Launch of Tangled Toes, Pins and Needles by Richard Pike
I don’t usually drink pink champagne, but the other night was an exception. I was at the book launch of a very old friend of mine, Richard. I hadn’t seen him in very nearly 30 years. We hadn’t exchanged a word with one another since our last couple of years at Wits University in the mid-1980s and there might well have been no reason for us to reconnect three decades later, but in our days at varsity together Richard and I and four others were the victims of a terrible accident that changed things forever, and the memory of which has shaped all of our lives.
I was 19 and we were all members of the University Boat Club and were travelling from Johannesburg to East London to row in the Buffalo Regatta. It was high summer and we were fit young students rowing for one of the most successful clubs in the country. The vehicle we were travelling in was a large Chevrolet pick up truck and we were towing our long and expensive rowing boats behind us. We were somewhere on the road between Frankfort and Reitz in the Free State when the trailer began to sway from side to side. Almost before we knew it, the trailer had jack-knifed and the Chevy was rolling across the veld. I was sitting in the back under the steel canopy with two other friends, Coenie and Gary, while Richard, his brother Andrew and Jeremy, the driver, were in the front.
I remember the sensation of not believing that this was real, as I spun around and around in the back as the truck rolled. I remember the unbelievably loud banging and crashing of the steel of the canopy buckling and being crushed as it hit the ground repeatedly. Strangely I remember dust and the golden yellow light of the late afternoon sun flashing past me as I was thrown about like a rag. Instinctively, though, I put my hands behind my head and curled up in a ball as I had been taught to do in judo class as a young child. That helped to protect my head and when the truck finally came to a rest, my fingers and right thumb was cut and so was a section of my right shoulder blade.
For a brief moment I thought: ‘Okay we’ll push the car back over and get back on the road.’ Slowly, then rapidly, I began to comprehend the catastrophe that had taken place around me. Gary had been in a bad motorbike accident some months before and he had literally taken leave of his senses; he was also not badly hurt but he was wandering around in circles in the veld singing. Coenie had been thrown out of the back, his head was badly cut and he was hardly conscious. The boys in the front had taken the worst of it. Andy had been thrown out first through the windscreen and then Richard and Jeremy after him. Andy was pumping blood from both arms; Jeremy had suffered a back injury and was lying prone in the veld. Richard was lying in the middle of the R26. Luckily, his T-shirt had been pulled up and I could see that his spine was grotesquely twisted in an S-shape. The smallest of things can have the most extraordinary consequences. It was simple way a shirt had been rumpled amidst the bloodied chaos surrounding me that allowed me, as the only largely unscathed one of us all, to begin to think about what to do.
At first, I turned my attention to Andy and I tried to stem his bleeding, but in a clear place somewhere in the centre of my panic, it was Richard I was most worried about. He was lying in the middle of a national road with a hideous spinal injury. A passer-by stopped and started trying to help with Andy, so I hurried over to Richard’s side. A few years before, at high school, a boy had been injured in a school ruby match. His spine was injured just as badly as Richard’s and the main thing the medics and teachers had stressed that he should not be moved until the paramedics arrived to limit the damage to his spinal cord.
I sat down on the road next to Richard and tried to assess what to do. Petrol was dripping from the vehicle. The fear was that the truck would explode and burn myself and Richard to cinders. ‘You’ve got to move him,’ somebody said. Richard was much bigger than me. I knew that I couldn’t have moved him without dragging him across the tar and shattering what remained of his spine.
Fortunately, I had worked on cars with my dad and I knew that the petrol was unlikely to ignite as the engine was not running. Based on that I chose to defy what everyone else was telling me and I refused to allow Richard to be moved. The rest of that terrible day is something of a blur. I sat next to Richard for long hours as passers-by stopped, police officers arrived and the day turned into night. Finally a helicopter arrived from Johannesburg and Richard was airlifted to hospital. The rest of the story is Richard’s and his long, painful but deeply courageous road to being able to walk again. Today, he is a happy and successful man who walks with barely a limp.
Sitting on the gravel of the R26 next to Richard was the moment my adulthood began. It was the first time in my life that I understood that what I chose to do would have an unalterable impact on the life of someone else.
What is harder to make sense of is the fragile alchemy of luck and circumstance. How much did my childhood judo play a role in keeping me unharmed? How much what I learn from witnessing the bitter suffering of another boy cut down in his prime at school come unexpectedly to help Richard a few years later? And working on cars with my Dad, that was crucial in making my decision. But above all, it was the chance fold in a T-shirt that changed the course of Richard’s life. Had I not seen just how badly his spine was injured I would have almost certainly tried to move him.
Hamilton Wende
