Recipe for Disaster

A Brief Biography of the Author

"Board up the doors and windows! We're evacuating!" shouted John Rintoul. The immense hurricane, however, continued its course toward the Rintouls' small beach rental. By the time the Rintouls put the coastal plain in their dust, the hurricane had already dumped two inches of rain on Ocean Isle Beach. Fortunately, the family's impeccable luck held out once more, and they narrowly escaped danger.

This was something of a pattern with the Reckless Rintouls. As a family, they had dodged tornados in the midwest, earthquakes in Los Angeles, volcanoes near Hawaii, and several hurricanes right at home in North Carolina. The youngest son, Stephen, had personally escaped with his life from a series of potentially-fatal accidents.

As a third-grader, Stephen inserted a small, faceted green bead into his right ear in order to impress two girls in his third-grade class. This was, of course, an incredibly inane course of action, but it provides evidence for the theory that guys will do extremely stupid things if they think it might get them in the sack. Now, Stephen wasn't thinking along these lines at such an early age, but the biological mechanisms were obviously already in place. The bead was finally removed after a trip to the UNC Hospitals emergency room, but the result was painful.

Stephen managed to make it through middle school without any major episodes, but as soon as high school arrived, he stepped back onto the wild side. He began working in the theatre, which was an extremely dangerous prospect in itself. He cut himself several times, nearly electrocuted himself once or twice, and had exactly one major injury.

At a weekend work session just prior to Hanes Theatre's production of My Fair Lady, Stephen was instructed to cut some one-by-two. One-by-two is a size of lumber used commonly for wall framing, and it can't be purchased in lumber stores. Instead, it must be made by dividing a piece of one-by-four down the middle with a table saw. This is an extremely dangerous piece of equipment, and all techies must pass a three-week safety course before being allowed to work in the shop. Despite taking this course, however, Stephen managed to screw up. He set up his cut flawlessly. For a time, the rapidly spinning metal blade cut easily into the Southern Yellow Pine. Suddenly, though, Stephen felt an obstruction somewhere. He reached for the push stick (a wooden stick used to push lumber through the saw), because he was uneasy pushing much harder on the wood with his fingers so near to the sawblade. Instead of carefully placing the push stick correctly, Stephen made the mistake of just throwing it on there any which way. In a split second, several things happened.

First, the push stick came into contact with the blade, which was spinning at probably 200-300 miles per hour. Next, the stick got into a bind with the blade, which pushed it with considerable force (a phenomenon known as kickback) into Stephen's palm, which was instantly perforated. Shortly after that, the electrical impulse registering these events reached his brain and he let forth a small yelp and a measurable amount of blood. These events soon brought forth yet another emergency room visit, in which his wound was closed. Here, again, the Rintoul lucky scrape tradition paid off, because were the push stick to have struck a millimeter to the left, it would have taken major surgery to save the tendon that serves that most critical digit, the middle finger. Nevertheless, it was here that Stephen received his first major scar.

Then, only a few months ago, very near to the end of the eleventh grade, Stephen had another brush with disaster. While cruising downhill on his bicycle, he hit an unmarked speed bump, flying over the handlebars and hitting the pavement in a most damaging manner. He had a concussion, and the ambulance was promptly summoned by an onlooker. The ambulance drove him to his home away from home, the NC Memorial Hospital E.R. There, he was administered painkillers and subjected to treatment by the North Carolina's finest fleet of orthopedic surgeons. His injuries included a broken wrist and superficial, yet nasty-looking, abrasions on nearly every exposed surface of his body. Three days, one surgery, six dozen doctors, one seizure, three brain studies, and approximately one ton of hospital food later, Stephen emerged, tattered, from the automatic sliding doors at the front of the hospital. The bicycle, on the other hand, emerged from the ordeal without a scratch on her.

And so ends, for now, the saga of Stephen Rintoul's injuries. His numerous accidents and mishaps have helped to shape Stephen into the resilient, thrillseeking, and ironically cautious youth he is today. While he rarely puts much stock into warnings about doing this or that, he always does it in the most careful way possible, which is usually insufficient to prevent an injury. He is, in a way, a walking cautionary tale to the rest of us. He won't be for long, though, if he carries on in this fashion. Eventually he will become a wheelchair-rolling cautionary tale to the rest of us.