The time has come, the walrus said,

to speak of many things.

Don't know (or care) much about kings (though the notion of "gross
national happiness" suggests Bhutan's former king, Jigme Singye
Wangchuck, might be worth another look) and cabbages could keep us
profitably engaged for weeks.....so we'll pass on that (for now) too.

That leaves (in no particularly meaningful order) chestnuts, coulee
country trout in June, and things that lend a sense of perspective to
the world.....or at least to its inhabitants.....or, some of them,
anyway.

Let's start with the latter.....thus putting the lie to the above
qualification.

Yeah, some things really are more important than others, I s'pose.
Roughly 48 hours ago, as I begin typing this at about 7 p.m., I
arrived at home to find a robust elderly woman on the driveway end of
the drawbridge.....with no vehicle in sight. The driveway is 3/4 of a
mile long. There should NOT be a robust elderly woman on the driveway
end of the drawbridge with no vehicle in sight.

Hm........

I pull up next to her.

Do you live here? she asks.

Yes.

She introduces herself and asks if I know her husband, Karl.

Of course. I'm Wolfgang, by the way.

Well, could you move your truck? The ambulance is on it's way and we
need to keep the driveway clear.

????!!

Karl has suffered a "BAD" accident up on the hillside.

O.k., I'll drive up and see what I can do.

I drive up to the barn and park next to a vehicle there. Looking off
to my right I can see a figure standing on the hillside. I walk up.
It's Karl's son standing next to a supine body recognizable (if only
barely) as Karl. Karl is a native Finn from somewhere in Finland
where they speak Swedish. Been here a long time. Married a local
girl and raised good old Murrican kids. And Karl was born with a
chainsaw in his hands. And now he's died (more or less) the same
way. It ain't official.....yet.....there's the whole organ donor
thingy to go through, but the important part of the story, for those
who knew him, is over.

Karl came out to the tree farm on Wednesday morning (Becky encountered
him at the end of the driveway as she was leaving around 9 a.m.) to
"help" Larry out by cutting down a bunch of "over mature" birch which,
on any other day, he would then have cut up to sell as firewood. Karl
was also scheduled to pick up his grandchildren from school at 3 p.m.
somewhere less than 45 minutes drive from here. I'm not yet sure who
first became concerned about his absence or exactly when, but it was
eventually noticed that something was most emphatically NOT
right.....and someone determined, quite correctly, that the search for
the missing Karl should start here.

As alluded to above, I arrived shortly after 7:00 p.m. The first EMT
on the scene arrived about fifteen minutes later. In the next fifteen
minutes no less than twenty cops, firefighters, EMTs and unidentified
others, along with one monster ATV (they called it a UTV.....whatever
the hell that might mean), two firetrucks, three squad cars and sundry
other vehicles showed up. The helicopter, I'm told, was not far
behind. I didn't see the latter till sometime later as it's pilot (a
savvy veteran of 41 years, I was told) decided to wait out on the
pavement rather than risk a landing on the soup that all too soon
swallowed the rear end of the ambulance.....which proved impossible to
unmire with the tractor......they got it out much later with a winch
on the firetruck.....which barely made it in and out in the early
spring mud.

The short version is that we managed to get Karl on whatever the hell
it is they call the modern version of a stretcher......I sorta forgot
in all the excitement.....and seven or eight of us skidded him down
the hill on the snow and lifted him into the back of the ambulance,
where what would be an amazingly efficient crew, if we hadn't seen it
all before, got him stabilized to the point that he could be moved out
to the road.....if the ambulance hadn't gotten stuck. The UTV came to
the rescue.....quite literally, of course. We all followed it out to
the road in a cavalcade of slow moving vehicles.....VERY slow
moving.....no need to aggravate any spinal or other severe injuries.

The rest of the evening is mere details.....except for the part about
the helicopter. Having worked for sixteen years at a medical facility
where the helicopter crew flew an average of three to four missions a
day, I thought I was used to this sort of thing.

Nope.

This guy had come in after lights out.....pretty much total darkness,
what with the solid overcast and the time of day. And he landed this
thing (and subsequently took off) under the same conditions.....with
the tips of his rotors no more than twenty feet from the power lines
along side of the road. Balls. 41 years. Hm.....I'm guessing I know
where he growed up.

Heroes.

Well, they may be over there somewhere or they may not.....but they
are most certainly HERE.....all around us.....every day and night.

Not that it did anyone much good on this particular evening. No
physician myself (let alone a neurologist), but, as noted above, I've
spent a lot of time in the company of the dead and near dead. A
minute or so in Karl's company on that evening was about enough to
confirm the impression that he was toast.

What happened, apparently (no one will ever know the details), was
that Karl had an encounter with a "widow maker", a term that he may or
may not have been familiar with. He certainly knew the actuality, if
not the English name. The severely leaning birch tree whose base he
was lying next to had been notched.....perfectly done, no problem.
But somewhere in the backcut the tree split up to about eight feet
above ground level. A common enough nightmare that almost always has
no memorable consequences. ALMOST always. This time.....well, it
bucked.....it got him.....and he'll never remember it. And the rest
of us will never forget it.

And then we'll got out in the woods.....with a saw.....alone (not that
company would have made a difference).

giles
who, on second thought (roughly two hours into the exercise) will
forego the trout and the chestnuts for now.

oh, and lest anyone get the wrong impression, Karl was not a dear
lifelong friend, not someone with whom i share a long and intimate
history. we probably spent about four to eight hours in casual
conversation over the last two years. he was a nice guy.