The Mind Does Funny Things. Installment Two.

I returned to Sno Valley Construction the following summer after having recovered from my dance with a Milwaukee skill saw. It had left my right knee with a knotch in the cap but no other signs of damage. So, after my senior year at Newport High I was back on the crew, swinging a hammer.

What I am about to recount will be scoffed at by most. I’m used to that. I have always wanted to film this event rather than write about it, but alas, at my advanced age it is easier to type than to assemble the cast, crew and equipment necessary to film it.

This happened one year to the day following my encounter with the ole’ worm drive skill saw.

It was around 3pm on a bright sunny warm summer Seattle day. We had been working on this house for six weeks or so. It was a new construction project and we had been with it from the ground up. It was framed and skinned and the roof was going on as well as the installation of windows and doors. I was up on the roof with another guy, Todd. It was a peaked roof, a comfortable slope, and Todd was on the opposite side of the peak tacking down shingles. I was on the sunny side rolling out tar paper. This stuff comes in rolls maybe three feet wide by fifty feet or so. It’s heavy and black and serves as a vapor barrier between the plywood sheeting of the roof and the shingles (asphalt or cedar) that finish the roof.

I was at the edge of the roof at it’s lowest point, rolling the tar paper out and stapling it down as I went. This was a two-story structure and I was covering the eves of the long side of the house. There was a hole in the eves where the brick chimney would rise once it was installed. Below me was a second story that had a large opening soon to be a sliding glass door onto a deck (not yet built) and a first story of I can’t remember what. It was three o’clock. The sun was shining.

I rolled the tar paper across the large opening that was to accommodate the chimney with the intention of cutting out the opening with a matt knife. Simple as that. Two or three feet beyond the chimney hole I ran out of tar-paper. I sank several staples into the flapping end and trudged to the peak of the roof where the supply of tar-paper rolls had been situated. Shouldering one, I headed back to the opposite corner from which I had been working. I tacked down the edge of the new roll and started rolling back toward the end of the previous roll. A quick glance behind me revealed nothing but solid black.

The sound was something close to, “TWOOOSHH”. Tar paper ripped away and I was, all at once, gravity's plaything. The mind does funny things. In what amounted to a couple of seconds at best, I had three clear, distinct and memorable thoughts. More remarkable was how succinct and free of invective they were. “What’s happening?” was the first of three. “I’m falling”, was the second, and, “this is going to hurt”, was the third and final before landing.

My trajectory was as simple as they come. I had pitched slightly backward when I broke through the tar paper and the upper part of my back caught the opposite side of the chimney hole. That sent me a little forward again and maybe off to the side because when I landed it was as if I were laying in a ship’s deck chair with my left elbow propping up my head, as if to take in the view.

Now it’s important at this point to register a few facts. One, when my back hit the edge of the hole it gave the house a little shake. Two, as I fell past the deck level I was within several feet of the only woman carpenter on our crew, Jane. She was framing in the sliding glass door opening. She saw me go past and hit the ground, and she started breathing hard, nearly hyperventilating. Three, everyone on the crew, who was ground level at the time, ran to my aid.

Cut to Todd, still up on the roof. Having felt the house shake and hearing the commotion, he left his task on the other side of the pitch and went up and over to see what the fuss was about. When he reached the edge of the roof where the torn tar paper gave him his first clue, he peered down and saw my sprawled figure surrounded by co-workers. Todd was extremely concerned and went straight away to the aluminum ladder that was propped up against the edge of the roof. In his haste, he failed to shift his weight properly and the bottom of the ladder skidded free and Todd and ladder were traveling the same path I had just taken.

Jane had continued to hyperventilate during this time. As Todd and ladder passed, Jane’s ventilating morphed quickly into hyper-hyper and she was inhalations away from “basket case.”

Todd landed twelve feet away from me. He preferred the face down approach and hit hard. Todd was at least fifteen years my senior and, truth be told, was a little out of shape for the work and his age. He lay motionless and every single person that had surrounded me, when I fell and as I struggled to my feet, immediately shifted over to Todd. It was like some greater suction had been activated a few feet away and everything within reach was pulled instantly to that point.

An ambulance came and the both of us were carted away. Todd was strapped to a backboard because they feared for his spine. I hopped in and sat in the back with Todd, trying to cheer him up. We were both out for a couple of weeks with severe bruising but, can you believe it…no broken bones, no lasting damage.

It was the second time, a year apart, that I had been in an ambulance. I was seventeen and eighteen respectively. Many years have passed since then and I can say (knock wood) that I have not seen the inside those horrendous vehicles since

For a while there the emergency crew knew my mother by name because what with my several accidents (some yet un-blogged) and my younger brother getting hit by a truck, and then, later cracking his head open, and my other brother in and out with breaks, sprains and trauma’s…well, they’d just pick up the phone and say, “Mrs. F, you better come down here when you can. No rush though, we’ll patch him up like usual.”

A couple of weeks ago I heard that a woodworking friend of mine lost the ends of two of his fingers. He’s fifty five or so and has been doing this kind of work all his life. Every day I finish cleaning up and putting the tools away, I look at my hands and know I’ve done well to keep everything in tact. But as fast as I fell through that tar-paper… well, you know…fill in the blank.