Slipping?

So I had this idea to make the stairs into the basement open on one side because, um, architecture is cool.  Building Inspector Ken put the kibosh on such coolness because, um, building code.  Or some such thing.  So I went with a dazzlingly beautiful hand-crafted handrail instead. 

Drive to up to somewhere near Green Bay for the best birdseye maple in the state, spend three hours sorting through the plie, crank up the table saw and sander and do the whole obsessive-compulsive wood-nerd show over the course of a couple days.  Keep all the fingers intact in the process.  Honestly, it’s stunning.  And safe. 

Thanks, Ken.

Arrive on scene to a cool open staircase into a basement.  Gravity, it turns out, is not impressed with cool.  Person at the bottom is banged up, bleeding and with a leg more than a little katywampus.  Our job is to get him out of the basement and into the ambulance. 

Guessing he is not in the mood to hear the story of my beautiful handrail, so me and the crew get to work.  Strap him onto a backboard, figure out the widest staircase available because that perpendicular leg is gonna be a problem in transit, and off we go.  James and me at the bottom.  James being just one year to go to the best age number song (19) ever.  Me some distance from that number.

Up some slightly wider but still narrow stairs we go.  Forget who is on top.  Gain focus on the stairway being too narrow to have James on one side and me on the other, so the (you can see this coming) “I got it” semi-command to James to let me have all the load going up the stairs. 

Gravity, being the jokester that it is, makes the brunt of the load of the guy and the backboard my load as we go up the stairs.  Which is less than optimal to start with, but then add in the guy slipping downward has put his one good leg between my two legs so now I’m moving two people up a narrow staircase with the guy’s good leg impeding my steps and the guy’s leg that needs a hospital ever so close to what would be a REALLY painful crash into the side wall. 

OK, so that’s going great for five or six steps and then one of the steps that has a non-slip tread grip thing loses the grip thing as I step on it and oh boy this guy is about to go on a second trip down the stairs in one night and I’m going to be the soft, squishy bumper to the force equals mass times acceleration five hundred pound flume-ride backboard.  Really should have worn my helmet to this one.  And my cup.

I attribute every physical disaster I have ever narrowly averted to motocross muscle memory.  Mostly because I crashed so much that every conceivable way my body could be contorted and smashed has already happened.

Make gravity and coefficient of friction my friend set the backboard down while hoping back a step to get his leg from between mine, my feet on a tread with good grip and lean into the backboard dagger pushing down.  The deftness of the move is too swift for some to process and they ask if something is wrong.  Kicking the slipped grip tread down the stairs, “Nope, I’m good” comes the standard reply.

And I was strike that we were good.  Got the guy up the stairs without bashing the wayward leg into anything and down the icy driveway and off to his ride to the hospital.

Nineteen, goes the song, is not the age of reason.  But it is (does math) at least a couple decades removed from the wear and tear of these mountain legs with car crash feet.  Should I have let James take the bottom of the backboard up the stairs? 

I dunno.

Guess I’m going to have to ask him about motocross next time I see him.