Five Days

As the sun came up, as consciousness and pain returned, he tried to rise. He saw that he was trapped. He was lying on his back at the bottom of a rocky California canyon, about 40 miles from Oakland. His wrecked automobile was on its side beside him and his right hand and wrist were pinned underneath the car's front fender.

Things began to come back. He was Ernest Steele--Ernest K. Steele. He had been fishing, then driving down Franklin Canyon Road on his way home. He guessed he had gone to sleep; he had a vague memory of terror, of feeling his car plunge through a fence and sail out into the gulley. He twisted on the hard ground until his back was raw and his wounded hand throbbed with pain. Then he thought of his wife, Mae, at home in Richmond, and he lay still and wept.

He could hear cars and trucks above him on the highway. They were only 50 feet away. He yelled again & again. The sun came up and dried the night damp, but it burned his right foot--his shoe had been torn off. Nobody answered him all day, and at night he was cold again.

He was horribly thirsty in the morning. Eight feet away, just beyond a little willow tree, a three-foot creek purled and gurgled. Desperately he began rolling his head, eating tufts of grass which grew within reach. That afternoon he heard a hammer banging near by; he knew someone was mending the fence his car had shattered. He screamed, hammered on the fender with his free hand. There was no answer.

Bees & Ants. The next day he began thinking of his knife, out of reach in the car. He wondered if he could cut off his arm. He picked up a sliver of glass, cut himself with it, and then stopped, suddenly afraid that he might bleed to death. He decided that he would die in the end anyhow. It seemed odd. He was only 26. He had been in the Navy during the war (and spent 36 hours on a raft after his ship was torpedoed). He had a good job in a Standard Oil Co. paraffin plant in Oakland. He scratched a note to his wife on the fender: "Don't forget I love you."

After that things became hazy. The nights were always cold. He chewed two sticks of gum a day. Sometimes he did not yell for hours. Ants crawled on his puffed, meaty hand, and bees hovered anxiously over it. His tongue grew puffy and his lips thickened and he ran a fever. Day & night the cars kept passing by and the little brook gurgled and talked to him.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, when two power-company linemen found him, he simply lay still and said, "Hello." They lifted the car off his mangled hand, wrapped him in their coats, dipped a canvas bucket into the creek and put its rough, wet edge to his lips. At the hospital in Oakland a doctor said he believed that the hand would not have to be amputated--just some fingers.

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