I can finally tell the tale. They say dead men tell no tales and that day I was alive and dead at the same time; being alive won. I was ejected from a high-speed automobile accident with hardly a scratch. The event has haunted me most of my life. This is the first time I tell the entire story.

If you are looking for a tale of epic tragedy where if only the main characters recognized their folly, and like Scrooge recanted and changed their ways, this is not it. My brother and I did what we always did, what everybody in the community always did, and we continued those practices long after the accident. People in distant farming communities accept that their lives are always at risk and that you are so far away from medical aid that any mistake may result in THE accident. My brother and I put that philosophy to the test.

On a sunny morning in late August, I was 17 years old and my brother, Chris, a 14 year old kid. It was 9am and we were already late. The sun had been up for a few hours and it was the big push on our farm to plant the fields with wheat before the planting window closed, and more importantly before Dad lost his two child-labor sons when school started. My football practice had already stolen 2 hours of time from work. Dad’s instructions were to not delay in getting out to the farm where he was already riding
the tractor.

We grabbed lunches as Mom handed us a jug of ice-cold tea and we jumped into the Ford F350 service truck. It was definitely a “Plain Jane” truck with its faded orange paint, jacked up tires for clearance in the dusty fields, and a long bench seat interrupted in the middle by a stick shift. It had no interior carpet and “2-60 Air Conditioning” (2 windows rolled down and 60 miles per hour). The pickup bed had a full 250 gallon fuel tank for refilling equipment in the field, a wide double-door steel tool carrier spanning the width of the bed, and a large array of tools and parts in several WWII 50-caliber large ammo cases that rattled and bumped as you went down the road.

I usually drove out to the farm, but exhausted from endless football drills, Chris drove instead. You would be wrong to surmise that the critical mistake in this tale of impending carnage was letting a child drive. We both learned to drive at an early age (me at age 11) and Chris was just as skilled as any adult. And like test pilots starting out on a routine flight in a trusted plane, we left our base with confidence and an expectation of the unexpected. We headed North for our usual proving grounds, 30 miles North into the wide open Great Plains. Just outside of town, Chris punched the accelerator and the truck’s engine growled as we lurched down a pot-hole littered blacktop. About 3 miles outside of town, the pot holes increased until they dominated the road, and then thankfully gave way to a smooth gravel road. I drifted asleep, not unlike other times, to the radio blaring 80s rock music and a cool breeze from the window mixing with the warm sun on my face.

Much of North Eastern Colorado farm country consists of gravel roads and no signs. Yes, there are mailboxes with maybe the name of a farm family, but no stop signs, speed signs or sharp curve warnings. No distance signs because if you do not know how far things are, maybe you should not be out there. The roads themselves didn’t have names of any kind until they were mapped in 1987, many of which having existed for over 100 years with no identification. Gravel roads crisscross at 1 mile intervals, marking where surveyors once mapped the land when “The Frontier” closed in the late 1890s. Not a single form of regulation really exists out there, including the sight of a single local or state police officer; once a local patrolman was driving about 10 miles north of town and people wondered if he was lost! Like anybody else living there, my brother and I navigated by knowing the dips, turns, and landmarks of the area.

Although I was half-asleep in the passenger seat of the service truck, I knew where we were. You drive the roads in the area so much that you know your location by the sharpness of a turn, the number of hills you crested or a certain dip in the road. We had just passed the crossroads near the old farmhouse where we once lived. Now abandoned, it only had electricity for the service buildings and a functional telephone in the house. The business-band shortwave radio mounted below the dash squawked with communications between farm neighbors (cell phones would not exist for another 20 years). Two sharp turns meant we were at the “correction line” that connected the same road, 1 mile apart, where two counties met; the engineers of each county must have been stubborn on who would move the road to meet the other. Past the correction, Chris increased speed for the last 7 miles to Dad’s location in
the field.

The Northeast quarter of Colorado is fairly remote. Once you turn off of Interstate 70 at the towns of Genoa, Bovina or Arriba, you go off the known map: Terra Incognito. The further you drive north, the distances between towns and farms grow, and the faster people drive. It was easy to drive for miles without seeing a single person, sometimes spotting the far-off dust trail of another car. And with the average family farm being several thousand acres, you might pass several miles of tilled fields or pasture without passing an inhabited house. Our family farm was 23 miles North of Arriba, then a community of about 1,000 people. Everybody drove fast. On gravel roads that screamed, “Drive 35mph!”, many people drove 60mph or more. My Dad, brother, and I often drove 70mph. Everybody drove fast. And for some unknown, unsaid reason, most people didn’t wear seat belts.

The gravel roads are tricky. Without gravel, rain and the powdery dust from use make them muddy, slippery, and easy to lose control or become stuck up to the axles when it rains. The county road maintenance crews only put gravel on them once every year (or two), so a lot of gravel is used. With driving, the gravel accumulates in the middle or each edge of a road, making it hazardous to drive on any part of the deep gravel mounds. To be safest, everybody drives in the middle of a road until they come to a hill and then they negotiate to their side of the road. You never know what is on the other side of a hill – cattle escaped from their pastures, a dozen wild antelope or another vehicle that is still in the center of the road. The ultimate boogeyman was topping a hill to find a combine crop harvester or tractor pulling wide machinery and set firmly in the middle of the road. IF, that is IF, you can react before hitting anything, the only escape route is off the road. But going off the road often means into ditches that are as wide and deep as your vehicle, with an adjacent barbed wire fence. Like a test pilot in a plane gone wrong, there really isn’t an “out” in the form of a parachute, just a prayer you would control the crash landing of your craft and survive in one piece.

As my brother ascended a blind hill at about 70mph, he steered the pickup over to the right side of the road. The right front tire of the truck caught the deep gravel along the side of the road that crusts from multiple rains over time and is deeply rutted with washboard-like erosion channels. I sat up with a start when the truck jerked and began to shudder as he over corrected, sending the hurdling mass of steel, fuel, and human cargo arcing into the middle of the road. With a lurch, the truck’s front tires plowed into the deep gravel ridge in the middle of the road; the truck spun sideways, now seeming to float. I exclaimed, “Oh God, here we go!!” when the truck’s back became its front as it spun around and careened toward a deep ditch. It all happened quickly; so quickly that time itself seemed to freeze.

I learned in that split second of physics, momentum, and cataclysm how beautiful it was to float in the air. As the pickup catapulted end-for-end, all of the objects in the cabin floated in the air, suspended in place. I was floating in the air, too! Like an astronaut training in zero gravity as the trainer airplane radically crests and falls into a dive of temporary weightlessness, I floated in weightlessness. There was absolutely no sound, only infinite quiet in a frozen moment of eternity. And when the pickup began to roll into the ditch, I effortlessly floated through the passenger window. It was so easy! I used my hands to help push through the open passenger window with the gentlest of nudges, landing first with my right shoulder onto the pillow-soft grass that now filled my entire field of vision. And then. . .nothing. No “fade to black” like the movies, no watching the pickup sail by like in the movies, and still no sound. My awareness simply stopped.

On a sunny morning on August I started a normal day and I woke up staring into the engine compartment of a Ford F350 that came to rest on top of me. I just lay there, absorbing what on earth I was looking at. No pain, no feeling, and no sound. Finally realizing the service truck was the abstract art over my head, I decided it was time to get up as if it were time to get ready for school. But I was stuck. Something was against my right hip but not on it; the right front wheel of the truck. With a wiggle and a few grunts, I crawled out from under the hulk of the truck. Resting on its wheels, the pickup’s bed and frame were bowed in the middle to the ground with no gap underneath. It was resting in a wide and deep ditch across the road from our original direction, and facing the opposite way from where we had been traveling. The once thick and deep grass was completely flat and matted. Just past the wheel I had negotiated around was the huge double-door tool carrier, upright, as if it had been removed by hand and placed there; later I would find that it weighed approximately 200 lbs. About 2 feet away on the other side of my legs was the full 250 gallon fuel tank, undamaged and with its fuel pump and gas pump nozzle in place. Unseen workman had removed it, too, and gently placed it upright. I must have been unconscious for some time as any dust from the accident had settled and the day was once again clear and bright, with the sky a brilliant blue. My brother was missing.

Looking into the cabin of our demolished craft, my brother was gone. I limped around the hulk looking for his body or even him trapped under the truck, but nothing. Calling his name slowly, repeatedly, and increasingly more urgently, noises began to come from the pickup bed. He had been thrown through of the truck’s back window. Chris and the unbroken back window were the only items left in the bed. But he was OK. He. . .was. . .O-K.

The driver-side door groaned as I argued with it to open. A jerk on the door and it opened with a lurch and moan. By instinct I found the two-way radio handset, its long, curled cord wrapped around the
stick shift.

Depressing the mic button, I said, “WRQ-294. . .mobile. . .2, to base. Come in”. Static.

And again, “WRQ-294 base”.

“This is base”, came a small and distant static reply over the speaker from my mother.

I replied, “Mom, get a hold of Dad. We had an accident north of The Mason Place. We are OK, but the truck is totaled.”

Dad and Mom heard the transmission and knew something was already wrong by the sound of my voice. Dad’s voice replaced Mom’s on the speaker, “Hold tight, I’m coming”.

Chris had climbed out of the pickup bed and stood next to me while I sent the distress call. We stared at each other in silence. The ever present, gentle breeze, wrapped itself between and around us. Almost noon, the sun was bright and hot on a cloudless day. Did I just transmit or was it an hour ago? We felt the need to find another person, anybody, to know that we were not alone. If we were bleeding internally and going to just fall down and die, we needed to find somebody for comfort. Standing in the middle of the empty road in the center of desolate farm country, I started to walk. How far could we be from The Mason Place? Though abandoned, the house phone has to work. My left elbow began to sting, becoming more insistent at having been ignored. When I raised it for Chris to look at it, he winced. Chris and I were both fighting shock and starting to walk, trying to somehow get ourselves out of the mess.

Out of the deep silence, the sound of a vehicle emerged, engine straining. Dad in his farm pickup roared over the hill, slamming on the brakes and bringing the blue pickup to a skidding stop when he was almost on top of the wreck and us. He didn’t see anything until he had crested a small hill at the site. The ditch almost hid our wreckage. Flying out of the truck, Dad hugged us, tears running down his face, and we stood a few moments in silence. He then took us 4 miles north to the closest neighbor.

After a brief rest and telephone calls to Hugo County Hospital 40 miles to the South, Dad drove us to the emergency room of the hospital. My brother had multiple broken ribs and bruises up and down his body from the steering wheel. The wheel left a perfectly circular bruise on his chest. When I landed on the grass, the skin of my left elbow split to reveal white cartilage; only 4 stitches. Only 4 stitches. We were taken home and slept for 2 days.

The official Colorado State Patrol report stated that hazardous road conditions caused the accident. The service truck flipped end-for-end and rolled over a 100ft distance to come to rest upright in a 6ft deep ditch. It was a total loss. The battery was split in half, making it unlikely that any electricity was available for radio communication. My glasses were found underneath the engine compartment of the truck. The grease stain on the back of my shirt was from a grease dispenser found underneath the truck as well. It took 3 men to remove the tool carrier and fuel tank. Debris covered over a 40,000sqft area, including several large WWII ammo cases partially embedded in the tilled soil of a nearby field. No investigation or penalties for a minor driving.

The closest neighbor we visited knew about the crash and its ragged survivors before Dad had even arrived in their yard; they knew they were the closest farm. Everybody for a 50 mile radius with a business band radio or police scanner had heard the transmissions. They knew that the Silsbee boys – plural – were being taken to an emergency room.

Everybody was well aware that being rushed to Hugo Hospital after an accident was grim. So many times the same story had ended tragically. The Ostoff girl and her friend missed a curve and were rescued from the overturned car, the Russel boy went off the snow-covered Bethel Church bridge and was rescued from an overturned car packed with snow where a passenger froze to death in the night, the harvest crew girl flipped her pickup and was DOA, the 4 kids in a high-speed collision where 3 were killed (one ejected) and the fourth passenger spent a month in the hospital, and on and on. Later that day and after hours of no more radio chatter, there was only one conclusion: THE SILSBEE BOYS WERE DEAD! The news quickly spread across a 50 mile area and 3 towns.

My brother and I encountered puzzled looks from friends and community members for weeks. Some sent sympathy cards to the house for our loss. Their faces held surprise, disbelief, and then cautious gladness. So few survive those accidents. People then, and since, have called it nothing short of a miracle. We survived without hardly a mark! Or had we?

I have been haunted by the accident for over 30 years. My brother and I rarely speak of it, and only then in hushed and truncated comments for only a minute or two. We are not silent out of guilt or blame or anything else for what happened; it’s a reluctance to speak about the unspeakable. When I talk about the accident, I have a sense of foreboding and a feeling that I need to look over my shoulder for something unseen, maybe terrible, and beyond comprehension. Perhaps locked deep within our memories are lost visions and the sounds of an immense impact that even today might be an overload for the senses; something just too big to fully understand, too horrible to fully grasp.

When many people have survived close calls with tragedy or death, they are joyful, grateful, maybe even high-fiving people at the accident site where they survived. I think that my brother and I know we should not have survived that day. We should have joined the lamented stories of the tragic dead, told as boogey man stories to kids to make them behave.

Saying even now, “I should have not survived”, I all too well understand the odds against us that day. A recent statistic cited that only about 4% of those ejected from a vehicle during a high-speed crash survive. I could have been ejected through the windshield, rolled by the truck, crushed by the engine, had the passenger tire embedded in my chest, crushed by the tool carrier, crushed by the fuel tank or (my gallows humor favorite) bled to death when I hit the nearby barbed-wire fence. But none of that happened. My brother faced similar odds. TWO people were part of the 4% survival rate in the same crash? But we survived. . .and it changed us.

Whatever happened all those years ago, it can’t be changed or fully understood today. I know on most days when I hear people say things are crappy I know otherwise because I have survived worse. There are times when the impossible does happen. I believe that having been spared was somehow a cautionary tale to value life and pass it on. I may have been spared for a purpose: To give some of the gift back. It might be why I try to help people as part of who I am. I have a HUGE debt to pay and I work every day to pay at least a small part of it back. The accident and my response to it have made me a better person. I hope I always pass along that deep. . .reverence. . .for life and doing something with it that has meaning.

~ Mason