Luck

Luck

This story is not my property.  I wrote it, but the material came from audiotapes I transcribed for my cousin Sandy some time ago.  She is writing a biography of her father’s life and the following tale is one among many on the tapes.  It may be the most amazing story I know, but other than possibly sharing it with a few friends and family it is never going any further.  As I said, it is not mine...

June 2002 (minor update 2010)

              

Howard Neighbor

Good people are not always lucky and lucky people are not always good.  Often the reverse is true.  My uncle Hersch however, was both.  In fact he was the luckiest man I ever knew.  He didn’t gamble and never won a lottery; but he did have his life saved by a stroke of fortune that leaves a million dollars looking thin as a politician’s promise. 

Some who believe in Providence might say it happened because Hersch was a good man.  If so, it sure wasn’t due to his piety.  He did not go to church. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes from the time he was a boy and he could cuss the stripes off a skunk.  Though not a drinker, if called on Hersch would hold up his end there too. 

Anyway, God-bothering, teetotaling and refusing to say shit with a mouthful are suspect measures of goodness at best.  Hersch was a good man because he had a generous spirit.  He was a good friend to his friends, a good father to his children and a good husband to his wife. He was honest in business and treated others with kindness and respect.  And he was a good uncle to me.

No, I do not think being a good man has anything to do with this story. I only mention it because genuinely decent people are always rare as desert rain. Hersch died several years ago; in case no one else ever says so again in print, I have and now it is done.

This happened in 1937.  Hersch was thirty-one, married with an infant son and struggling to survive the Great Depression.  Pictures of him around that age reveal that up to the day he died at eighty-eight his appearance never changed much.  He was a pleasant looking man, with dark hair and sharp, deeply tanned features.  Small in stature, he remained slim, wiry and muscular, with astounding endurance.  Hersch was more than lucky; he was physically the toughest man I ever knew.  There are other tales about that, but I have digressed enough. 

Hersch learned to endure early.  He grew up on a hardscrabble pioneer homestead in midwestern Alberta.  By the age of nine he was hunting rabbits and anything else he could find to help feed his family.  His success usually meant that he, his mother and younger siblings (including my father) ate potatoes and meat that day rather than just potatoes. 

By sixteen he was on his own.  He took up a small homestead but it was not enough to support him so he learned horse-trading and became a skilled horseman.  Already a competent hunter, in later years Hersch would be a well-known and highly respected outfitter and hunting guide in British Columbia.  At the time of this story he was wrangling horses for an outfitter named Bert Wilkins who worked out of Jasper, Alberta.  

Wilkins was taking a party of dudes on a summer trip into the Rocky Mountains. They would be away for almost forty days. Their first goal was Mt. Alexander McKenzie, nearly two hundred kilometres northwest of Jasper, in eastern British Columbia. The party consisted of Wilkins, a cook, two other wranglers, three teenage boys, seven teenage girls and a middle-aged woman who was group organizer and chaperone.  In addition to riding mounts, they had thirty or more packhorses.

That sort of summer holiday was common back then for young people whose parents could afford it. By the time they returned in late August summer in the mountains would be ending with night-frosts and possibly light snow.

As they were leaving Jasper Hersch’s horse, one he called “a knot headed maverick”, had spooked and fallen on him bruising his right foot.  Almost before the trip began he was

in trouble, though it would be over a week before he realized how much.

The party headed roughly northwest into the mountains.  They probably followed the railroad out of Jasper for a day or two before climbing from the lodgepole pine and spruce forest of the valley into higher country.  Soon they would be in dense spruce and balsam timber surrounded by towering, snowy peaks. Their path would take them across roaring streams and alongside icy, emerald lakes.  In a few days they would be in rolling alpine meadows carpeted with spectacular wildflowers. There would be black bear, caribou and marmots to see and grizzlies to watch out for.  First-timer or veteran, every mountain excursion is unique and unforgettable.

A few days out Hersch’s foot began to hurt.  At first he ignored it; there was little he could do anyway.  By now medical help was far behind them.  He kept riding and working as they moved deeper into the wilderness.  And his foot worsened.  Soon he could only get his boot on because in the mountains they wore lace-ups rather than the riding kind.  Even that was difficult.  After supper, once camp was set up and the dudes and horses settled in, he would soak his foot in a cold stream or mountain lake. 

One evening Hersch saw a red streak creeping up his ankle and realized how serious his trouble was.  He told his boss.  Wilkins had a little medical knowledge and examined the foot.  He agreed Hersch had blood poisoning and told him to start soaking in hot water instead of cold, but other than that there was nothing anyone could do.

Next day they reached Mt. Alexander McKenzie and camped on its eastern slopes.  After supper, as Hersch sat soaking his painfuly swollen foot, two Indians rode into camp.  They told Wilkins they were scouting trail for another holidaying outfit from Grande Prairie, roughly a week’s ride northeast.

The scouts said they were set up an hour away at Kakwa Lake with a fairly large group: nineteen dudes, mostly students from a Montreal Jesuit college.  But the remarkable news was they had a doctor with them.  Bert insisted Hersch ride to the other camp right away.  He agreed, but not until he finished his evening chores.  As I said, a tough man...

At that latitude midsummer twilight can last till nearly ten o’clock.  It was after eight when Hersch and the scouts reached the other camp.  It was set up in a meadow by the lake and he recalled there were several tents and perhaps seventy horses.

The doctor was in fact a surgeon and he quickly confirmed Hersch had septicemia.  He explained that when the horse fell on him it bruised foot bones, which had abscessed. Antibiotics were years away.  Immediate surgery, he declared, was imperative. The only treatment was to drain the abscess and scrape the bone and surrounding tissue clean of infection.  Untreated, septicemia is almost always fatal.  The doctor assured Hersch he carried equipment to perform anything up to and including an appendectomy.

Hersch protested. “I can’t have an operation.  I’m working!”

The response was blunt and over fifty years later Hersch recalled the exact words.  “It’s up to you.  I either operate or you get on that damn horse you just got off of and head for the railroad. But I don’t think you are going to make it.   Even if you do, you are going to lose that leg!”

“It would have taken eight days” Hersch admitted, “I knew that, hell, I wasn’t going out.  So I told him sharpen up your butcher knife and at her we go!”

They operated that night in a tent.  Three young students stood around a camp table holding large flashlights and a fourth administered ether.  It apparently took a lot.  Even when they thought he was out, Hersch recalled the doctor remarking how tough he was and saying that to compare him to people they knew was like comparing a collie to a timber wolf.  The student administering the ether was concerned about how much it was taking and the last thing Hersch remembered was the doctor saying perhaps he was a heavy drinker and that might account for it.

He woke up sometime in the night.  Two students were with him.  Hersch allowed it was one of the most embarrassing moments of his life: he was cussing the daylights out of all of them for calling him a drunk.  He fell asleep again and when he woke late the next morning, the surgeon and students had already gone.  He was still groggy and did not think to ask the doctor’s name, so he never was able to contact him.  For the rest of his life Hersch regretted failing to thank him and saying all those terrible things about him and the young men who had saved his life.  Of course he knew people coming out of anesthetic often do that sort of thing, but it still bothered him.

Around noon his boss came, helped Hersch onto his horse and took him back to their camp.  They stayed an extra day.  One of the crew made Hersch a sort of white oilcloth moccasin to cover the bandage and he rode like that for several days, doing light camp duty.  Within a week he had the bandage off and was back at his regular job.  He did admit though, he limped for a while.

.............................

So how about those odds?  In an area of unbroken wilderness twice the size of Switzerland, how likely would two groups of riders be to cross paths?  Remember, this happened over seventy years ago; barely thirty thousand people lived in that entire part of the world.  Virtually all were in small communities scattered along the edges of the wilderness.  Sound like slim odds?  Look closer and they soar out of sight. 

In one group is a man whose life depends on the skills of a surgeon.  Even assuming there would be one in the other group -- wildly unlikely -- what are the chances he would carry surgical tools?  Add the timing of the meeting.  Even two more days would have been too late.  By then the best doctor in the best hospital in the world could not have saved Hersch without antibiotics, which did not yet exist.  In comparison a million dollar lottery win looks like pretty small beer. 

Providence?  Perhaps.  All I know is Hersch lived and the world had the benefit of one more good man’s presence for another fifty-seven years.

A brief postscript: a few years before Hersch died, he developed diabetes. Gangrene soon infected the same leg the unknown surgeon had saved so many years before.  This time, in a bright and modern hospital, a sober faced doctor spoke to him in grave tones.  “Mr. Neighbor”, he said, “I am afraid we must amputate your right leg just below the knee.”

He must have been shocked by Hersch’s instant reply: “Then let’s get on with it and cut the damn thing off!”  Of course, the doctor had no way of knowing that leg had been walking around on borrowed time for over half a century...

- fin -