tough old goat

I called my Grampa this morning. He lives in Balzac, which is not-quite-a-town-really-just-a-gas-pump-two-churches-and-a-community-hall kind of place. Actually, my Grampa doesn't really live IN Balzac. No one does. Everyone lives in surrounding farms. My Grampa lives on a 20-acre farm about ten minutes north-west of Balzac. Balzac, incidentally, is just south of Airdrie and just north of Calgary; east of the Rockies; pretty much half way around the world from us.

My Grampa's farm used to be a mink ranch. The long mink sheds are still on the property (just in case he decides to go back into business?) but the mink and their manure and scritchy-scratching and squeaking, are gone. Grampa was a mink rancher from the time my Dad was still a young kid until about three years ago. So, he 'retired' when he was eighty-odd years old. No freedom 55 for this man -- he was out picking up barrels of chicken heads, grinding up tripe, hefting blocks of frozen eggs (also added in to the mink food), feeding mink, breeding mink, skinning mink and selling mink at a time when most folks are out cruising around Alaska or knitting booties. He's a tough guy.

Grampa's not a tough guy socially, mind you. He isn't stoic or icy, and he's certainly not mean or gruff. He is an incredibly kind and sociable fellow who talks to bank tellers, charms ladies, and snuggles babies. He's perfectly willing to be seen as a softie in those ways. But don't - for a second - imagine that he'd ever be anything than 100% tough guy physically.

At the end of the summer in 1995 I was heading to Kingston to start my job as a Residence Don at Queen's University. My never-tiring, never-saying-'call a mover' Mum and Dad drove me up from Toronto with all my collected junk and they were planning to stay overnight as far as I can recall. My sister was out in Balzac visiting my grandparents before her school year started. As soon as we got to campus, I went to check in at the Residence Life office to get my keys. Instead, I got a message: call your sister in Calgary -- URGENT. We called, and found out that Grampa was in the hospital. The outlook wasn't positive. Dad and Mum left right away, and Dad flew out on the next flight to Alberta. Was it a heart attack? Was it a stroke?

No, it wasn't a heart attack or a stroke or any normal danger that a 70 year old grandfather might possibly be anticipated to run into. My Grampa had almost - accidentally - blown his face off with lye.

He'd gone out to the shed in the mink enclosure as usual that day, and he'd noticed that one of the drains was blocked. Despite having been told by my uncle NOT to use lye on the drains, he got out his trusty pot of lye (tough guys often have a hard time following safety directives as you likely know), stuffed the lye down the drain, and then POURED A KETTLE OF BOILING WATER DOWN THE DRAIN.

Here is what homemakingcottage.com has to say about lye:

Notice the section that mentions lye will eat through aluminum? Mm hm. Well, after Grampa poured the boiling water on the lye, the lye exploded out of the drain and sprayed his entire face. It's hard to imagine what that must have felt like. My uncle came to help my Grampa, watered off some of the lye, called an ambulance, and with my sister and Gramma got him to the hospital. At which point they called the university and left me that message.

When my Dad got to Calgary, the doctors weren't sure about Grampa's prognosis. Most folks his age, they said, would've died from shock after the accident. As it was they said to wait and see. If Grampa's eyes and ears were ok, and he could manage through the next week, he might pull through. Meanwhile, they put Grampa on morphine to help with the pain. During those first few days, Grampa was not - to say the least - himself. He hallucinated on the drugs and said strange things. Fortunately, amazingly, he had somehow not burned his eyelids off - he couldn't open one eye, but apparently behind the puffy skin, his eye was still there. No one was sure if it would be in working order, but it seemed possible. His ear, while also burned, also seemed to be intact.

The next week, Grampa came back. He sloughed off the brain-melt and turned back into himself. He started chatting to the nurses and joking with the doctors. All of us suddenly stopped and took a moment to think that this might not be the end after all. The next week, Grampa stopped taking the morphine. It was messing with his head, he said. He went home and started the slow process of recovery. He had skin grafts that took a long time to 'take' and he had surgery on his forehead. After the surgery, though, to everyone's surprise he looked younger than before. Basically, after a year, it looked like he'd gotten a mini-brow lift and had his skin smoothed out - and he'd never gone on pain medication again.

If anyone asks him about how it felt to have his face blown off, Grampa says, "I don't recall. But I didn't like that morphine!"

After the lye disaster, Grampa kept mink ranching for another six years or so. Even now, after retiring, he maintains the farm. He shovels snow. He trims trees and hauls wood. He shoots at coyotes and sets mole traps. He feeds his chickens and collects eggs. He shoos the goats from one pasture to the next. And since my Gramma is now in nursing home, he drives to see her every day. And also since she's not around, he cooks, does his own grocery shopping, and even vacuums the house. He is a tough guy. Of course, as a tough guy, he does NOT wear his hearing aid, he does NOT wear his false teeth (except to church), he does NOT buy new clothes since his old green work pants from '74 are nicely worn in, and he does NOT wear the shoes that have the podiatrists' insoles in them since they hurt like hell and were a damn waste of money.

But the reason why I called yesterday was because my Dad had said that a goat had bumped into Grampa and hurt his knee. Here's how the conversation went:

(Comment from Mum re the above story: "i knew the plot already and was still over the top riveted to reading it" - thanks Mum!) [Balzac&Calgary-26-June-2005]