Coyote's Den

Once, when I was a kid, maybe ten or so, I went to visit my Dad, in Connecticut. He and I used to love hiking, and he had about five acres of heavily-wooded land. Somewhere on this piece of land, there was supposedly an old shed or outbuilding, or at least the foundation of it. We decided to go looking for it. He hadn't lived there terribly long at that point, I don't think (maybe I was even a little younger), and he was an airline pilot, so he was away from home a lot, and hadn't gotten to look at every inch of the property.

So... we went out traipsing around in the trees, looking for this thing.

Well... there was no sign of it until I stubbed my foot on something. A big old board popped up a little bit out of the pine needles and leaves and whatnot underfoot.

"Hey, look," I said, "there's boards and stuff under here. Maybe this is that shed?"

Dad took a closer look, and sure enough, there were lots of boards all around. Well, I took a step back, and felt something catch my shoe and poke my foot a little bit.

Darn it, I thought, I must have stepped on a nail. Sure enough, my shoe was caught, but it didn't really hurt, so I figured that it must not have gone too far... just poked through the sole of my shoe a little. There was no pain, for which I was happy. The last thing you want to do is ram a nail into your foot. You'd be amazed at how much feet hurt when you do things to them. Professional torturers love feet, because they hurt a lot.

So... I go to pull my shoe off the board, and it won't come off. Darn it, I'm thinking. My shoe is really stuck on this nail! So I tugged harder, but I just couldn't get the damn shoe to come loose. By this point, my dad's walked off a little bit, so I tell him to wait a minute, my shoe is stuck on something, and I have to take it off.

That's when I discover that I can't get my foot out of my shoe, either. Which is odd. Why would I not be able to get my foot out of the shoe?

Answer... because my foot was nailed to the shoe. And the board under it.

That's about when it started to hurt. Oops.

Now... I don't know that this is exactly true, because my mother, let us say... embellishes the truth, but she's told me that my father faints if he sees blood. I don't know about that, but when I told him my foot was nailed to the shoe and the board, and started crying, he did start looking a little pale. I now know that this is because he was worried about my well-being, but at the time, I had this terrified image in my head that he would faint, and I'd be nailed to a board, and I'd die of sepsis.

So, I yanked my foot off the board (don't do that by the way, it's bad for you). I felt like I had a moment of truth - in that split second, it was yank the foot off the nail or die while my father lay helpless and passed out, where he would be devoured by a passing bear, and it would be all my fault.

Fortunately, mom's tales of my father's wooziness were exaggerated (always take what divorced parents say about each other with a grain of salt), and he showed no signs of fainting. Thanks mom, you got me all worked up. He helped me get back to the house, and made appropriate comforting noises, peppered with a judicious amount of "now let's not act like this is the end of the world."

Now... the best part is that the puncture, which had gone deep enough through my foot to actually tent up the skin on top, closed up tight, so it looked like a little red dot with just a bit of blood. Of course, the damn thing had gone almost through my foot, and I felt it grate between the bones when I yanked it off (trust me, you do not want to experience that sensation - it squicks me just thinking about it, to this day). So, I now had this horrendously painful deep puncture, which looked like a spot on my foot. On top of everything else, I had callouses like a quarter of an inch thick at the time - I used to go barefoot everywhere. So this injury looked minor.

So... basically, my dad thought I was carrying on for nothing. In his defense, I was one of those kids who cried if a TV show got canceled, or someone looked at me funny, or if I noticed I was fat, or if I had to hang something up in a dark closet (dark meaning a closet with less than five 100-watt light bulbs). I was always crying and making a fuss over some damn thing when I was little, so I wouldn't have believed me either.

Let's just say that the incident was character-building. I hobbled around on a foot that felt like it had a railroad spike in it. And then, of course, being a kid, I discovered that being crippled by my terrible injury ate into time I could be playing "Lawn dart panic," with friends, so I basically just bit the bullet.

By the way... "Lawn Dart Panic," is where you throw a lawn dart (or three, or five, depending on how many kids you have, and how many hands they have left after playing cute childhood games) straight up into the air as hard as you can, and then try to run away before the lawn darts can skewer you in the brain, or some other vestigial organ. Keep in mind, I was a kid in the seventies, and lawn dart back then did not have safety in mind. They basically were a metal spike with a big weight on it, with vanes behind to help them fly better. If you through a 1970's lawn dart at someone, it would probably go through their whole body, possibly nailing them to a tree.

The moral of this story is that, speaking as a kid who cried and freaked out a lot, even though I didn't realize it at the time, most of it was just performance art. When there was no audience (or when having an audience was inconvenient) it's amazing how high one's pain threshold can go. Also... when I was in situations where I expected someone else to save me, I felt a lot more helpless and afraid than when I knew (or thought) I should be saving myself.

At the time, I honestly thought my dad would be unable to help me, so I pulled my own impaled foot off a nail. I didn't even make all that much fuss (by my standards at the time), and only made a fuss afterwards. If I hadn't known that he wasn't actually going to faint (Thanks Mom! Grrr!) I'd probably have carried on, and made him have to deal with it.