“Unsinkable ships sink. Unbreakable walls break. Sometimes the things you think could never happen happen just like that. Unbendable steel bends, if the fury of the wind is unstoppable. I’ve learned to never underestimate, The Impossible.” ~Joe Nichols “The Impossible”
This song came out only months before my dad fractured his skull. I wish, that I could tell Joe Nichols and the song writers how all too fitting the chorus to this song was at that time. My dad, to me, was unbreakable, he was everything that the dad in this song was, and his accident made my nine-year-old self learn “to never underestimate the impossible.” This is when “the impossible” happened.
It was a nice, sunny, warm day in August. We were living in the Sheep Station in the house we have now named the “strawberry house”. We named it because it was the third house we lived at in the sheep station and it got its name from the patch of strawberries that grew in the backyard. Another, more fitting name for this house would be the “fractured skull house.” Both my dad and sister fractured their skulls there, but I’ll only tell of one. On that August day, my dad planned on cutting firewood with a neighbor, Shane. My mom stayed home with me and my four siblings and left the wood cutting to the men.
Soon, we got a call from Shane. He told us that my dad never showed up to where they were going to meet. My mom was worried, and decided to go look for him herself. She trusted my siblings and me to be fine until she got back. We played like the carefree children we were while she was gone.
Soon after she had left, my dad walked in the back door. We all knew that something was wrong. I could see that one side of his face, around the eye, was purple and swollen and his ear was bleeding. He went right to my parents’ room and lay down on their bed. My brother called my mom’s cell phone and told her that he had come back. She rushed home and called the ambulance and our neighbor, Sandy. It was a tense and scary time of waiting, to say the least.
The ambulance came and loaded him up on the stretcher. The nearest hospital is in Idaho Falls, and so he and my mom were in for a long trip. I had to hold the door open as they carried him through our front door. His one open blue eye looked at me as he went past. I was beyond words. My dad- who always took pain with little reaction; who was the football and wrestling coach; a cowboy and a trapper- was strapped to a stretcher with an oxygen mask, and I didn’t know what would happen next. I was scared.
We spent that night at Sandy’s house while my dad and mom were in the hospital and my grandma and aunt made their way up from Utah. I don’t remember a lot of what I felt then, but I wasn’t in my own home and my parents were gone; I’m sure it was uncomfortable. We spent the rest of the week with my grandma and aunt and they each took turns visiting my dad in the hospital. We made a lot of memories even though it was a rough time. Dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets will now always hold a place in my memories and make me smile.
The only things we knew about the accident were what my mom wrote down in a journal from my dad as he forgot and remembered new things in the hospital. Now he doesn’t remember a whole lot from it and the journal is a blessing. It also contains things written from my grandma, aunt, and mom about their feelings on the situation. We kids also drew pictures. This is what we have written down:
My dad said that as he was waiting for Shane, he decided to start cutting in Alex Draw (near where they were going to meet). He doesn’t remember much more than starting on the back cut on the first tree and then waking up face-down in the dirt. He, not realizing the full situation, stood up and got back to cutting the log, mentally chastising himself for sleeping. He woke up again in the dirt and for a while drifted in and out of consciousness, saying a prayer in one of his waking moments. He finally woke to rain falling on his face. He knew something was wrong and he needed to get up, so he got up and pulled himself into the truck. He doesn’t remember any of the drive home, but he made the 15 or so miles back to our house- driving all the way back by himself in an old pickup truck.
It was a great feeling when my dad was finally released from the hospital. It was especially good to know that he was alright considering that a guy had died from a similarly shaped fracture around the same time. I realized that my dad was the “unbreakable wall” that was broken. It was hard to see my dad not as strong as I first thought. Broken walls can be fixed, especially if it’s only a crack. To this day my dad has survived that facture, walked away from an airplane crash, and much more and he is, although not unbreakable, a very strong wall. Because of this event:
“I’ve learned to never underestimate the impossible.”
Beautiful Sammy!
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