The Dark Secret I Kept for Almost Four Decades

Reposting of a "classic" story

Substack has been around since only 2017, so I’m not sure anything here can qualify as “classic.” But this story I wrote in late 2020 and it was classic for me because it made me money. It made me money because cliff hanger. No, I’m not gonna tease anyone then make you pay. The entire post is here for free. But when I was just starting to earn with my history writing, I offered stuff behind a paywall that was more personal stories. This was one of the early ones. I teased out the first third on Facebook then said, as nicely as possible, fucking pay me if you want to read the rest. Some were pissed off, but a lot of people became paying subscribers. I think most of them have stuck around. Anyway, here is the entire thing, no payment required. Although I added in a little break so you can see where I did my cliffhanger thing cuz I want you to appreciate my shameless marketing genius.

Our story begins …

I held a secret for a long time, one that filled me with guilt.

My father’s house—the house he built himself—sits atop a hill overlooking a pond and an expanse of forest. About a mile away is a river I’ve pulled many trout from. He has lived in that house over 40 years, and I’ve spent countless months there. It’s in the middle of nowhere northern British Columbia. There is no running water or power lines. Drinking water is hauled in, heat comes from wood, light and cooking is powered by propane, electricity for the TV that gets 3.5 channels and to run the VCR comes from a gas generator. If you have to poop, it’s a bit of a walk to the outhouse. In the summer the mosquitos are bad. My daughter, who has traveled to many countries, calls her grandfather’s land her favorite place on Earth.

There is always a big dog.

In the winter he builds a sled path with high walls akin to a bobsled run. It begins fifteen feet from his front door and runs in a steep arc to the valley below, and since it faces southwest it gets a lot of sun which causes a freeze/melt that makes it, as my father would say, slicker than snot on a doorknob. It’s crazy fast.

In the winter of 1981, the land newly purchased, my father and I sledded down that hill together for the first time, and something terrible happened. And then I did something that filled me with guilt, and I carried that guilt in silence for decades.

(Request for payment in original post was here — aren’t I a bastard?)

We were there with his girlfriend and a friend of his, scouting the spot the house would be built on; it was my first time seeing the land. We had an old-school toboggan, and during the inaugural run I was in the front, my feet tucked into the curve. My father sat behind me with his arms around my waist and his legs out. The snow was several inches deep and as we raced down the steep hill it flew into our faces, hoots of joy escaping our lungs as we plunged through the white.

As we came to a stop I turned around as was about to say, “Let’s do that again!” but something was wrong. My dad was screaming. It was a scream unlike anything I’d heard. This is a man who now is almost 80 and still lives in the middle of fucking nowhere hauling his own water and chopping endless piles of wood to heat his house through the Canadian winter. He’s not a wimp. A scream like that meant something terrible.

I saw his right leg was bent backward at the knee; his lower leg twisted at an unnatural angle. His screams echoed across the valley. I was immediately struck by the wrongness of it all. The leg wasn’t supposed to be in that position, it wasn’t supposed to look like that. I couldn’t handle it looking like that, and my immediate reaction was to reach out and grab it and pull it hard and fast to straighten it out.

I did it because I didn’t want to look at a twisted leg for one more second. My brain couldn’t accept it, so I acted. In the moment I yanked on his leg the already impossible screams somehow became louder. His girlfriend and friend were running down the hill toward us.

I’d broken my ankle a few months previous and it was already healed. What I’d gone through was nothing like this. This was not a broken leg, but a shattered one. The three of us slowly hauled my father up the hill on the toboggan, inches at a time, him in agony the entire way. We’d come in a truck and when we got to the top his girlfriend raced to a neighbor’s a few miles away to get them to bring their station wagon to put him the back. The nearest town with an ambulance was an hour’s drive and a 20-minute ferry ride away. They called ahead and had the ferry waiting with an ambulance.

As we waited for the station wagon, he was starting to shiver. His fingers were cold, so I traded him his gloves for my thick mittens. It’s odd the things you remember, but I recall the color of those mittens being a bright red. Dad’s friend took me back to the house he was renting a short drive away where my older sister was waiting. Dad was taken past the town to the nearest city, Prince George, which was another two-and-a-half-hour drive and given lots of morphine and surgery and pins and plates and shit like that. He was there for a couple of days while we stayed at his girlfriend’s house. He had a cast up to his crotch for almost six months, and it took a few more months after it came off before he could properly walk again.

I never saw the X-ray, but his girlfriend sketched a picture of how many different pieces his lower leg was in. That image haunted me because I always thought I’d made it worse by yanking on his leg. I never told a soul what I’d done for almost 40 years.

Then, around Thanksgiving a few years ago, Dad was visiting, and we were all drinking, and I felt a sudden need to confess. I spilled my tale about how I’d yanked his leg straight, and before anyone could say anything my wife, who is a family physician, spoke up.

“That was the best possible thing you could have done,” she said. My best friend the paramedic agreed.

It had to be done anyway, they explained. Better to do it fast and immediately. My Dad said in his amused manner, “Well I guess a thank you is in order.” A weight lifted.

It’s strange because I’m not exactly uneducated when it comes to medical matters, having been married to a physician for over a quarter century and being close friends with a paramedic. Years later I must have known that what I’d done was the right thing, but I was never able to reconcile it because my motivations had been wholly selfish. I could not abide looking at that twisted leg, it just grossed me out and I needed to make the image go away so without any thinking I just pulled it straight.

The fact that it was the right thing to do was pure luck. So, yes, there is still a bit of residual guilt, but my wife made me feel a lot better about it. “I can’t believe you felt guilty about that for so long,” she later told me.

Forty-two years later, Dad’s leg works just fine.

I write a wide variety of personal stories for paying subscribers, some amusing, others serious. You can get full-access to the back catalogue of paid stories plus the new ones I’m posting soon with a free trial:

Click here for a 7-Day FREE TRIAL.

And don’t forget to buy my fucking book.