Alive

I was behind the wheel of our two-door Honda Civic, barreling up I-5 toward Portland, when a smile stretched my lips. I was thinking: Dan is alive! He’s alive and when we get there I can talk to him and we can laugh together the way I feel like laughing now.

This was in 1982. Connie, his wife at the time, had just called us.

“Dan was electrocuted today,” she said.

There was no other word for it. He had taken a lethal 400 volts. No one could explain why he wasn’t dead.

When Joanne and I arrived in Portland, I went to shake my friend's hand.

“Not that one” he said and gave me his left. “The other one’s still a little sore.”

He was lying on their couch, that big brown thing they got such a deal on, and he looked tired, like his limbs were too heavy to lift. He spoke in his normal voice, though, and tried to joke as if nothing serious had happened.

Finally we got the whole story:

They were setting up a conveyor outside on the tank farm at Steinfeld’s, trying out a new idea for streamlined processing of . . . cauliflower, I think. Anyway, some guy forced the plug into a high-voltage outlet where it didn’t belong, and when Dan went to reposition the conveyor, 400 volts grabbed him. He screamed once and tried to get free, but it was useless. The electricity lifted him off the ground and put him back down.

That’s all he remembers.

Witnesses — and there were lots of them, bosses and workers  — said Dan was bounced twice and then hurled, head high, for a distance of about fifteen feet. His body went into rapid convulsions.

At the hospital, doctors looked for entry and exit burns but found none. They gave him a tetanus shot for all the scrapes he suffered hitting the pavement, examined him, and sent him home with a complete recovery expected.

Dan’s sister, Kathy, a nurse there at Emanuel, couldn’t believe they didn’t want to keep him overnight for observation, but here he was at home already. He let Joanne compare one arm to the other, and she said the right arm was still warmer to the touch. Some of the voltage was still coursing around in there.

“I guess the Lord wanted to keep me around a little longer,” Dan said.

His mother, Joy, a compact woman with dark curly hair, was in the kitchen cleaning up after their Kentucky Fried dinner. She had already lost her first husband, Bill, in an on-the-job accident. Kathy was there, too. She had been in nursing school when Joy drove to Portland to deliver the news, and so the job of telling Dan — it had to be in person, not by phone — fell to me, his best friend.

He was telling me now that he would have to go back to the plant the next day, see the scene, and actually touch the conveyor.

“That’ll be hard,” he said.

“Have to get back on the horse that threw you, huh?”

He didn’t answer me, just nodded blankly, and I wondered if he was thinking about the trip we made to the plywood mill to see the machine that struck down his father. He had insisted on seeing it; I’m not sure why. To make it real, I suppose. He was having trouble accepting it could happen — and did happen.

I was thinking about a lot of things. About a silent ride to Eugene in the truck of a family friend some eight years earlier, the highway straight and flat and dark ahead of us. About waking Dan with a late-night phone call once we got into town so he could give us directions to the trailer house he was sharing with some other students. About how he could see it in my face when he opened the door — how I wanted him to see it — before I said a word. Because all I could come up with was: “Your dad is dead.”

Later he would tell me he was glad it was me who broke the news; he couldn’t have taken it from anyone else, he said.

I had lost my own father to cancer so I knew what it was like and I guess that made all the difference, but I remember thinking, What if Dan had died today as, by all rights, he should have? Who was going to tell me, without warning, that he was gone? Who was I going to be able to take that from?

Here he was, though — blinking, breathing, speaking.

Questions of life and death and why were swept aside because here in front of me was something I could accept without question: My friend was alive.