Chapter 8 of 13
Three times the world set itself up to kill John, and three times he walked away. A silage wagon that pulled him in by the shoe. A plank that came down on his head and put him in a coma the doctors did not expect him to leave. A truck that never slowed at a roadwork stop on his own birthday.
He reads all three as the hand of God, and he tells them with no trace of fear. It is a short, plain chapter, and the historical appendix at the back will show you just how thin the margins really were — how real the danger, and how real the rescue. What John takes from it is simple and immovable: the Good Lord did not want him yet. Whether or not you share his reading, the survival itself is a matter of record.
It was a Tuesday morning, ten o’clock, and I did something that was very stupid.
We had forty-four acres of corn to cut that fall — silage corn — and the day was just getting started. Before you put a machine like that to work you go all the way around it and you grease it, every part, so nothing seizes up on you out in the field. That was what I was doing. Going around it, looking for the grease nipples one by one. The silage wagon has a conveyor belt on the front of it and a row of beaters, and the whole front of it turns and pulls and feeds. And I leaned right over the shield to get at those nipples while the beaters were turning. I should have known better. Every man on a farm knows better. But I had high shoes on that morning, and one of those long teeth caught the shoe and pulled me right in.
Sucked me right in. That fast. I knew two other men, in those years, who got caught in a wagon the very same way, and they got demolished — dead, both of them, right away. There is no time in it. Whatever is going to happen has already happened before you understand that anything is happening at all.
What saved my life was a wire. On top of the shield there was a wire stretched across the whole works, and they call it the safety wire. The idea of it is simple: the moment anything touches that wire, the machine shuts off — beaters, conveyor, all of it stops dead. As I went in, my arm flew up and hit it. I did not throw my arm up. I had no time to think a single thought. The Lord threw it up for me, and it caught that wire, and everything stopped. But by then I was already in — up to here. One of those steel bars was sticking right into my stomach. My leg was wrapped up over my head, and this foot of mine was hanging in front of my face, right in front of my eyes. And there I stayed, upside down, for almost an hour.
I was forty-one years old. I had four kids already by then. This was my sister’s dairy farm, where I worked in those years, and there I hung.
So I prayed. Hanging upside down with that bar in my stomach and my own foot in my face, there is not a lot a man can do but pray, and so that is what I did. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. And all at once I had power. Strength came into me from somewhere it had no business coming from, and I took hold of the beater and I ripped the big shear bar loose — that heavy steel — tore it right out of there. I got myself free of the conveyor belt and I dropped down onto the ground. And then I was done. I tried to move and there was nothing left in me; I could not move at all. The tractor was still running. The whole machine was still running, right there beside me, and I lay on the ground and could not get away from it.
Here is the part I have never been able to explain to anybody. Up at the house my sister heard a voice in the kitchen. A voice, telling her she had to go right down to the barn. She had no way of knowing anything was wrong out there — no reason to come, no sound she could have heard. But she heard that voice, and all of a sudden she came down, and she found me lying on the ground with the equipment still going.
The damage was bad enough. One of those teeth had gone into my leg here and dragged it all the way down, right to the ankle, and it killed the nerves the whole way. This part of me is dead still, to this day — the nerves are all gone, I feel nothing there. Another tooth had broken my leg clean through. By the time they had me in the hospital the surgeons fully expected to take the leg off; that was the plan they went in with. But they didn’t.
“We saved your leg,” the doctor told me afterward. “That’s the good news. The bad news is you won’t be walking for a long time, and you’d best not think about going back to work, not ever.”
I was over three weeks in that hospital. And three months from that day I walked into his office on my own two feet, just to let him see it.
The second time was twenty years on, in Rosedale.
I was putting in floor dressing in a house there, and I fell. Eight feet, straight down, onto sand. And the fall itself didn’t hurt me — landing in that sand, it didn’t bother me at all. I’d have got up and gone back to work. But there was a twelve-foot two-by-ten that came down behind me, and it caught me right in the head. The way the family has pieced it together since, that plank must have come to rest lying across me where I lay.
My helper was a good man.
“Be relaxed, John,” he kept saying to me. “Easy now, be relaxed.”
And he got on and called the paramedics. I remember the crew working over me down in that basement. And I remember one of them asking the other one, “Where are we taking him?”
And the answer came back, “The air ambulance is on the way.”
That is the last thing I heard. Eleven o’clock in the morning, and the lights went out.
They took me to Royal Columbian, down in New Westminster — which, if it had to be anywhere, was the place to be, the big trauma hospital for the whole Lower Mainland, the one with the brain surgeons right there on the grounds. At three o’clock that afternoon the doctor telephoned my Nettie at home.
“You won’t talk to your husband anymore,” he told her. “He’s not going to make it.”
That is what the man said to her, straight out. “Get ready. This is the end of it.”
But it wasn’t the end of it. By five o’clock that afternoon, five different groups of people had got down on their knees and prayed for me. Five groups. And the Lord answered them. At six o’clock that same evening I came around. Seven hours I was under — gone, in a coma — eleven in the morning to six at night, and then back.
The first thing out of my mouth, I asked Nettie, “Where am I?”
And she said, “You’re in the hospital, John.”
I couldn’t get the one eye open at all. And I could not remember one single thing about what had happened to me. Not the fall, not the plank, not the basement, none of it. To this day I have no memory of any of it. It is just gone.
My cheekbone was broken. So what they did, they lifted my whole face up to set a plate in there — a steel plate and four long screws. I tell people I’m a bionic man now. I was over two weeks in the hospital that time. And the doctor — the same one who had phoned my wife to tell her I was finished — well, there I was, looking at him. A miracle happened there. I have no other word for it, and I am not going to go looking for one.
The third time I was sixty-nine years old, and it was my birthday.
It was a Thursday, after lunch, and I was driving out toward White Rock to pick up my dentures. There were signs up along the road — be prepared, single lane ahead — because BC Hydro was working on a line. The road came down to the one lane. There was a van and a car in front of me, and we all came to a stop where the flagging was, the way you do, and we waited.
Behind me was a truck. A big three-ton truck. And he didn’t pay attention. Never slowed, never so much as stopped. Just bang — big crash, big, big crunch. He caught me a little bit sideways, so my truck got shoved right over, and the door jammed up so I couldn’t get it open. My seat snapped clean off its bolts under me. The whole back window was gone — blown right out of it. And in that first second, watching the whole thing stop dead right there at the roadwork, all I could think was, “Oh no, somebody is going to be killed here.”
And I walked away from that. A man came right over to my window.
“Are you okay, sir?” And he told me, “Don’t move. Don’t you move until the paramedics get here.”
So I sat there, and I waited for the ambulance, and I did what he said and didn’t move. They took me to the hospital right away, and I was there about five hours while they did a lot of X-rays, a whole lot of them. A bad back is all I came out with — a couple of bulged discs, and that’s the whole of it.
The truck driver had to admit it to the police, right there on the spot, that it was a hundred percent his fault — a hundred percent, no argument. The paramedics figured he’d been on his phone, distracted, never saw us stopped. The poor lady in the car straight ahead of me had it the worst of anybody. My front end ended up clear up in her trunk; her car was totaled right out. She crawled out of it and said she was okay, just a scratched neck — but by the time the paramedics were through with all of us she had a terrible headache, and I don’t believe she was okay at all. I still think about her.
Now here is the strange grace in the whole thing. It happened on my sixty-ninth birthday, like I said — that Thursday. The next day I went down to the insurance office to report it, and the lady there looked it all up, and she said to me, “Guess what. You’re going to go shop for a brand-new truck. Because you’ve got replacement insurance — and it runs out tonight.” One more day, and it would have been gone. So out of that whole mess — the crash, the crunch, three trucks wrecked — I came away with a new truck.
A big truck plowed into us without ever slowing, crunched my vehicle and two others besides, and I’m here, and I still can walk.
The world is full of ways to die, and not all of them come at you on a farm or a highway. I think sometimes about Los Angeles. We were down there one trip, staying at a motel not very far from the airport, and the security guard for the place was walking around carrying a gun. All we wanted was to go two blocks down the road and get ourselves some dinner. Two blocks. And he said to us, “Oh no, no, no, no. You don’t go. You’re not safe out there at all. You cannot walk on that road, not even the two blocks to the restaurant.” So we didn’t go. A man with a gun told us where the edge of the safe world was, and we stayed inside it.
Three times, though, I was past the edge of it and didn’t get to choose. The wagon, the plank, the truck. Three times the world set itself up to finish me, and three times here I still am to tell about it. I don’t take any of the credit for that. The Good Lord didn’t want me yet, that’s all there is to it. He knew I had a great-grandson coming, and that I was meant to be here to spend my time with him.