Lani, my sister who is just 18 months younger than I am, turned 62 this week. This could be considered a miracle, given that she has at least one major brush with disaster each year. This sounds like hyperbole, but it is not. At least once a year she sends an email or a text -- after everything has been resolved enough that no one will panic -- detailing the most recent close call. I am not even sure she tells us all about all the incidents. Some probably don't feel interesting enough to report.
She is a great storyteller, relating everything in one long paragraph, judiciously using all caps from time to time to emphasize how the horse would have said this, or the raccoon, and she tends to minimize the parts where things got very scary. She spends many hours on the road, often pulling horse trailers loaded with multiple horses. She spends countless hours riding horses, or getting dumped off by horses, or getting accidentally damaged by horses. Last year she was innocently driving down the road in one of her huge heavy duty trucks and a giant tree fell directly on her cab, leaving branches both in front and behind. She drives a truck with a super reinforced bumper on the front because she has collided with so many deer over the years that she decided it was time to protect the truck from so many repeat trips to the body shop. This bumper may have played a role in deflecting the weight of the tree. She and her partner have stopped driving lightweight vehicles and have a fleet of the heaviest and most cumbersome trucks imaginable, partly because highway driving is so fraught. If you spend enough hours driving in the night, you learn that people do really crazy and dangerous things, like entering the highway on an on-ramp and getting confused and driving directly perpendicular to the flow of traffic. Lani says her insurance man thinks she might be immortal but he will never ride with her.
Unlike me, but much like our father, Lani is a risk taker. I must take after our mother as I am far more conservative about the way I move through space, and how I use my body. My mother and I are in it for the long haul. Our father, Tony, was overconfident and fearless from a young age. His childhood friends describe dangerous escapades, near misses, a fair amount of gasoline, and driving down Beulah Road, using the snowbanks on the side to bounce from one side to the other. Those are the genes that Lani has inherited and exploited, following in Dad's tracks to the point of owning an airplane when she was in her early 20s and continuing on through the years with horses and trucks, recklessly.
She doesn't think of herself as reckless. She is careful. It's true that she pays attention and she keeps herself well equipped with safety gear and is also surrounded by a supportive crew. But she can't say that her choices are safe all the time -- she has had more concussions and broken collarbones than she has ever told us about. Her hair turned white long ago from all the times her helmet got cracked on impact. Last year when the EMTs were checking them over after a particularly horrendous accident, she told them the bruises on her face and body were pre-existing -- she had just finished an endurance ride, completing it after she had fallen and broken her collarbone. She was one big purple bruise and she didn't need to go to the hospital. Her injuries were unrelated to the current crash.
But the point of all this backstory is that Lani has come to believe that she has a guardian angel. She doesn't think it is the guardian angel's job to rescue her, and she can't count on this angel always being attentive, but she is fortunate that this angel has been watching over her just enough.
Two years ago, when I was minding my own business on a tractor, driving on level ground very slowly, a large dead locust tree fell on me. This was one of those times when Lani and I might possibly be sharing the same guardian angel (she thinks his name is Tony). This would make sense. I don't have so many occasions to require Tony, but I can believe that he would watch over both of us. This was an example of pure dumb luck. I easily could have died or been permanently maimed. The tree fell all around me (it had many branches) and it dented the hood of the tractor, but I was not scratched.
Last year I was minding my own business on a tractor, driving on level ground very slowly, and trying to figure out why the spader was leaving such unusual tracks behind me. Usually the ground is left without a tire track, but something was unexplainably weird. I kept looking at the spader to try to figure it out. Finally I glanced down to my left and, in an instant, had my doubts that I remembered what I was supposed to be seeing. Nothing looked right. I stopped, put the tractor in neutral and got off. The rear tire (taller than I am, full of water, weighing maybe 2000 pounds but that is a wild guess) had worked its way to the end of the axle and was within moments of coming off the end. I did not get back on the tractor. I reached up and turned off the key and walked away.
That is what I was taught to do, 50 years ago. When something goes wrong, turn off the tractor, get off and go for help. You might think that in all these years I would have a more nuanced response. But I don't. Our dad has been gone for 39 years now, and some of the lessons of my youth have not been revised in the interim. My guardian angel has kept me from getting crushed, and now it is my job to get help.
If you spend enough time on a tractor, eventually almost everything that can fall off will fall off. That's what I decided yesterday when a pin fell off, disconnecting an arm way underneath me where I couldn't see. I could see, once again, that something was terribly wonky behind me. I turned off the tractor, got off, looked at the problem, and started walking. (You would think in this day and age I would just use my cell phone, but I didn't have it with me.) This was not one of those times I really required a guardian angel, but it did bring him to mind. Before he became our guardian angel, he taught us as much as he could -- mostly about being attentive.
He didn't teach Lani anything about avoiding risk, but so far the two of them have managed to keep her going. They are like two peas in a pod, even though Lani would never say that herself. And somehow she has lived to be 13 years older than he ever did, so maybe our mother's genes are helping to balance the equation.
