I was about sixty-five and getting our house ready to sell. The house had decks outside the bedrooms, about twelve feet above the ground, and I had removed the flooring from one of them to do some repair work.
I had laid a sheet of plywood across the exposed joists so I would have something to kneel on. The underside of the deck was plasterboard, and there was a small gap that needed patching. I cut a piece of plasterboard to fit and leaned forward to press it into place.
The plasterboard gave way.
I plunged headfirst through the joists.
After the initial shock, I realized that I hadn’t fallen all the way to the ground. Somehow my knees had caught on the structure above me. I was hanging upside down beneath the deck, with nothing below me but the ground about twelve feet away.
There was nobody around to help. We lived in a somewhat isolated area with large lots, and I knew I couldn’t simply hang there and wait for somebody to come along. At my age, I also knew I wasn’t going to be able to remain upside down indefinitely.
The underside of the deck offered nothing useful to grab.
Fortunately, I had fallen through fairly close to the outside edge. Hanging there, I could see that if I reached with my left hand, I could almost touch it.
Almost.
I began swinging my body back and forth.
With each swing I tried again, until finally my fingers reached the edge and I was able to get hold of it.
What happened after that is difficult for me to reconstruct. I don’t know how long it took. I only remember working my way upward, inch by inch, until somehow I got myself back through the opening and onto the deck.
But what I remember most clearly isn’t the fall.
It’s what I felt while I was trying to get out.
I didn’t feel human.
I felt like an animal caught in a trap.
There was no concern for dignity, no philosophical reflection, no thought about who I was or what I was supposed to be. There was only one imperative: get out. I remember thinking afterward that, if it had been necessary, I could have chewed off my own hand to escape.
That feeling disturbed me almost as much as the accident itself.
We spend our lives thinking of ourselves as civilized human beings, somehow removed from the animals around us. But for a few minutes, all of that disappeared. Something much older took over—a creature whose only concern was staying alive.
Not long afterward, a man who occasionally did maintenance work on our house stopped by. I told him what had happened. He was a religious man, and after hearing the story he said that God must have been helping me.
I couldn’t argue with him.
I only knew what it had felt like from my end.
For a few minutes beneath that deck, civilization had disappeared.
And evolution had reminded me that I was still one of its animals.