My right leg propped up on the bathroom sink, pouring peroxide over the open wound on my shin ... one and one half inch vertical, one quarter inch horizontal ... the peroxide foams immediately as it strikes the oozing sore ... I am suddenly aware of how many battle scars my body has taken on through out the years. I'd like to take this opportunity to give a shout out to my new found friends at the Berlin, New Hampshire Teen Center who I had the pleasure of meeting and going hiking with up to Lookout Ledge in Randolph this past Monday, July 30, 2007. Hey Dancing James. Hey David. The two I was running after when I took the digger that I am now dressing the wounds from. And let us not forget the other James that rode up to the trail head with me and back to the teen center and although is a pretty cool kid, is also an incessant pest to my beloved wife, Vicky. Someday ... perhaps I'll take him camping for a weekend, get him out of his own mother's hair, and exact Vicky's vengeance on him. Just kidding, Buddy. Relax. I'd also like to shout out to Tammy, who is not only Vicky's boss, but also organized the expedition and Jeff, a striving and strapping young minister in the making. I hope I said that right, Jeff. God forgive me if I messed up. Yes ... that was kind of a pun intended joke. Enough of the shout outs and onto the battlefield.
This new wound was a bloody one. Very impressive for the young eyes to bear witness to. The truth of the matter is that it wasn't even as painful as it looked. That is until I flipped a tire over onto it at work the following day right before I left ... and the next day dropped a three pound air ratchet on it from four feet above. Yeah ... that made me wanna puke. The fact of the matter is this new scar is actually on top of some old apparent scar tissue on my right shin. What year was it? I don't recall. I was a restaurant manager working at Shorty's Mexican Roadhouse in Manchester ... and when you opened the place first thing in the morning, the procedure was to open the back door to the kitchen, turn on the lights so you could see ... and once the door opened you had thirty seconds to make it all the way to the front door entrance of the restaurant to disarm the alarm. Well ... my stupid key got stuck in the door. I know. Big fat hairy deal ... I should have just let it dangle in the lock, turned on the lights and follow out the normal routine. But I didn't. I chose to fight the stupid lock because for some strange reason unbeknownst to me at the time, I wanted my damn keys back. So I fought the fight ... and I won ... however ... time was no longer on my side. I now needed to sprint to the front of the restaurant before the alarm went off and not only alerted the owner of the company, the local police station, and the alarm company themselves ... but also go through the rigmarole of having to explain why the stupid thing went off to everyone that I just mentioned. I envisioned myself on the phone for hours ... especially with the owner who would not be too pleased about being called this hour of the morning to hear one of his managers just screwed up a normal opening procedure. I skipped the lights and ran. Bad mistake. Especially considering the bartenders the night before had taken the bar mats and laid them onto a two wheeled dolly and had it pointed blade first on its back in front of the kitchen exit into the dining room. Now if the lights were on, I would have still been a little perturbed by this act of obvious recklessness, but the fact is, once my leg hit the upright blade of the two wheeler at forty miles an hour, I'm sure you can imagine in your mind how the rest of the accident played out. Not too well in my favor, suffice it to say. Or should I say ... suffer it to say. Oh yeah ... I suffered alright. I scraped the entire length of my shin from right above my ankle to right below my knee cap and took skin and hair and probably some shin bone right along with it. The pain was immense and I still managed to somehow get up from the face first collapsed position I was in kissing the filthy and stinky bar mats on the two-wheeler, and crawl-slash-jog the rest of the way to the alarm pad, punch in my code, and disarm it before it went off. I win! I win again! Well ... I won the war ... but definitely not the battle. The battle won hands down. I spent the morning at the emergency room only to be told they couldn't stitch the wound because it was too deep and too wide and I didn't have enough skin on the shin ... but good luck with that and here's something for the pain you're going to be in for the next several days. Not to mention the hideous looking leg you're going to have once it does finally heal ... which it will. All things heal, I suppose ... as long as it doesn't kill you, that is.
So ... there's a brand spanking new scar on top of this old scar tissue and I'm suddenly looking at my body and seeing all the scars of my past and reminded of my days of yore. A memoir or a photo album of my past mistakes and misadventures ... I wear these battle scars like many others and reminisce like I'm part of the trip on board the Orca in the movie Jaws. Maybe nothing as flattering as surviving the U.S.S. Indianapolis or getting bit by a shark. But come on ... who else do you know that shaved their shin down to the bone with a two wheeled dolly? Anyone? Anyone at all? I win again! Too bad you can't get some award or trophy (worth money, that is) for doing the stupid things in life.
Which reminds me of running after the two teens this past Monday. I saw them getting ahead of us. I could have hollered then ... for some reason, I didn't. I guess I didn't realize that an intersection was coming up. Even though I had just read about a husband and wife hiking team that botched an expedition on a nearby mountain top ... doing just that. She got ahead of her hubby ... hit the intersection ... instead of stopping and waiting for him ... she took the trail she thought she was supposed to ... and when he hit the intersection some time later, he took the correct trail. He arrived at their parked vehicle first and panicked since she was ahead of him and she spent the night in the woods. It's that simple, people. It's how stupid things happen. Luckily, they found her unharmed, but I bet she wasn't all that comfortable that night in the woods ... was she? So we hit this intersection ... and I'm thinking ... where the heck is David and Dancing James? I hope they went this way ... and not that way. I stopped and asked the others for some reason of assurance. As if they could peer into their crystal balls and say to me ... "yes, Jody ... they went the right way." Now what do we do? Chance it? Get all the way down to the bottom only to find out we have two missing teens on our shoulders? Our responsibility! How did this happen? I knew what to do. I used to hike for recreation. That's why I offered to help my wife chaperone this small hike. To get back to my roots ... but truth be told ... since we're all throwing our cards on the table precariously truthful here ... I can't even remember the last time I went hiking. Too many years ago and the memory banks of those days are obscured by too many beer hops and too much bong resin of yesteryears to surface any kind of semblance. I can tell you this. I owned a log cabin for nine years before we moved up here three and a half years ago ... and I had never stepped foot on a mountain summit since the day I bought that log cabin back in May of 1995. So ... that's twelve years and I wouldn't be surprised if it was two or three before that when my last hike was completed. I don't know how I got out of it. I had and still have all the equipment of the time. I will never throw it away. I can't. It's as significant as any scars my body boasts. I did amazing things up on the heights of New Hampshire, survived many a trying experience, and saved a few lives along the way. Had a lot of fun, endured a lot of hard work ... sometimes couldn't wait to go back to work so I could catch up on my rest ... but for the life of me ... I cannot recall what my last hike was or when I took it. It's just gone. I have logged accounts of my 4000 footers and when I completed them all, but that's not accurate because I only logged the first time I completed it and many of them I climbed well over once or twice. Most of my day hikes were not logged at all. Which brings me back to this past Monday and the current situation at hand ... because I did not log that either and for the moment, we had two potentially missing teens. I would run down the mountain. I can do it. I did it before ... when I used to hike ... whenever many years ago. I'm 44 now ... but I still got it. It's like riding a bike. I'd run down the trail and holler their names until I caught up and then I'd either find them and tell them to wait until I went back up or I wouldn't find them and reunite and split the posse up going one way down and the rest of us the other. So I started to run ... Because I used to do this and I still got it. Oops ... until that rock jumped up and there I went. The other James hot on my heels and tattling on every move and mistake I made. He's hollering up to my wife ... "Jody just fell!" "Vicky! Jody's bleeding pretty profusely!" I didn't bring a gun for obvious reasons. Damn! I pushed myself up off the rocks. My right shin was marred and bleeding all down my leg and my sock was ten times more saturated then Curt Schilling's during the World Series. Not good. It hurt, but my hands actually hurt more as they sprang out defensively and automatically protect my face from getting pummeled into the rocks ahead of the one the just pierced my right shin. So I pretty sure I sprained the crap out of my left hand ... but hey ... no scar there ... just swollen and sore and black and blue for a coupla days ... and the palm of my right hand scraping the porous rock surface and kind of ripping skin or something to the effect of a friction burn. But I hadn't found the teens yet. I got up ... and guess what I did? Go ahead ... guess. I'll wait. If you guessed I started jogging right down that mountain ... like I had to shut some emergency alarm off somewhere before the whole town of Berlin and Gorham and Randolph and probably even Milan found out about the errors of our ways ... you'd win! That's exactly what I did. The good news is they did indeed go the right way, and I found them a short time later and we all reunited and they were suddenly taken a bit aback by my gaping and profusely bleeding wound. Which I told them was all part of hiking and to pretty much never mind it. They all decided I would probably need stitches or at least a visit to the emergency room. Look kids ... when I have to bend over and pick my severed leg up off the ground and hop around on the one remaining attached to my body ... we'll consider the trip to the emergency room. In the meanwhile ... since this is a familiar injury to me ... I'll just field dress it for now ... nurse the dressing twice a day for the next several days ... and save myself and our deplorable health care system to daunting task of looking at my wound to only tell me they cannot stitch it because I've not left enough skin on the shin to do so ... but that'll be twelve hundred dollars, thank you very much.
So ... here I am in front of the bathroom mirror ... alright I'm not really ... I'm obviously typing at the computer, but play along with me for visual sakes, will ya ... geesum whiz ... the nerve of you people sometimes. Anyway ... I'm looking at the scar on the left shoulder blade on my chest, just above my tattoo and remembering moving that queen size mattress ... despite having the furniture company just offer to put the bed and mattress together that we ordered and had delivered ... yet I declined ... because I'm proud and I still got it ... although that was a very long time ago when I did indeed still have it. They left, I moved the mattress top place it on top of the bed and box spring I had just carefully placed and accidentally struck the bedroom light fixture right above my head. CRASH! A large shard of broken glass guillotine fell from above, missed my left ear by a millimeter, and chopped into my shoulder blade splitting the tender sinew open and immediately spurted blood all over the place. I lived two hundred yards from the hospital. So what did I do? Go ahead ... guess ... I'll wait. If you said drive four miles to my parents house so my mother could field dress the wound and blow off the whole emergency room experience ... then you'd be absolutely right! You win again! I had to take my shirt off on the drive over to absorb the blood. My mother was just sitting down with my grandparents for lunch when I pulled in woozy from the blood loss. They just about passed out at the sight of me. My mother demanded to take me to the hospital ... but I wasn't so ready. Finally, I agreed, but reluctantly so. We stopped at Care Pharmacy first which was right before my apartment, and I bought some field dressings for wound and told my mother to stop at the apartment so I could clean up the glass. Hey ... she bought it. She waited for me in the car ... and I went up and dressed my wound with my newly bought and paid for bandages and was impressed that not only did I stop the bleeding ... I also was field dressed pretty well. Finally, she came up to see what was taking so long and must have been impressed enough of my own work to let me talk her out of talking me into going. She went home ... and I healed ... scar intact ... and then there's the ... what the hell ... oh yeah ... I can't tell you about that scar ... but there's the one that happened when I was ...
Jody L. Campbell
8/2/07
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