Until today, I have always worn my legs hairy by principle, despite the coarse, dark pelt that always made me feel more primate than pretty, more grotesque than desirable. But this morning, twelve years after my girl friends began shaving their legs, I was drawn to the curved brown razor my housemate left in the shower. Without thought, I picked it up and ran it up my leg, ankle to knee. Again. And again, until both legs were as smooth as morning.  I wanted to know how it would feel to have my sarong sweep across slick skin. I wanted an excuse to slow down, to linger under the pressure of hot water. And I wanted to see my calves unobscured by hair. To see my muscles and my scars.  To remember, with my fingertips, all that they have been through.

***

Four days out of college, I entered the redbrick canyon of Main Street, Bozeman and came home to a dream I had held since I first placed Montana’s profile-shaped piece into my wooden puzzle of the United States. As if a different version of myself had preceded me, I slipped into a life there. I got a job at the food co-op, rented a room in a log cabin five miles out of town, and spent my afternoons picking armloads of sunflowers and lupine. Everything was exactly as I had dreamed it would be.

Mornings were cold then, and I usually drove the five miles to work, savoring a gritty cup of coffee and the warmth of my truck. But that high-June day was different-I had an evening shift, for once, and didn’t need to head to work until the sun had warmed up the valley. The air hinted at summer, and I wore a sundress in celebration of it. A blue-plaid, knee-length dress that I had bought for an Urban Hillbilly party several years before. I was giddy and alive with all my pale, bare skin finally touching the world. I decided to let it touch the world at the rate of twelve miles per hour on a bike ride to town. To spend a few hours wandering around in it before work, stocky legs and all.

My first stop in town was the mountaineering store. There, I bought a topographical map of the Bridger Range and the Rocky Mountain Guide to Wildflowers and zipped them into my backpack, anxious for the intimacy with the mountains they would allow. I was positively glowing until my bike fell against my leg and pierced the skin above my left ankle, leaving a bloody puncture wound. It was the first prick in the fabric of a perfect day.

After a brief bout of cursing and tending to my small cut, I contemplated buying a new rear bike light to replace the one that had fallen off my pack and gotten smashed by a car the day before. Eh, forget it, I decided. It would still be light when I got out of work at 10 pm, and sitting in the sun with a cup of coffee sounded like a much better use of my time. I spent the next hour at the coffeehouse writing a letter to a friend. Telling her how terribly dreamy my new life was.

After work that night, a cashier from the co-op and I chatted for a while before hopping on our bikes and heading up Babcock Avenue. I wanted those six blocks with him to last all night. Ren was cute, made my stomach drop when he walked by the deli counter as I sliced organic roast beef, and was the reason I had allowed dusk to descend before heading home. I thought about asking him out for a beer, but held back, thinking, He’s too cute for you, Bex. He wants nothing to do with those hairy tree-stump legs and shaved head. Besides, it’s almost dark.  So we parted ways on Bridger Canyon Road, my road home, without so much as an awkward hug.

For the first few blocks north, I chastised myself for not inviting Ren out for a drink. I wanted to believe my insecurities were stupid, and the quaintness of the country highway I lived up suddenly made my fear of darkness seem unwarranted. But self-deprecation soon gave way to the awe that had defined my thirty Montana days as I looked west towards the Tobacco Root Mountains, the popsicle-blue sky hanging just above it, and the valley that lay between us all.

I was ebullient, riding the brilliance of my freedom, the possibility of the unknown, and the pure joy of being a twenty-two-year-old on a purple bicycle in the middle of a Montana June, with just one mile to go.

***

I was confused when the car hit me from behind. I had been riding so smoothly, so effortlessly, that I had no reference point for the washing-machine-like feeling I was now experiencing. For minutes, it felt, I was a part of the spin cycle. Time slowed until I was certain that this was the only reality I had ever known. I thought in full sentences to myself, bemused. This is weird. What is happening? Oohhhh, I am being hit by a car. Hmmm. And there was nothing I could do about it.

The car riding my rear wheel finally swerved left and tossed me into the ditch on the side of the road. There, I lay in soft young grass, already moist from the night’s condensation. Wow, I thought to myself, I’m okay. And I can think! I just got a bit of wind knocked out of me. All I need to do is catch my breath and walk the mile home. I’ll worry about the bike later. Instinctively, I patted my body from head to toe to make sure I was fine to get up. When I reached the bottom of my left leg, however, I realized I was not. Although my bare foot pointed towards the earth, the top half of my tibia stabbed the night in jagged white. 

I would not be walking home.

Just as I was making sense of my cleaved leg and the warm liquid gushing out of it, a mustached man approached me.  “Help,” I yelled, “over here!  Help!” The man in tight Wranglers and a grimy undershirt stumbled toward me and grabbed my shoulder and arm as if to hoist me onto his small frame.

“No!” I said. “I have a compound fracture. Call 911!”

 ”I’m from Billings, I don’t know where you are,”  he said through breath that smelled like compost and beer.

“I am r i g h t  h e r e. Get in your car and call 9 1 1!”

“Where should I go?”

“I don’t care! Go to the nearest house. Go back to town. Just find the nearest phone and tell them I have a compound fracture!”

“Ok, ok,” he nodded.  And continued to stare at me.

Again, I urged him. “Please go. Please. Go. Call 911. Can you do that? Can you do that?!”

Yes, he nodded, as he got into his car and screeched up canyon.

Okay, I thought. All I have to do is wait here a few minutes. I realized then how woozy I felt, so I lifted my leg up high and brought my heart down to the grass. Just a few minutes until the ambulance gets here and it’s okay to pass out. I hoped he would return before the ambulance arrived so they knew where to find me. But when a few minutes had passed with no siren sounds, I felt a tinge of worry.

Having been trained and retrained to as a Wilderness First Responder, I decided it was time to respond to the bloody bone-ends poking out of my skin the way I would to anybody else’s. I went over the ABC’s impressed upon all first responders. I definitely had an unobstructed A, airway, and I was B, breathing. That left C for circulation. My heart was doing its job fine, but my severed vessels made it hard for my blood to return to my heart.  I had to stop the bleeding before I passed out.

Before getting a handle on the blood loss, though, I wanted to set my bone. Still lifting my leg above my heart with my right hand, I pulled my ankle forward with my left in attempt to line up the exposed pieces of bone, resting what I could of them on my forearm. With my fingertips, I touched the exposed fracture in effort to reconnect my skeletal shards, but there was no precision in the break, no puzzle pieces to fit together. The angle of the break had cut off the circulation to my foot and numbed it, so I used instead the return of sensation to that extremity as a guide to setting my bone. I knew I had done something right when I could wiggle my toes again.

Next step, control the bleeding. I remembered that one could directly pinch the ends of a vein or artery to stop blood loss, but the darkness of the night and the thinness of the blood vessels so far down my leg made that option impossible. So I went for the next best thing-direct pressure. Still pulling traction with my left arm, I grabbed the hem of my dress with my right and pressed its worn threads onto my gaping wound. As far as I could tell, my flesh was ripped open at least halfway around my leg, my small hand barely able to cover the bloody mess. Phew, at least I’ve got the creepy part taken care of.

Uncomfortably settled into my traction-pulling position, I was no longer distracted from the reality of my situation. It was dark out now, for-real dark, the stars-were-on-fire dark. I was in a ditch four feet below a country highway with a 75-mile-per-hour speed limit, and my bones were sticking out of my own skin. There were no houses in visual or auditory vicinity, and the young grass toppled over me, stalk by stalk. My dress was dark and I had nothing with which to signal my presence. Lightning danced in the distance. And it was clear that the man in the white station wagon would not be returning.

Now is the time to scream bloody murder, Bex, I instructed myself, the way you’ve always wanted to. So I did my best to send a scream as shrill and cold as glacier water across the road and into the houses beyond the bend in the highway where I lay. To no avail. Warm cars filled with people with perfectly in-tact bodies sped by with painful regularity. It was such a bitter tease to be just a few feet away from rescue, holding my bones in the palm of my hand.

I had to do something else. Of course, I could pull myself out of the ditch and flag down a car on the side of the road. But all that I could imagine coming of such a move was my body smashed flat on the shoulderless highway, fatally marked with tire treads. I played that scene over and over in my head, laughing at the ironic ending to my story that would make. No, there had to be another way. What would I do with a patient in the backcountry? I’d make a splint, evacuate them. I went over the contents of my backpack in my head. A topographical map, a field guide, my Kryptonite bike lock. My lock! I could stabilize my leg with that and… And what? Hop a half-mile to the nearest house? Let my bones grate together and slice into my veins, my lifelines? Maybe I should just sit tight after all. Maybe somebody else was bicycling up the road right now, would hear my screams when they passed. Maybe I would think of something else.

And I did think of something else. I thought about the lightning in the distance, and wondered how long it would take before it crackled above me. I thought about the sassy new shoes the car had blown off when it hit my leg. I sang the word crepitus, crepitus, crepitus like a mantra. I thought about how weird it was that the only pain I felt was in the muscles of my leg-elevating and traction-pulling arms. And I thought about the amputation I was sure to have, came to grips with it. By the time help came, if it ever did, my leg would be too far gone, would have lost too much blood to be saved. Yes, from tomorrow on, I would be an amputee. I wondered how it would feel to wake up one leg lighter, to reach down to scratch an itch on a limb that wasn’t there. I had never much liked my short, stout legs, but I already missed the one that would soon be gone.  I mourned all the mountains I wouldn’t climb and the lovers I wouldn’t have for the creepiness of making love to a one-and-a-half-stumpy-legged woman. And then I remembered Tom Whittaker, a professor from my college who, with a prosthetic foot, had climbed Mt. Everest, big walls in Yosemite, and paddled rapids so fierce I cringed just thinking about them. He had a wife and two kids. Maybe my adventure life, my sex life, wasn’t quite over yet.

The traffic on Bridger Canyon Road had thinned out considerably as I mused on my impending legless life, and it struck me that I could either hang out in this ditch until I passed out only to be found the next morning under the blades of a John Deere, or I could get the hell out and to the hospital. Since my leg was going to be amputated anyway, a little rubbing of sharp bone on soft flesh wouldn’t really matter. Just in case my leg was salvageable, though, I wanted to stabilize it for my journey out of the ditch. But, with what?

Standing behind the co-op deli case on my tiptoes earlier that day, I had noticed that a seam in the bodice of my blue dress was wearing thin and made a mental note to put it in my mending pile at the end of the day. Huddled below the road that night, my hand remembered that earlier discovery before my brain did. Without thought, I fingered the weakness in the stitching with my right hand, the scarlet hand that had been holding pressure on my open leg, and tugged. The fabric tore hesitantly, ripped with a grind as grating as my bone-on-bone friction felt. Determined not to compromise the careful alignment job I had done, I fought the woven cloth off with just one hand while my other held my broken leg.  I was triumphant when I finally held the bundle of blue fabric in my hand. Ha! Look at me, I thought. A scantily-clad woman on the side of the road on a Saturday night. I wondered if my new outfit would help-or hinder-the likelihood of rescue.

I wrapped the dress around my open break and gave the responsibility of blood-loss control to it. Using my now-free hand and good leg, I made two scoots up the slope towards the highway in a half-crabwalk. The slight movement exhausted me, made my head wooze and my breathing fast and heavy. Just catch your breath, Bex, then you can move a little more. You’re almost there. But just as I finished my pep talk, I heard the familiar whoosh of an approaching car. I didn’t know if I could handle the disappointment of screaming in vain yet again, but scream I did. I gave it all I had, gave it my childhood dreams of being an actress, the loss of a mountain summer, the anguish of my looming amputation, and the sedentary and celibate life that surely lay before me. I gave it all my hope of being saved. I waved my free arm above my head as a little red Porches sped past. Dammit. True despair sank in for the first time that night.

Until I saw its taillights come back towards me. They had heard me!

The Porches stopped several yards behind where I sat. A man and a woman hesitantly stepped out of their car. “Help! Help! I’ve got a broken leg! Over here!” I screamed. The couple made their way over to me in slow motion, pulled out a giant cell phone, and, like that, an ambulance was on its way.  Only then did I feel how cold the night was, how agonizing my pain.

It was hard to release myself to the paramedics’ tentative hands. It was harder still to do as they told me-let go of my blue-plaid dress and perfectly pulled traction. The bottom half of my leg flopped about as they laid me in the ambulance. I was certain that the weight of it would tear what flesh remained and make surgical amputation unnecessary.

As soon as I got to the hospital, a needle found its way into my upper arm and I melted into the opiates. Even better were the hot towels they placed on me from neck to toe. While the heat did little to quell my seismic shivers, it did calm my skin, my heart. Calming my heart, also, were the words of the young feathered-hair surgeon: “We’ll clean you up tonight, straighten out your leg,” like it was no big deal. I couldn’t believe it. Nothing more than a baby toe would be left behind.

A few minutes later, one of the nurses handed me the phone with my far-away mother on it. “I’ll be there tomorrow,” she said, and the weight of my world was lifted off my shoulders. I was a daughter again, a broken girl to be mended.

***

Three years later, I think about my accident daily. I have to. A titanium screw, cerulean, hangs from a strand of purple beads around my neck. It was one of four screwed into my tibia that night to hold a corrective rod in place. An elegant piece of hardware, I keep it close to my heart. Don’t forget your bike light, it vibrates, and wear your helmet. You are a lucky woman. Welcome every curve on those legs that get you everywhere you want to go. That piece of jewelry whispers to me that strength is sexy, and that believing otherwise can be truly dangerous. You would not be wearing this necklace if you had asked Ren out that night, it reminds me.

Smoothing lotion over my newly-shaved calves in today’s early morning sun, I am shocked by the subtle contours of sinew lying just below my skin. They are beautiful.  I tighten and release the extensor, peroneal, and flexor muscles of my now-healed leg just to see what they can do. To remember what they have been through. I trace the long ridges and deep furrows of my bare leg with my fingertips, and am reminded by my musculature, by nine tenacious scars, how blessed I am to have this life, stocky legs and all.