Ol' Bob Wahr

In an episode of my favorite online editorial cartoon, Chris Muir's Day by Day, the guys do some fence work at the ranch, and the wife of the younger is concerned his inexperience will result in him hurting himself at the hands of the treacherous barbed wire, and I couldn't help remembering and commenting about when that happened to me:


What did somebody say upthread, that Bob Wahr bites? Oh yes indeed he do.

The little pasture around our old Lake Okeechobee house, the same one that contained ol’ Wooly Booger the giant Brangus bull that was featured in an earlier post, featured a couple of rickety gates made of 2X8’s, that we ignernt daredevil yard apes liked to tightwalk on, not too easy as it would rock back and forth as you made your way across the 12 or so foot span…lose your balance and fall into Wooly’s space and you’d barely have time to get back over the fence or else just say your prayers.

So one Sunday when it was my turn I get almost to the end and start to lose it, Wooly watching intently from close by, and in an effort not to get stomped to death I tried to leap the last few feet to the little platform we had nailed to the end post. That didn’t work and I instead fell onto the 90 degree adjoining fence section, straddling that rusty ol’ bobwahr. I had on the typical boys tough levis so it didn’t do the damage that might be implied by that landing, instead it ripped my inner forearm flesh open like a ragged can opener, the blood starts spewing and I and my brothers and sisters start screaming.

Like I said it was Sunday, my hardworking Daddy’s one day off. The house was maybe a hundred and fifty feet away, and he was enjoying the Sunday paper while visiting the crapper when he hears the commotion, and as he later told me, he “cut one off in the middle”, pulled up his pants and ran outside, sure he was going to find one of his young’uns under Wooly's hoof. Instead he extricates me from the grips of ol’ Bob, throws me in the back of our ’65 Falcon wagon (two door, like a little Nomad!), and floors that little six banger the six or seven miles into town to Everglades Memorial’s ER. I lived, they sewed me up, but the ragged scar remains to this day, I’m looking at it right now.

 You’d think such an experience would lend a bit of judgment and reserve to a 12-year old wild child…but no, I did a whole lot of stupid shit after that…sometimes even still. Ain’t it a wonder that we survived?