EVEL KNIEVEL TAKES ON
COTTONWOOD HILL
As mentioned in some previous blog posts, I spent my early childhood
growing up in the rural town of Bishop, California. It was the early 1970’s and the hippie
movement was still in full swing, with rock bands like Three Dog Night singing “Jeremiah
was a Bullfrog” and kids like me were running wild all summer in short shorts,
tank tops and bare feet (or maybe the occasional pair of flimsy flip-flops).
There
were many childhood heroes in those days.
The Six Million Dollar man, with his bionic legs, arm and eye was saving
the world on TV each week, not to mention his countless escapades of courage
and valor around my house and yard, as my Steve Austin action figure battled
whatever foes my imagination could conjure up on days which were never filled
with boredom. Now days, $6 million
dollars wouldn’t serve to rebuild a busted up guy for more than a couple of
knee replacements, a catheter and a motorized wheelchair, but in the early 70’s
that kind of money could build a robotic super hero!
In
those days, kids didn’t have computers, smart phone, videos or DVD’s and
endless entertainment at your fingertips.
A kid’s imagination was his domain… a world where if you had a hot wheel
car, an action figure and some dirt, you could play for hours on end and never
get bored. In fact, a kid with a bicycle
and a few pieces of scrap wood could build a jump and be Evel Knievel right in
his own driveway! In fact, there was one
day, when several of the kids in the neighborhood all got together, and with an
old milk crate and some plywood, constructed a jump of, what we thought was,
"EPIC" proportions. I can’t remember who
it was now, but one kid came tearing down the street as fast is his smoking, little
twig legs could go, and when he hit that jump he pulled up on the handle bars
and really sailed off into space… the only problem was that the impact of the
jump jarred his front tire loose from the front forks of his bike, and as he
sailed up into the air, his tire fell down and bounced off to the side of
the road. Needless to say, he came to a
rather abrupt stop upon landing, as his front forks dug into the hot summer
asphalt and bent upwards at an angle that would only be useful if you were
pedaling your bike inside of a bowl. But
don’t worry, he was stopped from bouncing his skull off the pavement by the
force of his crotch slamming into the post below his handle bars, and eventually his voice
returned to normal within a few weeks!
But,
lest I forget, we need to get back to Evel Knievel. Now there was a true adrenalin junkie
It
happened on a hot summer weekend. I can’t
exactly remember how old I was at that time (a result of too many blows to the
head throughout my childhood no doubt – a fact of which my poor mother can
attest), but I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8 years old. My parents had gone out of town for the
weekend, and my older brother Dirk and I were staying with one of our friend’s on
the outskirts of town. It just so
happened that they lived along the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in
a small house at the bottom of Cottonwood Hill (Cue dramatic music in the
background – Dum, Dum, Dum!!!)
I
don’t think my childhood memories are exaggerating much here, but Cottonwood
Hill was actually more like Cottonwood Cliff.
Not that it was incredibly long, but the angle it seemingly sloped off
the edge of the world was enough that if you had a gutless car (which in the
early 70’s probably would have been a Ford Pinto or AMC Pacer), you may not
ever leave the valley floor unless strapped behind a beefy tow truck.
In
the mid-afternoon, as my brother, myself, and our friend, Mike Bellick played
in his yard, we noticed some older teenage kids with their bikes at the top of
the hill cliff. Whooping with joy
and exhilaration they coasted at incredible speeds down the steep incline and blurred
past us for several blocks worth of momentum before disappearing off somewhere
else in the neighborhood. Visions of our
hero, Evel Knievel, flooded our youthful cognitive processes and soon we found
ourselves climbing our bikes up the hill.
When
I say climbing, it’s because not only did we have insufficient muscle fibers in
our scrawny legs to propel a bike up the hill by pedal-power, but because if it
were any steeper, I’m pretty sure we would have needed carabineers, climbing
harnesses and a belay system of some sort to reach the top!
Huffing
and puffing great gasps of air, we may have well been standing on Mount Everest. If I had sense
enough to look around, I’m sure I would have found a small hut with an old guru
sitting in it, who would have offered some sage advice such as, “What are you
crazy kid?! You’ll kill yourself trying
to ride down that hill!!!” But my head
was filled with visions of a stars and stripes clad Knievel, and the sense of
adventure and pending exhilaration bypassed all my safety mechanisms.
Our
friend, Mike, was smart enough to peer over the edge of the chasm, his hands
trembling on the handle bars, and state, “No way I’m riding down that!” But my brother Dirk, who was then one of my
childhood heroes as well, and who I have followed and admired my entire life,
mounted his banana seat and slipped a foot onto the pedal, so I naturally
followed suit. Adrenaline pumping fun
was only a few feet away.
After
the initial stomach-jumping-up-into-your-throat thrill of going over the
precipice, I realized that my pedals were instantly useless for propulsion,
because I was suddenly rocketing faster than my legs would ever be able to
go. The relentless pull of gravity now
had free sway, and as the wind whipped my ragged hair about my head and tugged
at my tank top, I suddenly became aware why Evel Knievel wore a leather suit,
boots and a helmet, as my short nylon shorts and flip-flops left far too much
exposed skin in event of a crash.
In
fact, all the glory and heroics of Evel Knievel seemed irrelevant at that moment,
and were replaced by the repressed memories of some of his horrific crashes and
bone crushing injuries (In fact, the over 433 broken bones he suffered during
his career earned him an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records as the
survivor of "most bones broken in a lifetime”) The details aside, my quick-lived exhilaration
was now replaced with the frozen shock and horror of impending doom as my
flimsy little bike hurtled down the rough graveled roadway. I’m not sure whether it was the speed which
caused my handle bars to begin violently vibrating in my grip, or the spasmodic
convulsing of my body, but my twig like arms were no match for the force placed
upon them.
Out
of the corner of my wide-eyed terror, I saw my brother hit his brakes in
attempt to slow down, causing his rear wheel to fish-tail uncontrollably as he
fell behind me. At the same instant my
handle bars began to wobbly back and forth with such severity that they were
ripped from my sweaty palms and my front wheel spun sideways, ejecting me in
rocket-like fashion head-first over the handle bars and onto the ragged gravel
pavement below. Unless you were a news
crew or movie studio, people didn’t really have hand held video cameras in
those days, but if someone would have been filming the event, I imagine it
would have been somewhat like Evel Knievel’s famous crash while trying to jump
the fountains at Caesar’s Palace.
Of
course, wearing nothing but a tank-top, shorts, and flip flops, my fragile
flesh was exposed to the tearing forces of the rough gravel roadway as I
bounced off my head and shoulder and rolled like a rag-doll for some distance
down the hill side.
Because
of shock and trauma, I don’t remember much until the next day, when my friend’s
aunt, who was a nurse and had heard about my crash, came over to check on my
condition. When she examined my blood
encrusted wounds she gave the following diagnosis, “He’s got so much rocks and
dirt in these scabs that he’s sure to develop infection and permanent scars
unless we clean them out.”
Upon
returning from their trip, when our parents arrived to pick us up that
afternoon, they could only gaze upon me with sad and knowing eyes as they
looked upon my situation. It was as if
experience had taught them that somehow they would return to find me in some
kind of mess or another.
Making
a long story short, despite the pain of having the wounds cleansed at the hands
of a skilled healer, my wounds did heal without infection and left no permanent
scars behind, other than those which still lay deep within my psychological
reservoir of experiences. But such is the nature of this life, and it is
through experiences such as these that we are molded and formed into the people
we ultimately become.
If
I had to draw a moral conclusion or parallel to this story and what I learned,
it would be this: That far too often in
life we seek to cure the seeming boredom of our lives by trying to fill the
void with something thrilling or exciting.
We somehow make the mistake that the fleeting rush of adrenaline and
exhilaration is what provides happiness.
In saying this, I am no way implying that all thrill seekers are bad or
that such activities don’t have their place in life, but when we throw common
sense to the wind and jeopardize our future for the temporary thrill, we can
find ourselves in situations which are helplessly beyond our control.
If the thrill-seeking actions are
related to sin and violation of God’s commandments, we will always crash and
burn and find ourselves littered with festering, debris-filled spiritual wounds,
from which there is only one way to escape without permanent scars and injury…
Repentance.
Repenting
from sin is not always an easy process, and often involves opening partially
covered wounds and injuries and exposing them to the process of humility, restitution
and spiritual cleansing. But the end result
is that, under the hands of the healing Master and his atonement, our wounds
can be healed and made whole by the power of His love and forgiveness. The
flashy Evel Knievel and Six Million Dollar Man heroes of my youth have
fortunately been replaced over the years by the real heroes in my life: My hard
working and honest father, wise spiritual church leaders and friends, and countless
others who live their lives in consistent acts of service and honest labor
day-in and day-out. Not living life like
a flash in the pan, but by showing true strength, courage and moral fortitude
by their heroic efforts to control their lives and emotions and use their
talents to strengthen and lift others.
And especially the Master himself, Jesus Christ, who patiently and
lovingly heals the wounds of my mistakes and allows me and all of us to
progress and grow into something much better and more whole than we are today.