No, I am not talking about Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 unreadable doorstop of a novel but instead the last, perhaps, significant thing that happened during the Great Hiatus – that period of time between August of 2013, when The Blog – now The Old Blog, click up there or down there – crashed unceremoniously into the Sea of Tears, and now. Talk about sentence structure, amirite?

As I’ve written, Bainbridge Island, a small dollop of green set in the clear waters of Puget Sound in Washington State, USA, is my adopted home and frequent target of my cynical attention. Its grounding principals are set firmly in the American Dream: Family, Community, and the unbridled stampede to secure stuff at any cost. It’s with that middle one (“Community”, if your short-term memory is addled due to endless doomscrolling on TikTok and YouTube Shorts) where today’s story begins.

At the beginning of July each year the local Rotary Club sponsors the Bainbridge Island Rotary Auction & Rummage Sale. For locals, this event represents an annual opportunity to move all the shit they’ve saddled themselves with the previous twenty-six fortnights during the year-long Festival of Acquisition. Only without having to pay the dump fees to get rid of it. For the rest of the multi-state Pacific Northwest area, particularly Idaho, it’s a chance to pick up nearly-new garbage for next to nothing and bundle it home to sell at a profit out of the back of the garage.

This year I was an eager participant. I have been dragging some Significant Items around with me for basically my entire adult life when the realization struck that I had not opened any of the boxes involved with said stuff since well into the previous millennium. Regardless of personal value, it was time to move it out. Well past time, actually.

Which is how, on the last Saturday in June, I found myself up a ladder and into the storage area above the carport going through dusty, time-ravaged cardboard boxes to make sure I got rid of it all. I had been at it for over an hour. Up the ladder, onto the storage platform, select the boxes, drag them to the edge, and then up and down the ladder to – without standing on the ladder’s “On or Above Here” warning steps – safely and securely move the boxes to the ground. I had gone though dozens of boxes to the point where the boxes had fully displaced the cars from their humble home. I was down to the last two boxes which were patiently waiting their turn.

Up the ladder I went for what I thought was the penultimate climb. I grabbed the handle on the heavy plastic tote and pulled. At this point all my lessons from high school Physics came rushing back as I suddenly realized that angular momentum is indeed conserved. My feet were four feet up a six-foot ladder, my center of mass another four feet up from that putting my head almost ten feet up. My pull on the tote induced a torque into the tote-me-ladder system that should have been gobbled up by friction between the feet of the ladder and the concrete floor of the carport. No. Such. Luck. 

I don’t remember the whole incident beyond the start and the finish. I can clearly recall looking down and seeing the ladder spin away from me as the First Law of Motion kicked in. My feet, still on the ladder followed along as now – because of the box – my center of mass was somewhere above my head. I rotated into the horizontal plane. At this point my memory cuts out but I can only assume that for a brief moment I remained suspended – a still-life vignette of me, the box, and the dancing-away ladder – like Wile E. Coyote before I dropped. Meep-meep.

Now, I fall all the time. Decades of doing stupid things like skiing off rocks, etc. has given me plenty of opportunities to learn how to fall and I can do it pretty well. I have lost any instinct to try and break my fall with my arms; which doesn’t work and usually results in those last few words coming up in a different order. Instead, I try to spread the impact over the largest area possible. In this case, however, there was not enough area.

I don’t remember the fall at all, but I can see the impact like it was happening right now. I landed on my left side. I felt something go snap in my shoulder. But there was no pain. There was only Blue. Pure indigo like a pair of new jeans. The color of the deep ocean washed over me like a cerulean tsunami. Wow! I thought, That’s pretty cool!

This was my first experience of full-blown synesthesia – which is the perceptual transposition of one sense in place of another. It had never happened to me before, and I was amazed. Apparently, my brain – deciding that the level of pain I was sending it was way more than I could bear – riffled through the card catalog and came up with Blue and pulled the old switcheroo. It was very cool.

I then bounced and ended up on my back with the box on one side of me and the ladder on the other with my damaged arm draped at an unsightly angle over the ladder. I reached for my phone.

However, while I was thinking Wow! That’s pretty cool! I was apparently saying something else very loudly – and using words that would be too fucking inappropriate for a family-friendly blog to repeat here – so that by the time I figured out how to get my phone out of my left pocket using my right hand, my trusty neighbor Beck had arrived on the scene, surveyed the destruction and summoned an ambulance.

Which is where I was inserted into the out-of-control cash grab that is the American Healthcare System.

The first ambulance showed up in minutes. The crew rushed over to assess the situation, and two of them returned to the bus – as they are known in the biz – for the needed equipment. The remaining first responder independently assessed that my arm shouldn’t be on top of the ladder, so he lifted my arm without warning and kicked the ladder out of the way. A true professional. By now the others had returned and decided that they needed to get the actual people who knew what they were doing and summoned the pros. The second ambulance soon appeared and, according to the pictures I’ve seen, the shift supervisor had too. It had become a circus. 

The pros from Dover acted quickly. They inserted an IV injection port into my wrist and started pumping in the narcotics. While I was still lucid, they suggested that we should roll the bus over to the local Level One Trauma Center – at which point I realized that golfing on Sunday was probably out of the question – in Seattle and thereby confirmed that the local hospital emergency room was the clown car short about fifty clowns that I thought it was. An opinion based upon personal experience and possibly the subject of a future blog. So we rolled.

Bainbridge, having “Island” as its official suffix, is surrounded by water and that water, in the direction of Seattle, is expansive enough that a boat is required. When there is a medical emergency the ferry waits, empty, so that the incoming ambulance gets the spot in front. If it’s a true emergency, then the boat takes off immediately leaving hundreds of people in their cars stranded in our quaint seaside village until the next boat. Everything is messed up, ferry-wise, for the rest of the day. For a candy-assed “emergency” such as mine, they just put the ambulance up front and then load everybody else in behind. Much later than they should have. I’ve been one of those drivers. I know what they were thinking.

However, it was all a fuzzy cloud to me. By this time, I had assented to so many additional injections of opioids that the street price in Appalachian mining towns had started to tick up. Fentanyl, Dilaudid, and Atavan are the names that stuck in my mind, and I was in such a pharmacological state that my damaged arm was just a dull reminder of the past couple of hours. Time passed like stars on a cloudy night.

So, I missed out on most of the actual medicine that was performed on me. As midnight approached, the fog started to clear, and I got the details. My “humerus” – ironic, right? – “snapped cleanly off and was displaced in both a lateral and longitudinal direction by a substantial amount. But not to worry, you can just keep it in a sling and maybe it will heal right up.” No, that part is real. “You can see the doctor in three weeks to see what happens next.” 

I kid you not.

So, I asked, what happens now? 

We’re going to release you.

Are you nuts? I can’t get a ride home at this hour. By the time it got here the ferry would be shut down.

Not to worry, the nurse smiled. We can call you an Uber.