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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday April 8, 2002 Volume IV Number 14 |
FOCUS - Hero
On January 23rd earlier this year, Carolyn and I made a bitter-sweet ninety minute drive home from Pasadena. It was Kristyn’s birthday. We spent an unforgettable afternoon with her, just us three hiking in the foothills in the shadow of Mt. Wilson on a Wednesday afternoon, their Jack Russell Terrier Sam chasing and jumping up and down the trail, up a steep canyon to a waterfall where we talked and grieved and shared; reflecting on a life-changing experience just less than a week before, when hopes and dreams vanished in a hospital room and a tiny life cut way short. We wished our daughter a happy birthday, knowing really, it wasn’t.
It was a quiet drive home.
Neither of us felt like talking much.
As the sun set on the horizon, and the shadows lengthened, we made the familiar turn off the Interstate down the country road into the now familiar picturesque valley that welcomes us home. The valley provides a half hour buffer zone between us and the civilization we leave behind when we head back to our place in the country. It’s a valley no one knew about, until California Proposition 5 passed overwhelmingly (an astonishing 85%), voters thinking they had granted Native Americans a shot at “self-reliance.” What the voters really gave the Reservations (though the expensive marketing campaign never fully explained it) was a bright green light to build gambling Casinos at will. (Some would rather say “gaming” Casinos.) Today our formerly wide open country road is a narrow winding seven mile long Entryway, lined up with cars and taxies and tour busses and limousines, a pleasant approach to the glittering interiors and gaudy decor and flashing lights and bells and sirens and red velvet and spinning wheels where there are no restraints. You can cut loose inside. And maybe even win.
The Casinos have interrupted the open landscape of hills and valleys and meadows and spreading oaks and citrus groves.
We try to be gracious. Progress sometimes brings unwelcome change.
On that same crisp January night, long after dark, there would be a terrible incident on that same dark road that would forever change someone else’s life.
As we drove through the pleasant valley at sunset, one of our favorite places on all of planet Earth, remembering the day with our daughter by the waterfall, Carolyn and I were blissfully unaware would happen on that same road later that same night.
* * * * * *
Frank Lee seems like an ordinary sixty year old. Wiry. Energetic. Engaging. His eyes are clear and bright. He laughs easily. His thinning hair and short goatee pure white.
Frank runs marathons.
That sets him apart. He’s lean and fit. Strong. Curious. Generous.
On Wednesday January 23rd, he took a long run through Pauma Valley, up Highway 76 and turned up an unpaved road then to a single track trail to an old tourmaline mine. It was a clear afternoon, cool and crisp, visibility unlimited. As he climbed the hill, he watched the wide vista open ever wider until at the opening of the mine, he could see for miles, West, East and South. He took some time to explore. He located dazzling crystals of blue and green and pink. He would later describe it as his favorite destination. His favorite workout. He was preparing for the demanding Catalina Marathon coming up in March.
After returning to his home in the Valley, he cleaned up and visited a friend for dinner in the next town over, San Marcos. At about 10:30 PM, he left his friend for home. Frank likes to check on his Daily Pick, so on the way, he dropped into the Pala Casino. He had $8 in his pocket, and in about an hour’s play, converted it to $30. As he walked back to the parking lot and approached his seventeen year old Mercedes with a fresh new paint job and recent tune-up , he thought, “This has been a really good day.”
Frank fired up his polished sedan and pulled out of the lot, turning right onto the highway, deeper into the dark valley under a clear starlit sky, heading home. On an open stretch, around the bend and down into the wash, alone, about midnight, he spotted an old, battered stretch van pulled over on the shoulder, headlights barely on, hood open and emergency lights flashing dimly. There was a lone man near the open hood, waving at passers by.
Frank slowed down and pulled over next to him.
Through an open window, he asked, “Need some help?” in a friendly sort of way.
“I need a jump. My battery’s too low to start,” said the stranger.
“No problem,” said Frank and he turned his Mercedes sedan around and pulled up to the van, nose to nose. “Got some cables?” Frank asked as he opened the door and stepped out of his car.
“Yeah,” said the man as he turned toward the back of the van to fetch them.
Frank reached under the hood to pull the latch. As he lifted it and looked for the battery connectors in the low light, he heard a “crack!” and felt a sharp pain on his left side.
It took him down.
From the dirt and gravel of the shoulder Frank looked up in horror at the stranger. The man stood barely three feet way and pointed a revolver directly at Frank’s head. Without a moment’s hesitation, he pulled the trigger. Bang! Bang!
Frank felt the bullet hit his forehead, like the club of a baseball bat.
Wounded, but alert, adrenaline now pumping through his body, he jumped to his feet. “Hey!...” he shouted at the man. “What the…?!” He ran across the empty highway, facing his assailant and with hands raised, blood flowing down his face to his chest, Frank pleaded for his life.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
He felt one of the bullets enter his chest. It missed his heart by less than an inch, and then exited through his back.
As he fell to the pavement in disbelief, pain screaming through his body, his head, his chest, his arm, he saw the stranger dash to driver’s side of his Mercedes, engine still running, and pull the door open. Then he heard him call out “Let’s get outta here!” as a second stranger jumped from the van and ran to the door of the passenger seat of his beloved old car. They both climbed inside Frank’s sedan and slammed the door on either side. With tires spinning in the gravel on the shoulder, and then screeching on the asphalt highway, engine revving, dust and exhaust flying, the shooter and his companion raced down the dark road leaving the beat up van with dull flashing emergency lights still on the roadside, and Frank slowly turned over on his back in the dirt, groaning, bleeding terribly, in shock and pain, on the shoulder of Highway 76 across from the broken down van.
Alone.
That night under the stars, Frank Lee, Marathoner, age sixty, fully believed he would die.
* * * * * * *
Brandon is a poet. He’s a university professor, too. He teaches poetry and literature, and his classes on cinema have a waiting list at both the Community College and the State University. He’s a Master of Fine Arts. A renaissance man. Students line up to hear Brandon’s lectures on film. In his spare time, he teaches children to write. He believes in the redemptive power of expression. He loves to light the fires of creativity. Teachers and administrators all over the county want Brandon to work with their students.
On Wednesday, January 23rd, Brandon, also a musician, held a poetry reading in Orange County. It ended late and Brandon, life long resident of this part of the country, made the familiar turn off the Interstate, down Highway 76, past the Pala Casino and on home.
* * * * * *
Frank felt the hole in his chest with his finger tips. He felt the warm ooze of his own blood. His head throbbed in pain. He reached and felt another gaping wound on his muscled shoulder. He looked up at the stars.
I’m not going to lay here and die, he said.
In an astonishing display of brute strength, he stood to his feet. Years of fitness training and the regular discipline of high intensity physical work-outs combined with a rush of adrenaline all gave him extraordinary resilience. He watched his cherished Mercedes disappear around the bend, and wondered what could possibly cause a man to so callously and brutally attack a complete stranger on this lonely road, and an accomplice, too. Who are they? What are they saying to one another? What kind of cowards hide behind a pistol and steal without remorse?
Will I survive? Will I bleed to death? Is this the end? My final chapter?
He staggered to the middle of the highway.
A car sped around the corner… slowed… and then continued on. Then a pick up truck. Then two cars in line, coming from the other direction.
Not one stopped.
For more than ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.
As Brandon’s pickup truck passed the Pala Casino, he took a deep breath and quietly sighed, eager to get home. The road is familiar, every twist and turn. He’s driven up and down this highway a thousand times, ever since he was a teenager.
As he turned around the familiar bend down to the wash, he saw an old van on the shoulder, and a shadowy figure stumbling on the road.
A drunk, he thought.
He eased onto his brakes.
The man waved. He looked stunned. In shock.
As Brandon drove by, something told him to stop. A strange compulsion.
He pulled on to a side road, and turned around. Approaching the stranger, he opened his window, and just as he was about to ask if he could help, the headlights illumined the man’s face. Brandon clearly saw blood. Lots of blood. In the matted white hair. Bright red soaking through his shirt.
“I’ve been shot,” the man said.
“Get in… we’ve got to get help,” Brandon said as he stepped out to help the man into the seat on the other side.
“I don’t want to mess up your interior,” the man hesitated.
“Get in,” Brandon said. Gently. Firmly. He gave Frank an assist up into the truck.
* * * * * * *
The headline of our local weekly newspaper this week announces PAUMA MAN TURNS SHOOTING EVENT INTO LIFE-AFFIRMING EVENT. The advertising revenues, thanks to the new local Casinos, have given THE ROAD RUNNER enough resources to upgrade to a full color front page. Frank and Brandon appear together, in living color, looking at one another affectionately, two strangers, neighbors, who have since that fateful night become friends, and the caption reads “Frank Lee and the man who saved his life: Brandon Cesmat.”
Frank, also an aspiring writer, tells his version in the front page article of a story that captured the imagination of the entire county.
As Brandon sped down the Highway that night with a mortally wounded passenger, he found a security guard at the valley country club. The police, it turns out, had been searching for Frank. One of the passers-by alerted 911 that a man was wandering around the highway, bleeding. But the police officers were given the wrong information about the whereabouts of the man, and they were searching on the wrong stretch of highway.
At the guard shack, relieved, Brandon and the security guard called the police, and within minutes, Frank was in the skilled care of a trained paramedic. He had lost nine pints of blood. As Brandon watched them remove Frank’s shirt exposing the awful wounds, Frank breathed a heavy sigh, and Brandon believed at that moment, Frank would die.
Brandon prayed.
Brandon is a long time member of the Worship Team at our church. For over a year, before a full-time worship pastor joined our staff, Brandon was our worship leader.
Miraculously, Frank’s breathing continued. Slow. Deep. Frank barely conscious.
The next morning, Brandon phoned in to check on Frank’s condition.
“He’s gunna make it,” the officer said. "Good thing he's in such good shape. A marathoner, huh? Anybody else,,, at that age? No way. He'd be a goner."
Frank later said, “I didn’t believe them.” The intense nightmares and terrifying hallucinations plagued him for weeks following the terrifying night on the highway.
Some time after his recovery, Frank got some perspective. “For about fifteen minutes, I tried to flag down help,” he wrote in the newspaper article. “Finally a very brave man stopped. He put me in his Blazer,” (actually, it was a Dakota) “with blood all over me and got me to the Pauma Country Club. If he had not picked me up, I would have died. Four bullets hit me. Two were grazing shots. One carved a canyon an inch deep and nine inches long across my forehead. It took forty five stitches. The other entered my chest about one inch to the right of my heart and went through my lung and exited out my back. They estimate I lost nine pints of blood.”
“I was a bloody mess. He stopped and saved my life. I will be forever grateful to Brandon Cesmat.”
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
Later someone asked Frank, “Well, have you learned your lesson?”
“You mean, did I learn never again to stop and help someone in trouble?”
“Uh… yeah.” Chuckle. Chuckle.
“Let me put it to you this way,” Frank rubbed his white goatee with his thumb and forefinger. “It’s a good thing Brandon didn’t learn that lesson.”
Then he paused as he considered the outcome.
“If he had, I’d be dead.”
It’s risky business, this Good Samaritan thing.
Carolyn and I drove home that same day down that same road. Highway 76. Wednesday, January 23rd. We were thinking that day about a different kind of crisis. We had no idea that our good friend Brandon would be called upon later that same night, tapped on the shoulder by Frank’s guardian angel, to perform heroic duty. Brandon, of course, considers the term hero an overstatement. He simply cared. We knew nothing about it until we picked up our local paper.
For Brandon, he simply did what he believed God wanted him to do. No fanfare. No trumpets.
Go ahead. Look for an opportunity today to show a simple act of kindness. No need to be a hero.
It could be risky. But it will make a difference.
For the subject of your kindness.
And for you.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
LeaderFOCUS is brought to you by Good Stewardship Associates
Special Thanks for Design by my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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