You live below a steep embankment, maybe you think you\u2019ll never have a bluff come down into your bedroom some moonless night. Probably moved here from some prairie state, flat tableland perfect for corn or hay, with no clue that the earth is in motion. Or maybe just don\u2019t believe in localized tectonics any more than climate change. Jeffrey Gladstone was one of those, a man who bought a 3 story skinny house directly beneath a precipitous bluff up on the north end of the island. A one lane road carved out of the bank leveled off at sea level for about a dozen or so neighbors.<\/p>\n
Jeff wanted me to make him a bathroom window so those same neighbors wouldn\u2019t peer in while he was relieving himself. When I first drove in, all I could see was this wall of clay and glacial till hanging ominously overhead, five times higher than his already high roof. \u201cYou ever worry about a slide?\u201d I asked and Jeff shook his head. \u201cNot really. We already had our slide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, okay, there you have it. You had one slide, no way would you have another, right? But before I could offer up this cynical reply, Jeff launched into the story of the first (and no doubt last) avalanche. He\u2019d planned to build a back room on the lower floor and so he hired a local kid, a brawny but not terribly bright 17 year old just down the street. The first week the boy had made some progress shovel by shovel, probably undercutting the bluff, and moving the dirt around to the front for hauling away. Jeff said he felt the house move slightly one afternoon and went outside to check on the kid.<\/p>\n
Sure enough, the bank had caved in and a small hill was smashed up against the house. The kid, however, was nowhere to be seen. Jeff ran into the garage, grabbed a shovel and like an energized madman began to furiously dig for the boy who he knew must be under the dirt, maybe already dead, but \u2026<\/p>\n
Jeff\u2019s wife called 911 and a few minutes later he could hear their sirens up above. And that\u2019s when he hit the kid right in the head, gouging a wound in his skull. The medics worked on giving him oxygen while Jeff dug him free. Before the ambulance left one of the medics told him chances were slim to none that he would survive and even if he did, he\u2019d most likely be brain dead. Too long without breathing, he said.<\/p>\n
The neighborhood turned on old Jeffrey, accusing him of hiring a kid for minimum wage to do a dangerous job nobody should have been doing. The press came up from Everett and Seattle to interview them and Jeff, a ceaseless stream of cameras, reporters and vans with antenna. For a time the boy stayed in a coma. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe moved away,\u201d Jeff told me. \u201cMoved to Portland for a year until the publicity died down. Neighbors still won\u2019t speak to us but we finally had to come back. God only knows what would have happened if Brian had died. I suppose we\u2019d have sold and moved away. They\u2019d have called us killers, made our lives miserable.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the boy lived. End of story \u2026 until curiosity got the better of me and I asked what happened to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d Jeff said, \u201cthat\u2019s a funny deal. The kid was basically a jock, not too good at school, everybody thought he was a bit of a dummy. I did too. Nice boy, but \u2026I didn\u2019t hire him for his brains. Turns out, he came out of his coma after a week, took some months to heal up broken bones and all the rest. He\u2019ll always have that shovel scar in his head where I dug into him. But he healed up. The funny part is he gave up sports, sort of applied himself to school, went to college at WSU a year later.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it turned out okay,\u201d I said. <\/p>\n
\u201cBetter than that, he went on to get his PhD. Who\u2019d have thought?\u201d<\/p>\n
I had to ask, \u201cWhat was his degree in?\u201d <\/p>\n
Jeff laughed. \u201cMining and engineering, what else?\u201d<\/p>\n
He said it was ironic, but that landslide probably turned the kid\u2019s life completely around. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou ever finish that back room addition?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJanet and me keep a low profile. The house is plenty big enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
And fortunately, no worries about another slide\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You live below a steep embankment, maybe you think you\u2019ll never have a bluff come down into your bedroom some moonless night. Probably moved here from some prairie state, flat tableland perfect for corn or hay, with no clue that the earth is in motion. Or maybe just don\u2019t believe in localized tectonics any more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[7743,7742,7744],"class_list":["post-20123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-landslide-dead-ahead","tag-living-below-the-bluffs","tag-shovel-ready"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20124,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20123\/revisions\/20124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}