Measure of Endurance : The Unlikely Triumph of Steven Sharp

by Mishler, William

• ISBN13: 9780375411335
• ISBN10: 037541133X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

The remarkable, heartwarming story of a courageous teenage boy, who, after being gravely injured while using a farm machine, takes on its powerful manufacturer and wins. Steven Sharp was a hardworking, energetic sixteen-year-old growing up happily in a tiny farming community in eastern Oregon, in a remote high desert valley. His family was his harbor. Nothing pleased him more than the outdoor life, fending for himself in the nearby mountains. In the last hour of the last day of a summer job on a local ranch, his life was changed forever when a huge baler he was inspecting suddenly and mysteriously turned itself on and severed both his arms. Slipping in and out of consciousness, stumbling through a field, he followed a fence to a nearby house. Soon he was on an airplane, hoping time was still on his side. His recovery was amazing. Somehow he maintained his optimism and his zest for living. In the hospital, his desire to get on with his life inspired both his doctors and his fellow patients. He returned to school, joking to reassure his classmates on what could have been an awkward first day. His relaxed, down-to-earth manner put his family and neighbors at ease. Finally he was back in his beloved mountains, hunting and fishing, with the hospital's prosthetics and his own rigged-up rifle compensating for his missing arms. Although he was convinced that the machine that had injured him had malfunctioned, he had no intention of seeking redressfarm life had its risks and rewards. He wasn't going to dwell on the past or let his setback change his way of life. But by an amazing quirk of fatea friend's memory of a notice in a three-year-old magazinehe came to learn that others had been similarly injured while using the same kind of machine. Now, with the help of a brilliant and idealistic trial lawyer named Bill Manning, whose commitment to Steven seemed something of a completion to his own spiritual journey, Steven took on the multinational, multibillion-dollar company, withstood their counterattack, and emerged triumphant. A Measure of Endurance is a gripping, poignant, and truly unforgettable story.

Author Biography

William Mishler grew up on a small farm on the outskirts of Cleveland. In 2002 he retired from the University of Minnesota, where he taught Scandinavian languages, literature, film, and culture. He wrote extensively on these subjects for journals and anthologies. In 1989 he was the corecipient of the Richard Wilbur Award for the year’s best volume of translated poetry. His own poems appeared in <i>The Mudfish,</i> <i>Denver Quarterly,</i> and <i>Chicago Review.</i> He died in December 2002.

Excerpts

CHAPTER ONE

Steven sharp woke in the night to the percussion of hooves on the thin mountain soil. With only a folded blanket between his ear and the ground he could sense their approach before he could hear or see them. Elk. Then he felt the commotion of their heavy bodies pushing through the brush and the low branches a stone's throw from the clearing where he'd built his fire. The early June night was chilly and moonless. Unmoving, he lay in the dark, his lanky body folded in on itself inside the thin sleeping bag, inured through long habit to the pebbly bumpiness of the cold ground, reading the sounds of the herd's movement for the number and size of them. They were heading for the new grass in the lower meadow that bordered Hidden Lake, now passing close enough through the undergrowth for him to distinguish the guttural grunting and snorting of bull, cow, or calf. To be on the ground among large animals, potential prey, though with no thought of hunting them, brought him to an alertness indistinguishable from joy. All game commanded his attention, perhaps elk most of all, for to the hunters in the Pacific Northwest elk were a prestigious prize. What drew Steven, however, was not the allure of the animals as trophies so much as the force of the connection he had established with them half his young life ago. His father, R. E., had first brought him up into these mountains in the fall of 1981, when Steven had turned seven and was first capable of sitting a mule. Since then Steven had never missed a hunting season, which began early in October. Usually the weather could be counted on to be decent-cold, but still free of snow.

On that first trip, however, which had begun in bright sun while he and his father spent half a day packing in on muleback, snow surprised them. It fell in the night, starting sometime after midnight and silently blanketing the world. At dawn father and son had emerged from their tent to find the pine branches loaded and the meadow below covered in nearly a foot of snow. The air had a sharp, ozone edge to it, frosting the inside of their nostrils. Scanning the apron of the meadow, R. E. found fresh elk tracks. Hurriedly he pulled on his high boots and heavy jacket, then bundled Steven in an extra flannel jacket and a hunting cap with earflaps. The two of them set out after the tracks, wading in the snow toward the lake. The trail led around the rim up into Box Canyon, and was so fresh R. E. couldn't resist heading over to see whether he could catch a glimpse of the elk on the canyon trail.

Assuring Steven he'd be gone no more than ten minutes, R. E. posted the four-and-a-half-foot boy as lookout in a level expanse of snow that flowed seamlessly over the meadow and across the lake, telling him to stand there and to shout if he saw something. With that, R. E. was on his way, stepping storklike through the drifted snow, rifle slung on his back. For some moments Steven watched as his father disappeared while silence settled around him like a transparent bell. In the stillness he became aware of the sound of his breathing. Whenever he moved the cold clustered around him like invisible bees. The light off the snow flooded his eyes. His boots creaked on the new snow with a squeaky sound. Minutes passed. And then without warning, turning again, he found himself staring at a five-point buck at no more than twenty paces, poised atop a slight knoll, as if it had bloomed there or as if the air had opened and it had stepped through, coming into view so quietly and matter-of-factly that its presence seemed both totally expected and yet as strange as if a mountain had taken a step closer to him. The buck was huge, particularly seen from the boy's lower vantage. Vapor puffed from its nostrils. The animal dropped its wonderfully encumbered head and snorted. Sober curiosity and wild excitement warred within Steven while he and the buck stood measuring each other. Finally Steven shouted for his father. Again the bull lowered its heavy head with a clearing sound in its throat. Again Steven called, his cry echoing clearly off the canyon walls. This time, faintly, his father answered.

At a leisurely pace the buck advanced in Steven's direction. The boy watched it come with eyes that ranged as eagerly as hands over the long shaggy body, from the massive antlers to the heavy knobs of its forelegs to the ragged and uneven coat that hung in ropy tatters off its belly. The long hair on its back inner thighs was matted with urine and excrement. As it drew nearer, the boy caught a whiff of the animal's rank musk. Steven stood utterly still, heart racing, scarcely breathing. Moving past, the buck gave him a glance with a swing of its heavy head, then kept on toward the woods, grunting softly, its forelegs articulating stiffly, a forlorn dignity in its stiff, measured gait.

Then it was gone.

And now Steven's father was crossing the snow toward him, running.

R. E. gave a whistle when he saw from the tracks how close the buck had come to his son. He clapped Steven repeatedly, as if to congratulate him for somehow having conjured the animal into appearance.

Then he took the boy's hand and they followed the tracks back into the trees, but the elk was not to be found. "That's OK," R. E. said, meaning it sincerely, "that's OK," from which Steven understood-not in so many words but nevertheless clearly-that what counted most for his dad in the matter of hunting was not necessarily getting the animal lined up in his scope but the encounter.

Since that first trip Steven had been coming back regularly with his father or grandfather or brother, and then later, during his teen years, as often as not, alone. Hunting with a buddy was fun, but it could be distracting from what he was gradually discovering to be his real purpose for coming into the wilderness-namely, to push himself, to test his capabilities, to use every part of himself. Hanging out with buddies could be done anywhere, and never offered the kind of satisfactions available only in these pristine surroundings. There was risk, of course, in camping alone in the mountains. One slip could, and occasionally did, send him sliding down a sheer rock face or tumbling among boulders, but that was a price he was more than willing to pay.

More than once, while bandaging Steven or applying a splint, his mother, a trained nurse, would try to get him to agree always to take a buddy with him. "Stevie, you could die up there, and we wouldn't know for days."

"Right," he would say ambiguously, hoping she wouldn't try to pin him down.

But if she did and he was forced to declare himself, he'd tell her that, sure, of course he'd try to be more careful. He wasn't interested in hurting himself. "On the other hand, Mom, once a guy's taken reasonable precautions he might as well do what he feels like. Otherwise, he'd spend his life being scared and that's hardly living at all."

now, in the June night, Steven felt the herd moving down into the same pasture where he had been left standing that snowy October morning ten years before, the sound of their passage dying away, skittering and scurrying noises returning in the dark. In moments he was asleep.

At dawn, which came prior to the sun as a spill of light from the higher snow peaks, he rolled out of his sleeping bag, stowed it near a fallen tree, and pulled on his bill cap. Around him the trees swayed like silvery ghosts in the drifting ground fog. His breath smoked. He drew the charred remnants of last night's fire together, banked them with twigs, then held a match to them. Once the flame caught, he headed with a steel pot to the meltwater creek that fed Hidden Lake. The icy dew drenching the silver grass stung his bare feet like fire. Balancing on a rock in the middle of the stream, he snagged some water with his coffeepot. He squatted close to the flame until the coffee came to a boil.

From his pack he took his rod and reel and assembled them, his hands going easily through the routine motions, then he set out through the meadow between him and the oval of Hidden Lake. He moved in slow zigzags, scarring the dew, scraping with his toe at any likely brown or green speck, for it was too early in the day for the grasshoppers to be stirring on their own. At every telltale twitch or flicker he sprang and stomped. By the time he reached the lake, some hundred yards, he had a pocketful of the trampled insects. Rounding the east shore, he came in a matter of minutes to a point that had been his grandfather's favorite fishing spot, and then his father's as well. In Eagle Valley below, and even in neighboring Pine Valley, beyond the mountain twelve miles distant, you could for brevity's sake refer to the Sharp's point at Hidden Lake and most people would nod.

Steven dropped his fly not far from a ripple and began to reel it in. A blue heron stood on the other side of the water, smudged by mist. The first fish to strike was a bluegill. Then a sunny. For upwards of an hour he continued to cast and pull fish from the lake, releasing most of them, the wet line singing by his ear with a thin whistle. Casting a line was as exhilarating to him as pitching a baseball, feeling the flow of energy in his arms and in the roll of his shoulder as he canted back from his waist in order to pinpoint his target; he also loved the subtle draw of the line through the water when his fingers and wrist and forearm were functioning like an antenna tuned to the slightest strike.

The sun moved above the rim of the mountains and filled the upland valley with light. Steven felt its soft heat on his shoulders as he continued to flex and whip his fly rod. Now he was hungry. He secured his hook and locked his reel. He chose a trout from his stringer, and with his folding knife gutted and filleted it. Grasshoppers were starting to sing in the grass and sail waist high through the air as he headed back through the meadow to his clearing. He noted the droppings and trampled grass where the elk had trekked the night before. There was birdsong and a distant woodpecker. The day was heating up. As the sun climbed the canyon it swept shadows from the granite walls and kindled the surrounding peaks, the light immense and yet insistently tuned to particulars, stopping him in his tracks and inviting him to look around. He never tired of resting his eyes on these mountains; at moments like these it was as if the light came from them.

Years later, when he was required to spend several months in the Midwest, he discovered he sorely missed the mountains. He told R. E. that driving between Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, he would look around but find nothing to see, really, by which he meant nothing to raise his eyes up to. So he hung on fiercely to the memory of these Eagle Caps, and they served him as a kind of shelter for the sweetness of things as they used to be, before they became radically otherwise. He had no way of knowing, that June morning in the upland meadow, at the beginning of his seventeenth summer and with a feeling of leisure as rich as the unplanned day stretching before him, that he was about to become engaged in a chain of events that in a few short months would lead him up to a very narrow gate in his life. How could he know it, since he'd glimpsed it only in nightmares that were full of warnings but empty of particulars? On the other side of that narrow gate everything would change for him and for his family, and for some in his community. And eventually, the ripples from his ordeal would move outward and come to touch other lives in other places, years later and thousands of miles away.

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CHAPTER TWO

Eagle valley forms a pocket-geologically, a volcanic trough-in the Eagle Cap Mountains, themselves part of the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon. Ten miles as the crow flies west of the Idaho border, the sparsely populated valley is nearly landlocked. Eighty miles separate it from Baker City (population 9,880), the county seat and nearest city of any size, and twelve miles, over a mountain, separate it from the city of Halfway in neighboring Pine Valley, where the nearest supermarket, Laundromat, drugstore, video rental, Catholic church, lawyer's office, high school, and library are to be found. Highway 86, a two-lane strip of asphalt, connects these three points. After leaving Baker City it runs northeast for a dozen miles through fields and farmland, then begins a winding ascent through mountains and desert, eventually to arrive at Richland (population 175) in Eagle Valley, where its name changes from 86 to Main Street. Roughly a mile farther on, it exits at the eastern end of town and becomes 86 again. You can stand at either end of the town and stare straight through to immensity, for it is surrounded by miles of plain-first of cropland and pasture, and then, where the irrigation ceases, of rolling hills that flow into a desert landscape of stark beauty-of rock and sand, juniper, sage, cactus, and tumbleweed. Circumscribed by the surrounding peaks, the desert sky nevertheless seems wider than the land it overarches, perhaps because it appears to be without upward limit. In any direction, dawn to dusk, you see predatory birds-hawks and buzzards and, of course, the eagles that gave the valley its name-slowly circling, drifting so high above the plain they look like specks of floating ash.

The valley, twelve square miles in area and a pear-shaped oval in form, is enclosed on three sides by the Eagle Cap Mountains and bounded on the south by the Powder River. Thanks to its south-facing orientation and a lower elevation, Eagle Valley has a milder climate and a longer growing season than the neighboring valleys. Its bottomland, carried inland millions of years ago from the floor of the Pacific Ocean by the shifting of the earth's plates, is rich and fertile. Irrigation, a necessity in this arid climate, is provided by the mountain runoff into a network of creeks, chief among them Eagle Creek, which distributes the water through a tightly regulated grid of ditches and sprinklers. Most of the roads in the valley are narrow and unpaved.

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Excerpted from A Measure of Endurance: The Unlikely Triumph of Steven Sharp by William Mishler
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