24HBD #3: Defining Childhood Memory

The actual topic was “When someone mentions childhood what one memory pops into your head?  Explain in detail.”

So I’ll talk about the time I fell down a hill, cracked my head on a stone, and showed my dad my skull.  Fun times.

My family was on a camping trip – my uncle Barry was there with his family, also, along with my grandma and aunt Patty.  We were camping up down in the “land of 1,000 lakes” “Land Between the Lakes”, which is Minnesota in Kentucky, I think.  I am not exact on the details of where we were, but I know we were camping.  I don’t really remember how old I was, either.  Maybe 4th grade.  Around there.

Anyway, we had gotten our tents and things set up, and my cousin Matt and I decided to climb one of the many hills that surrounded/ensconced/characterized the campground.  We climbed all the way to the top of an I-Don’t-Know-How-Tall hill, and it was pretty cool.  We could see all around us for a pretty good distance – or as good as any distance could be in a wooded area.

Then we started back down.  The ground was chilly and damp, and there were fallen leaves everywhere.  We began to go faster, and run a bit.  I remember my cousin yell “It’s like skiing!” as we slid and ran down the side of the hill.  “…yeah” was my shaky reply as I tried to stay right behind him and match his moves.

I’d never been skiing. 

So the inevitable happened – Matt made a turn, and I didn’t.  I lost my balance, and tumbled down the hillside.  In my mind, it was a craggy mountain peak, but age lies.  I fell, headfirst, straight down for about a thousand miles before landing (yes, on my head) on a rock. 

Smack.

Man, that hurt.  I grabbed my head and rolled around for a while.  I didn’t black out or anything, which meant nothing to me.  I didn’t even know that was a possibility.  My mom ran over and asked “are you ok!?”  “….no” was my (again) shaky reply.

So my parents sat me up on a picnic table so my dad could take a look at me.  By then it was dark, so by light of a Coleman lantern my father examined my horrific and debilitating wounds.  He looked and poked around for a while, then very calmly told my mom not to come look at me, but to go find out where the nearest emergency room was.  He also told me what a nice, white skull I had.  Compliment sandwich.

So we (carefully, because we were in deer country) took a winding, forty-minute drive to the emergency room.  We had to stop to let a couple of deer cross the road.

At the emergency room, they asked me what happened.  They were very directly asking me.  So I told them, they affirmed that my parents weren’t beating me, and the wait for the fix-em-up guy began.

When it was my turn at the healing store, they took me into what I’m sure was a standard doctor/fix-em-up room, but to me it seems like it was one of those giant observation rooms with the lights and windows and gawkers.  I felt like I was in some kind of space movie.

Anyway, the doctor was really nice, and he talked with some kind of thick accent my tiny, underdeveloped mind couldn’t wrap itself around.  He shaved some of my hair off, and then proceeded to pick up each side of the cut to scrub the bone underneath.  No big deal.  I was fine.

I ended up getting four stiches, and the cut on my head only bled one drop, once.  I can’t remember if it was during the initial injury, or if it was when the doctor was cleaning the dirt and camping out of it.

Since my mom buzzed my hair up until I was in high school, the scar was very visible for a while.  Every time my hair was short, you could see this half-inch or so line of no hair.  I thought (still do) that it was pretty cool.  The doctor said I was lucky to not have passed out, to not have bled everywhere, and to not have hit my head an inch in any direction, because then I probably would have died.  As it was, I hit a rock with my head in the only non-bleeding, non-passout, non-die part of my skull.  Which my dad has seen.

My parents get to see parts of me that I wish I could.  My dad has seen my skull, and my mom got to see the extra pigment clumps on my irises one time at the eye doctor.

Life is not the fairest.