I made a 111 call. ‘Ambulance, fire, police?’ the operator asked. ‘Ambulance,’ I screamed.
I thought people might think I pushed him. Nobody will ever want to buy our property. Why did I say I was going to get the seedling elm? My God, this isn’t real. It should have been me who fell. This isn’t fair. It’s not right.
As I hurried down the hill to find Dick, Lynette next door called from her balcony. ‘Is everything all right?’ ‘No,’ I screamed and breathlessly continued on down the hill.
By the time I got to Centennial Park the ambulance was screaming round the corner from the opposite direction.
‘Help! Get me up. Help!’ Words from Dick. He was alive. Thank God. I was still about 30 metres away.
The ambulance officer told me to stay back and sit down. I was still holding our home telephone. It was now out of range. I borrowed the paramedic’s phone.
‘Bridget. Dick has fallen off the rock,’ I said. ‘Is it bad?’ our youngest daughter asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was a policeman.
The paramedic directed me to the far corner of the park to show the fire brigade to the accident site. Malcolm Macpherson pulled up. ‘I’ll direct the fire brigade,’ he said. His wife, a doctor, was at the bottom of the rock helping with Dick.
Under the tree, on the grass, Bridget and I huddled together. The fire brigade got to work. Soon, two lines of men with arms outstretched were bearing my husband from man to man, gently, carefully, and finally through the open doors of the ambulance.
‘How many brothers and sisters do you have?’ Joy Watson from Victim Support asked Bridget in the corridor of Dunstan Hospital.
‘Three,’ she said.
‘Ring them right now.’
I felt I’d been cut in half. I wanted to cuddle Dick but wasn’t allowed that close to him. The emergency staff were working on him. Life-saving measures. A nurse cut off his shirt. I never did like that shirt.
At last I was allowed to talk to him. I kissed him. ‘My arms are tingling,’ he said. ‘Something strange is happening.’
The team from Dunedin Public Hospital arrived in the rescue helicopter.
We walked out to go home to shower and pack for what lay ahead. Sue and Malcolm Macpherson took me. The ambulance doors were gaping wide open. ‘Where’s Dick?’ I asked. ‘He’s in the helicopter,’ Sue replied.
Bridget drove. We were almost in Milton, which is one and a half hours from Alexandra. Bridget broke the silence. ‘We haven’t said a word since we left.’ I replied, ‘What is there to say?’
The puffing and hissing sounds from the oxygen equipment indicated that Dick was still alive. Dots blinked across the heart monitor and the oxygen saturation recorder was in place, along with a drip.
It was about three a.m. Linda was awake to greet us. ‘He’s broken his neck,’ I said.
Bridget and I went to bed in Linda’s spare queen-size bed. We cuddled each other and cried. Bridget slept for about an hour. I couldn’t sleep. The pillows were damp with our tears.
The next morning at the intensive care unit at Dunedin Hospital a consultant and a medical registrar took Bridget and me into a room. The official diagnosis was delivered. Dick was C5 tetraplegic. Complete. He would never walk again.
They said Dick would be transferred to the Christchurch intensive care unit as soon as a plane or helicopter became available. Wrapped and strapped in red blankets and silver survival sheets for the flight, Dick looked like a giant Christmas cracker.
By the time I puffed my way to the summit of Mount Iron it was mid-morning, bluish, windy, cold. A sign informed climbers of the mountain’s geological history – it was formed by glaciers, was once a thousand feet beneath ice. There were views of the mountain ranges, Fog Peak, Black Peak, Shark Tooth – and Rob Roy, which was covered with snow all that week.
There were views of the past. I’d come to know the ranges and valleys in travels with my father. He lived his final years in another of the ‘cold lakes’, Tekapo, and later in Fairlie. I’d visit. We’d take road trips, stay in motels. We’d go to Wānaka. We’d go through the Lindis Pass.
In 2003 I wrote about our last trip together:
A great many things were going on in the middle of the South Island two weekends ago. In Ōmarama on Saturday night – no doubt you heard about this on the news – it rained at three a.m.
That was at the end of a warm crisp day in winter, not a cloud in the sky, and hardly another car on the road. Out of the wind, poplars still held their autumn blaze. You could see that most vividly on the shores of Lake Benmore, and beside the Benmore Dam, where a father and son were fishing next to the No Fishing sign.
I was on a road trip with my dad: another father and son spending time together in the middle of the South Island. We went indoors to see fish. The pub in Kimbell has a 43-pound salmon, caught by L. Rooney in 1970, mounted on a wall. It’s above the jukebox (‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’, ‘Rocky Mountain High’), and next to a gallery of photographs marking great days in the history of the McKenzie Collie Dog Club, established in 1891; in 1950, at the club’s jubilee trials, vice-president Roy Rapley appeared in a kilt.
Next door to the pub – there are two doors in Kimbell – is Lloyd Harwood’s Silverstream Gallery. Lloyd draws portraits. ‘You should be able to see the eyelashes really well,’ he promises clients. He also paints, although he is colour-blind. Much of his gallery is devoted to landscapes of Randall Froude,
