Without a Face

Because the sidewalks actually do roll up at 5 o’clock on Friday nights in small rural towns, you are left with just two options if you are looking for some evening action as a young adult. Option one, go to the local bars and carouse. Not being a drinker that wasn’t an option for me. Second option, attend the local high school football games and cheer them on. It was on one of those typically cold and quite foggy fall nights just after the football game was over when the call came in—a reported M.V.A. (Motor Vehicle Accident) on some deserted stretch of country road. I rushed up to the fire station and climbed into my cold turnout gear hanging on my hook waiting for me before I climbed into the driver's seat of the extrication truck and waited… Being that we were a volunteer department, no one ever knew how many firefighters would show up for any particular incident. Unlike me, our other volunteers actually had lives beyond the fire department and would go to the movies, or would be enjoying a nice dinner with their wives on a Friday night—all located in other towns several miles away. Some volunteers, heaven forbid, would actually crack open "a cold one" with friends, making them ineligible to respond to emergency call outs because they had been drinking. So, with the extrication rigs engine running, I sat and waited for anyone else to show up. We were trained to wait for five minutes for reinforcements to arrive before charging out on your own to any emergency. Fortunately, going solo didn't happen often, but this was one of those calls where I left the station alone with my overhead lights reflecting off the foggy darkness. Knowing the streets and lanes in my community like the back of my hand, I still had to drive with extra caution that night due to the dense fog.


Seeing someone’s four-way flashers illuminating the roadside where the accident most likely had occurred, I pulled to a stop and grabbed my "Streamlight" (a powerful flashlight) anchored next to my drivers seat. I stepped into the cold night, seeing my own breath in the headlights of my truck, — a bystander points into the woods. Aiming my beam of light into the forest I could see the rubble of a pathway left by a vehicle that had left the roadway out of control. Walking towards the wreck I could hear, but couldn't see, some man screaming, “She is dead! My sister is dead!” while he ran in circles around the crash site just beyond my view. On reaching the center of the chaos, I could see that a small Volkswagen beetle had caused all this carnage. Shinning my narrow beam of light through the smashed-out front windshield, I screamed. I’m not sure to this day if I screamed only in my mind or if I actually screamed out loud. Sitting slumped over in the passenger seat was what appeared to be a girl, but without any features to her face—no eyes, nose, or mouth, just raw flesh and lots of bloodied hair.

Gathering my composure, I slowly inched forward in the darkness to see what, if anything, I could do for her. Feeling for her pulse through the crushed side window, I got one! Looking more closely at her injuries, I saw she had been partially scalped and the loose hair and skin had fallen over her face covering up her facial features. The car doors were squashed shut and I could not get to her directly, but I finally squirmed my body (I was thinner in those days) through the small, almost undamaged frame of the back window that now had no glass in it. Kneeling in the back seat behind her, reaching round and over her seat I held her neck (C spine immobilization) and assured her that real help was on the way. She was bleeding badly from her serious head wounds, so like feeling for holes in a bowling ball, I placed my individual fingers over the spots that were bleeding most profusely to help stem the tide.

So here I was— alone, scared, on a dark, dark foggy night, squished in the back seat of a Volkswagen, trying to keep the precious, life-giving fluid in this young woman. Outside the vehicle I could still hear the man running around in the woods screaming, “My sister is dead!” I could actually hear him thud into a tree now and then, but he'd get back up and resume his panicked screaming—I never did see or find out what his injuries were. Finally, far off in the distance, I could hear the wail from the siren of the ambulance coming to my aid. I begged my young lady to hang on, “Help is coming!” She had bled so much by then that she had stopped bleeding as the ambulance crew jabbed her with two trauma IV lines, one in each of her arms. To my delight, while still kneeling behind her, holding her neck and head she began to bleed again indicating she had regained at least some blood pressure. As more firemen finally began showing up, they started extricating both of us from the wreckage. The young lady was loaded onto the gurney and placed in the back of the ambulance; the rear ambulance doors were slammed shut. A hard slap on the back door signals the ambulance driver to take off. With the interior lights in the ambulance illuminating the goings-on in there, they drove out of my life and into the stiff darkness toward the hospital.

On another Friday night several years later I was again walking into my local high school football stadium to see the annual, homecoming football game. By this time in my life I had gone through a divorce, I had ridden almost ten thousand miles on my mountain bike to help ease the pain of that time and I had met a new lady friend, of course at a Firemen’s Conference in some distant city. That evening was our first quasi date since we'd met, she had traveled to my little community. I was taking her to the local high school homecoming football game for our “special night” out. As we walked by the front of the overflowing crowd in the grandstands on the way to our seats, not even holding hands yet, I hear a woman yell my name from high up in the bleachers. Looking in her direction, a young lady jumps up and yells my name again, but this time even louder, “Bill!”

Firemen are the most notorious practical jokers known to man and my fire buddies knew this new girl friend of mine was coming to town. Looking anxiously towards the quickly advancing young woman (I had no idea who she was) screaming my name from the bleachers, I was searching for my firemen-culprits, giggling in the shadows, who had put her up to this stunt. The young lady pushed herself through the Cougar fans, ran down the bleacher stairs and leaped into my arms hugging me while gushing tears. Being the “gentleman” that I am, I caught her and held her for what seemed like an uncomfortably long time, all the while I’m glancing at the new girlfriend eying me from the sideline. Finally the sobbing woman stepped back and said to me, “You don’t know who I am, do you?" I replied, “Miss, I am so sorry, but, no, I do not.” as the new girlfriend narrowed her glare towards me. The young lady asked if I remembered a particular wreck that had occurred a few years earlier on a dark foggy night and I said, “Yes.” She then informed me “I was the girl in that wreck and you saved my life that night.” Stumbling backwards I said, “Oh, my God, you look so much better then how I remember you.” (They call that Firemen's tact,) I began pushing her long dark hair back away from the side of her face and admiring how the doctors had been able to hide the scares from the accident. We laughed, she smiled and we hugged a few more times before she ran back into the bleachers.

To this day I have no idea how she found out that I was holding her together on that cold foggy night. With my attention now drawn back to the new girl friend who was almost in tears by now, she asked, “Does this happen often?” I took a long pause… and said, “Oh yes, this kind of thing happens to me all the time. I’m a fireman”.