Following my cavalier equations of driving under the influence with personal freedom (in my recent Toyota post) I was kind of keeping my eye on God as I drove to camp after Saturday night’s wine dinner at a Saratoga, NY restaurant. It was a business inspired function, which is about the only type of social event that I attend.
J wines were being profiled by a distributor with a nice array of dishes. Normally, I expect wine pours similar in size to how we serve them at home, but at the dinner Riedel Vinum glasses were filled to at least the halfway point, if not higher. We started with whites and switched to Pinot Noir, capping the ensemble with a very nice and limited production pear brandy. Each pour captured maybe a third of a bottle of wine. After a few of these boluses, I was at risk, anew, first of getting in trouble with the law, and much worse, of potentially being involved in a crash; which, even if I wasn’t functionally responsible, would have by law made me technically responsible.
I thought of my post and thought about all the crow I would have to eat if something untoward happened, – so I was very, very careful. First driving north through the city of Saratoga. It was only 11:00 pm, but not too early for a checkpoint. Then the counter-intuitive left turn to get on the Adirondack Northway heading north. It was raining a little and the temperature was flirting with freezing. Tricky.
Then the turn-off into the town of Warrensburg, and winding through half of it before turning onto the relative freedom of the two lane blacktop road which follows along a beautiful reach of the Hudson River north, after it is no longer navigable, and is as beautiful as it ever was, in the dark only in the mind. Finally onto the famous Route 28 Northwest and soon right onto the barely paved five mile road to camp, leaving all other cars and the world behind.
Pulling along side my camp and parking the sled, I felt a powerful sense of relief and almost made a pledge to myself to figure out how not to get into that situation more than once in a blue moon. Could we afford a driver? How do other people do it?
Once out of the car, my worries evaporated in the near euphoria of having a couple of days at camp, the pheasant in the trunk to roast, the 1998 Les Ormed de Pez I was looking forward to opening. The lake with still no ice. The loons. The solitude.
Not wanting to waste any time, I carried as much as I could in my first trip up the few wooden steps to the deck leading to the side door of camp, next to the San Francisco cable car bell, which I love to ring upon arriving, in a kind of Angelus.
But we have a problem, Huston: That the thin film of rain on the second to top stair had hit that cusp in the 29 degree mountain air. I leaned a little too far to the left trying to compensate for the heavy load in my right hand as I groped for my door key. I reached out to just tap the side of the camp in order to right my perpendicularity with the stairs. The slight push on the siding caused my left foot, holding my weight, to feel the slightest sideways force to the right – all it needed on the almost imperceptible patina of ice.
If there is one thing you learn in the woods, it’s to never step on a wet piece of wood in anything put a perfectly perpendicular angle – and double that admonition if at all icy. Faster than gravity, I began a descent back down the stairs, catching myself on a knife blade edge of the bottom railing. If I had fallen on my back, I might be paralyzed; on my stomach, I might have gotten out of it with just my wind knocked out; but on my side, there was only #11 rib to keep me from breaking my spine in half. Shattered it into three pieces.
I knew it was more than my standard type of fall, and I let that be known. My wife, who had made it to the deck, freaked and ran down, first holding my head and kissing me as if I were dying and then asking me if I could get up. I realized I couldn’t. It simply hurt too much. So Lynn, all 130 pounds of her, took hold of my arms and made a Herculean effort to right me, which she did, but not without taking her back out.
So Saturday we spend the day, both of us walking like crabs to purchase the accouterments for the pheasant dinner, and luggage with wheels for a schlep to Frankfurt that I have to make in two weeks.
The moral of the story is stay away from American wine if you are going to nearly break your neck. The headache you get the following morning, and generally undigested feeling, accentuates any other minor discomfort that you might ordinarily tolerate without a second thought.
