Where Our Choices Lead

It's been a long, bizarre weekend and I'm stuck in my head a bit.  Saturday began with a day filled with yard and house work.  Tracy, Betty and I got a lot done and were feeling good about the day.  New trees in the backyard, house cleaned, yard mowed, dinner ready for overnight guests.  Life is good.  It seemed like it was destined to be a regular Saturday.

The plan was for my brother Kerry, Joe, Cat and Amy to come over and we'd play "tourist" in Oregon City.  Joe is a recently returned native and we thought it would be funny to have some cocktails, engage in some tourist activities, and have a dinner party.  It was a silly excuse to get together more than anything else.

Well, here's where the series of choices comes into play.  Tracy and I debated keeping Shea at the house and taking her on the tour with us.  In the end, we decided we needed a date night and took her to grandma's house.  When Kerry and the others arrived, we drove down to the Highland Stillhouse bar, parked and prepared to wait for the open air trolley that would take us around town.  We waited for more than fifteen minutes but the trolley never came.  Tammy, the owner of the Stillhouse, explained to us that she hadn't seen the trolley in a while and that it might have stopped service for the summer.

Hmm, what to do, what to do.  Well, there's a walking path between the elevator and the Stillhouse, so we decided we would hoof it down to the elevator
or and at least get to do that portion of our trip.  There's also a lower pedestrian walkway that takes you down to the bottom of the cliff first and then around to the elevator.  We had a choice.  We chose the lower route.

When we got to the bottom of the hill, just past the tunnel, we had to enter a small covered walkway to come out on to the street.  The women were in front of us guys and they stopped short of the tunnel. 

"There's someone in the tunnel," Cat said. 

"Okay," I said.  Joe and I stepped forward to walk into the tunnel in front of the girls.  There was a man lying on the ground in the tunnel with an arm bent over his face.  He was shirtless and shoeless.  He looked like a transient who was taking a nap.  As Joe and I skimmed past the "sleeping" man and moved on down to the end of the tunnel, it dawned on me that I didn't see him breathing.  I had noticed a gigantic raspberry on his back like he'd fallen and scraped himself, which reinforced the "drunken transient" snap judgment.

When our entire party was at the foot of the tunnel and standing in the sun, Cat said, "That guy's dead."

"Did you see the trail of blood coming from his head?" Joe asked.

"He was bleeding out his ears," Tracy said. 

I hadn't noticed any of this.  "Someone needs to call 911."

I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and dialed the emergency number.  The operator drilled me with questions.  She asked me how I "knew" the man was dead.  I told her we couldn't see her breathing.  She asked me if I had a problem giving CPR.  I told her he was dead.  She asked if I could tell her how I knew.  I told her the flies were a giveaway.  She pushed and pushed me with questions until I finally touched the man with the toe of my shoe. 

Tracy was at the base of the tunnel yelling for me to get out of there.  She didn't want me to touch him, she worried that if he was alive he would jump up and grab me, or get blood on me.  At that moment I heard the sirens in the distance and left the tunnel.  The paramedics arrived in that moment and took over.  Kerry, Joe, and I waited around for the cops to arrive so we could give our statements, but we sent the girls a couple of blocks over to wait it out at the wine bar. 

As we discussed the events later that night, we felt like we were meant to find the man.  There were too many decisions that could have gone another way.  There was too much variability to the situation.  An oddly fated situation.  Our evening carried on as lives do, even in the face of death, but the conversation throughout the evening returned and returned to these moments, those choices, and how the man appeared to be our age, maybe a bit older. 

As morbid and disturbing as the situation was, it feels good to be reminded of my own mortality.