The Fall

Glaring light made me squint and blink. Behind the silver lamp-head over me and to my right I could see a row of pictures – x-rays. My mother was seated on the right side of the table I was lying on. A man, a doctor, stood next to her, looking down and over me.

"She's coming around," he said.

I immediately turned to my left to see if my arm was still attached. I'd been in a strange twilight state, hearing voices around me while not fully conscious. I cried out in an effort to salvage my limb as the team verbally determined they would have to cut my clothing away at the shoulder in order to correct the damage I'd done in a fall. From a tree. Onto a sidewalk. "Don't cut it off," I yelled. I clearly did not feel safe, even while unconscious.

"They thought you broke your back and that you might have permanent brain damage, you were out for so long," my mother told me later, in a breathy and sad voice.

The last thing I remembered was climbing one of the not-too-large trees growing along a sidewalk that sloped uphill behind the large building where we lived. It had once been a veteran's hospital but in the 1970s was home to New Tribes Mission, specifically to its Bible school program candidates, like my parents. Behind the four-story brick structure was a heavy iron fire escape that lead down to a sandbox and metal swing-set behind an arched barracks style building that quartered Mission staff who were veteran missionaries, teaching at the Bible school.

My brother Steven and I had been playing unsupervised, proving present-day rumors that Gen-X youth ran about, feral, until sundown. A little red-headed girl across the street had noticed a bird's nest in the tree, and I had talked to her about it. I offered to climb the tree and retrieve the nest. I was seven and girl was maybe four. The girl watched from across the street as I scaled the narrow trunk and then navigated the branches. This tree was young, but solid and not spindly. It was early summer in Wisconsin and the leaves were just coming out.

A bird was making noise nearby, and I still wonder why I didn't decide this was a bad idea and climb back down. In order to reach the nest, I extended a leg and then a foot onto a branch that looked big enough to bear me; it was a dead branch and it snapped off. I woke up in the hospital.

In between, my brother had witnessed the fall and ran into the brick building, up three stories of stairs, to find my mother. I know this, of course, because he later told me. Also reported to me post-incident was the fact that I had screamed on the way down, and upon impact had gone into a state of shock. I was turning blue.

At the end of the sidewalk's uphill slope was a workshop where student missionaries learn practical skills required for life in third world countries – the same reason our apartments did not have their own running water and we carried water from a shared utility room on each floor. A teenaged boy was working in the shop when the scream reached his hearing. The son of missionaries, he had learned CPR and gained lifesaving skills – such as the curiosity to step out of the shop and find the source of a blood-curdling scream. He located me and immediately recognized he needed to open my breathing channel which was blocked by my own tongue. He saved my life before the doctors had a chance.

I was breathing but discolored with a mangled arm when my mother arrived at the scene and I was taken to the hospital. As happens in these altered states, I have no idea how long I was unconscious. I wish I had seen a great light or some angels but I remember no such thing.

I spent the rest of the summer with my arm in a plaster cast, bent at the elbow. My brothers and sisters and friends signed it with markers and I drew pictures of people's faces on it. I couldn't go swimming and by the time the reeking cast was sawn off, my arm was scaly and scrawny from disuse. I went to the workshop and found the teenager and shyly thanked him for saving me. He seemed more embarrassed than me. His name was Steve.

We left the Mission program by the end of summer. I started third grade in a new school with a working arm.