A Drill in the Head

I met a guy up in Alaska who told one of my favorite self-injury stories. It seems he was working atop a ladder with a power drill, and he lost his balance and fell, knocking himself unconscious. When he awoke, he tried to sit up, but felt something tugging on his head. The bit if the drill had punctured his skull, two inches up and forward of his ear. He tried to pull the drill out, but it was stuck. So he put the drill in reverse and backed it out. Then he stuck a finger in the hole and drove to the hospital in Fairbanks. He walked into the emergency room with a finger to his temple.

The nurse asked, "Is this an emergency?"

I would think that doing a Hans Brinker to keep your brains in your head qualifies as an emergency.

My favorite part of the tale is when he has to put the drill in reverse to pull it out. Does that really seem like a good idea?

I take this story with a grain of salt: Alaskans are notorious weavers of tall tales. When I visited the lower 48, folks would always ask how much snow we had. Delta Junction is quite dry, so we only get about three feet of snow in the winter. They were so disappointed by this response that I bumped it to 30 feet, which is more typical for the southern parts, like Valdez. Just for fun, I went up to 300 feet, which is crazy talk, but folks just said, "Wow." Naturally, 3,000 feet was next on the menu. Again, the response was mostly, "Wow," but you could see the wheels spinning in their heads, trying to figure if this was BS. If they seemed skeptical, I'd say, "Well, that doesn't all fall in one year. It piles up over centuries, since lots of it never melts. And actually this is pretty much true -- glaciers can get over seven thousand feet thick. Even when I raised the ante to 30,000 feet, the initial response was always just a gullible, "Wow." Then I'd tell them, "Yeah, and that's especially impressive when you consider than Mount Everest is only 29,000."

Alaskans lead interesting lives, to be sure, but those long winters make for some improvements in the retelling.

Filed Tue - May 3, 2005, 03:44 PM in

Return to: |  



.