feel any significant pain. When I arrived home I was greeted by some California cousins up for a visit. Around 3 AM I awoke to some of the most horrendous pain I’ve ever experienced. The mind does funny things.

I was laid up for three weeks receiving workmans comp all the while. I felt so good after two weeks that I hoped on a plane and visited my best friend Craig in Missouri. He and I ended up at Table Rock lake in the Ozarks and there was a moment that I was guilty of waterskiing on my bum leg, all expenses paid.



But I digress.