Search and Rescue

Outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1979, I worked for a friend, Bill, who was remodeling his farm homestead. The front portion of the building consisted of wood frame construction, the rear was much older and made of adobe. It was the adobe part Bill wanted to remodel. This section was a fort-like structure with walls that were ~four feet thick. The mud brick walls had been sealed over four century's ago with milk and blood, forming distinct layers of off white and rust colors. The shutter type windows were quite small on the inside and the opening tapered out to several times their original dimensions, presumably to enable defenders to aim and fire weapons at attackers. We were framing interior walls and installing electrical wiring.

It was on the weekend that we were renovating as Bill's day job was working in the cancer research lab at the University of New Mexico. From his work he had rescued and adopted a dog, one of the experimental animals and she was an adorable petite breed of Husky. He found the dog too cute to bear seeing it put down. The animal had been scheduled for euthanasia after having served its purpose in the research and having a significant portion of its intestines removed. However, soon after bringing the animal home it went astray. Considering its compromised physical state we were both especially concerned for its survival chances.

So Bill and I set out on horseback to search for the dog. I agreed to go even though I was limited in my riding ability. To compound matters for me the saddle stirrups were set up for Bill's wife, a much shorter person than I, plus the boots that Bill loaned me were five sizes too large for me. When I mounted the horse the boots were in the stirrups although my feet were not and my legs were sharply bent from the short stirrups. In this "spur of the moment" undertaking we began to search the levees of the nearby irrigation canals that ran adjacent to the area farms and provided trails for us to follow.

As the day wore on and the sun began to noticeably approach the horizon, Bill suggested that we split up to cover more ground and be more effective. Immediately after he rode off the horse I was riding began to misbehave in ways indicating it didn't like being separated from its stablemate. I struggled with the reins turning the horse repeatedly keeping it from following the other horse and going in the opposite direction I needed us to go. Then the horse suddenly turned perpendicular to the levee and swiftly moved toward the barbed wire fence at the foot of the levee. The angle of the levee was near forty-five degrees, when the horse put its head down and bucked I was launched head first in the direction of the fence.

Surreally Time slowed way down and then stopped! Hanging in mid-air, I heard a susurrant voice just as calm as you please, say simply, "Robert, if you don't grab the top strand of the barbed wire ...you aren't going to live through this." I felt from the soothing qualities of the voice that I had all the time I needed to make this life or death decision. I reviewed my life at the time ...it was great, I was happily married and enjoying the adventure of living a full life. So it was not long before I decided I wanted to continue living and if enduring some pain was the price, it was well worth it, so I brought my arms up preparing to do what was necessary --instantly everything sped up to normal time. I flew down to the fence at the bottom of the levee catching the top strand in both hands, as suggested by the gentle voice, braking my fall then sliding down it a ways ripping my hands up and slashing my neck in between them. My momentum exhausted my body flipped down cutting my knee open on the bottom of the three strands of barbed wire.

I stood and staggered to the top of the levee so that I might be more visible for rescue. Then as I slid into shock I put my hands up into my armpits and compressed them in an effort to stem the blood flow and sunk down to sit on the ground and wait. After a time, perhaps only half an hour, which in another permutation of Time perception seemed to stretch on without end, up rides Bill with the horse I'd been riding in tow. He'd figured that when the other horse had shown up that something untoward had happened and began searching for me. He asked me to show him my hands and as I did I looked at them for the first time. I could see the pale colored fat and other structures down in the many cuts ...I nearly swooned. He mildly said he guessed that we'd better visit the Emergency Room (ER) in Abuquerque.

Bill helped me onto his horse and mounting in front headed back to the house. A half an hour to forty-five minutes we reached his car. It was another forty-five minutes to the ER where a doctor put four internal stitches in my neck and began to close the wound there. He informed us that the barbs on the fence had come within an eighth of an inch of severing my jugular vein. Had I even nicked this major blood vessel I'd have bled out in a matter of minutes and died right there. Then he was called away to attend a gunshot victim and he "on call" surgeon was notified by phone. The on call physician simply on normal rotation proved to be a plastic surgeon that specialized in the hand came in a short while later! He finished sewing up my neck (fourteen stitches), my knee (eight stitches) and my hands (sixty-two stitches).

It was a few days later when the shock of these events wore off and I began to speculate as to what was the source of the voice I'd heard while hanging in the air. Since, I don't speak to myself in such a way I feel that It must have been some sort of "Guardian Angel" that rescued me. If I had not broken my fall with my hands, my body would have surely died right there at the fence soaking the dusty ground with my life's blood.

 

Afterword

The lost dog showed up within a day later. The horse in a bit of news I was astonished to hear had already killed its former "owner" by bucking them off into a landslide. Bill felt quite culpable for having put me onto such an animal and paid for all my medical bills and damages. Aside from the scars and some loss of feeling to one half of the long finger on my left hand and a compromised web space between the index and long fingers of my right hand, I've completely recovered from those injuries. However, the return of the loss of feeling to my left hand took years for the nerve to mostly grow back.

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Copyright (c) 1998-2011  R. Clark - clark@acceleration.net .
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“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's "Relativity."”
- Albert Einstein , German-born American Physicist, Person of the 20th Century (1879 – 1955)

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
- Albert Einstein , German-born American Physicist, Person of the 20th Century (1879 – 1955)

“The only reason for Time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”
- Albert Einstein , German-born American Physicist, Person of the 20th Century (1879 – 1955)

“Our perception that we have "no time" is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture.”
- Margaret Visser

“Time hasn't stopped for any troubles, heartaches, or any other malfunctions of this world, so please don't tell me it will stop for you.”
- C.S. Lewis

“Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.”
- Douglas Adams, British comic/satirist writer (1952-2001)

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”
- Henry Van Dyke

“When God created us, God gave Adam a secret--and that secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again. In other words, it is not given to us to begin; that privilege is God's alone. But it is given to us to begin again--and we do every time we choose to defy death and side with the living.”
- Elie Wiesel