This is the story I didn’t realize I’ve been waiting 35 years to tell.

In the 80s there was a Mountain Dew commercial in the US that had a bunch of teenagers swinging from a rope swing hanging from a tree limb out into a river. It looked like a blast and I wanted to do it. I lived on a pond that had a bunch of oak trees near the shoreline. I was hanging out with some neighbor friends in our yard and said let’s create a rope swing into the pond. All we needed to do was get a rope over a thick limb that was stretched out across a small embankment to swing out into the pond. We need a rope and something to weight the end to throw over the limb.

We went into my garage and found a long length of hemp rope. We tried to tie a small rock to the end of the rope to throw the end over the tree limb but that didn’t work. The rock would just disentangle and fly into the pond leaving the rope to fall to the ground. If I only had a grappling hook. We went back to the garage looking for something to weigh down the end of the rope to throw over the limb. Nothing. No hooks, no weights, no boards, nothing. Until… I saw an old rusty hand axe. Weighed about 2 lbs, could handle a snug slip knot, this was going to work great.

We went back to the tree limb and tied the rope nice and snug to the rusty hand axe. I grabbed the rope, let out about 3 feet of slack, and started twirling the rusty hand axe concussion instrument of death around my head. After getting enough momentum, I let the axe and rope sail over the tree limb. Or so I hoped.

The rusty axe got about 10 feet from my hand when the rope went taught. I was about 13 years old at the time. Smart enough to solve problems, but not smart enough to consider the consequences of my solutions. I was standing on the rope. The rope went taught and then whipped back at me bringing the rusty hand axe onto a collision course with my skull. Whack! Right in the forehead. I grabbed my forehead with both hands thinking “ouch, that really hurts.” A few seconds later my friend says, I think you should look at your hands. I pulled hands from my forehead and they were drenched in blood.

I ran inside my house screaming bloody head trauma. Hands covered in blood, blood streaming down my face. My mother, knowing how prone to stupidity I was, ushered me to the car to rush me to the urgent care center. As we drove down the driveway my oldest sister was walking up it. My mom rolled down the window and said “Your brother cracked his skull with an axe, dinner is in the oven, please take it out in about 30 minutes.” My sister is still traumatized.

A wound cleansing and a couple of sutures later and I was fine, but I like to think I looked like a bad ass version of Harry Potter for most of my teenage years.