It's a Long Way to Fall...

Darkness...cold...rocks and rubble beneath my strangely weightless body. Where? Why am I alone? Questions which entered my head only to leave it again because I did not seem to feel that it was really very important. I needed sleep. When I awoke these things would all be gone and I would be where I should be, wherever that was. Sleep...sleep.

Morning. A pink and blue and gold sunrise in the distance over Lake Tahoe. My eyes enjoyed it, as did some oddly detached portion of my mind, as I began to realize where I was and what had happened.

I remembered leaving Lake Tahoe about midnight in order to get through the road block on the way to Placerville. (It was open only between one and two in the morning, as massive construction was being done on Highway 50 during the nighttime hours. The road closed at 6 PM as I recall, and reopened at 6 AM except for that brief hour between one and two.)

My sluggish brain worked a little harder, and I remembered driving through the agricultural inspection station at Meyers, exchanging pleasantries with the man on duty there. I remembered starting up the long Meyers grade toward Echo Summit, the highest point on the way home. Then a hazy recollection of the car being out of control and headed toward the forbidding rock wall on the right side of the road. Don't hit the brakes, the pavement may be icy...foot off the gas...cut the wheel to the left...no, no! You cut too sharply! And too late I remembered that the left side of the road was on the edge of a sheer drop of over a thousand feet to the canyon below.

As the car crept over the edge, a wildly optimistic thought found expression..."Oh, well, it'll bounce a couple of times, and then it will quit." On the second bounce I was thrown over against the passenger side door, and I quickly thought about my glasses. Not wanting to get an eyeful of broken glass, I whipped them off and tossed them aside.

That was the last thing I could remember.

All these things came back to me slowly, and then I began to think rationally and make an effort to evaluate the situation in which I found myself. I was about 400 feet down the side of the mountain, hidden from the road by an outcropping of rock. There were patches of snow on the ground around me. I could not see my car. Oh, there was a pile of rubbish down at the foot of the cliff, blending in with the scenery. But that couldn't possibly be my sturdy little Chevy. I didn't seem to be injured; at least I couldn't feel anything. But when I took a good look at my right leg, I knew that it was not natural for it to be bent at that odd angle above the knee. It was obviously broken.

For a moment, panic set in, and I screamed loudly for help. All I heard in answer was an echo from the opposite wall of the valley. All else was strange and lonely silence. I couldn't even hear any cars going by on the highway above me. And I realized that they couldn't see me anyway. There were houses in the valley below, but no smoke was forthcoming from any of the chimneys; too early in the season for the vacation cabins to be occupied. I thought of trying to inch my way up the mountain to the road, but abandoned the idea at once. With a broken leg I knew I would never make it up the sheer face of the cliff.

I must have lost consciousness again. When I awoke there was no longer any trace of panic. I would be found. Someone would come to help me. The people at my office would wonder why I had not come to work. My roommate would wonder why I had not come back from the lake the night before. I had promised her the use of my car that day. I called for help again, and decided to call at regular intervals, resting in between each effort. My watch was still running, so I set up a schedule, and every five minutes I shouted.

The minutes crept slowly by and turned into hours. At noon, some eleven hours after I had gone over the edge, I finally began really to be frightened. An then, mercifully, I heard an answer to my cries for help. A woman's voice saying, "Where are you?". Then I did panic, and I screamed desperately, hysterically. "Please help...my leg is broken...I can't move...Please!" Again her voice answered me, and I knew I was not imagining things. She assured me that help was on the way...just hang on.

"Lucky" doesn't begin to describe the series of events that led to my rescue. A highway maintenance man, noticing the earth was "disturbed" on the side of the road, flagged down the next car on the road and asked them if they heard someone calling for help. It turned out that he had answered my cries, but I did not hear him. When the woman in the car responded the higher-pitched voice was audible to me.

From this point on, events took on a nightmarish quality. A strange man painfully feeling his way down the side of the cliff to me. A sudden realization that my stockings were full of runs...they HAD to come off! A human being to talk to. More men arriving...some in the uniform of the California Highway Patrol. A basket stretcher being lowered down by rope. I remember commenting that in all the murder mysteries I had ever read the victim had been carried out in a basket, and here was I being transported up the side of a mountain in the same fashion! Sudden terrible thirst, and someone offering me coffee, because no one had any water. "But I don't drink coffee," I said politely. They persuaded me to drink some anyway, and I did, not tasting it at all. The ambulance was there, and the attendants were ready to place me into it.

The officers questioned me, gently but firmly. Had I been alone? Was I sure that no one was with me? One of them stood beside me while we waited for the ambulance to be ready, shading me from the hot sun. I gave them my name and told them that I lived in Placerville. Yes, I was alone, I told them. There had been no one in the car with me.

The attendants placed me in the ambulance and I was whisked to a doctor's office at Lake Tahoe. He and I exchanged jokes as he examined me and said that I should be taken to the hospital in Placerville. The men put me back in the ambulance and started the 62 mile trip. One of them lit a cigarette for me when I asked for it, and held it for me as I took one puff and decided I didn't want it after all. Then I must have gone to sleep, for I cannot remember arriving at the hospital.

The next few days are but a dim memory. Brief moments when friends were allowed in so that I could tell them whom to notify. My mother in Long Beach was called, and the next morning she was with me. The doctor came in and told me that I had a fractured skull as well as a fractured right femur, and that he was going to operate on my leg the next morning. I didn't seem to care. I told him it was all right with me.

This story might end here, but the really important part is yet to come. My accident was on May 2, 1957. I spent three weeks in the hospital and then was released, wearing a waist-to-toe cast and walking with the aid of crutches. Late in July my cast was removed; I went back to work, and life seemed to be back to normal. My seven year old son and I had an apartment in the same building as the landlord and his wife, a wonderful Italian couple. All seemed to be fine, except that I was experiencing a great deal of pain in my mending leg.

On August 19th, the doctor x-rayed the leg and told me that all the new bone I had formed had disintegrated, leaving only the steel plate holding my leg together. Surgery, a bone graft, would be necessary. This required a specialist from Sacramento. And it was the beginning of ten months of pain and waiting for healing.

More about that in another story...