halloween we trekked a trail, watched a med flight, and someone broke into our house

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bright morning ~ a three hour hike ~ a motorcyclist collided with a deer ~ med flight saved a life ~ family stayed the night ~ a kid broke in, fell asleep in his boxers at my computer chair at five in the morning

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aside from our wedding day oct. 10th, we experienced more this past halloween than we have on any other given day to memory.

first, this is a video of twenty three seconds of our morning:

this short short one is of the bridge we had to cross, roughly halfway to the falls:

and a few picts:

damn cool hike, weird day..

the cedar falls trail is a 2.2 mile hike, semi strenuous. central arkansas was bitchslapped with heavy rains thursday night, so a saturday trek was imperative to us because the falls would be raging. they were; they were quite powerful. we sat for only a little while and hiked back out. a three hour hike, so with the driving, it was a six hour round trip that was actually seven because we had to wait an hour on the side of the highway for a med flight vac..

we were the first on the scene, the first people to stumble upon the scene who'd NOT witnessed it. we missed the accident by seconds not minutes. a man lay twisted on the road, his motorcycle was broken. he wasnt moving. i helped his buddy flip him over. ive never seen so much blood on a person. he had puncture wounds from the antlers on his chest and a shoulder and his legs didnt look right. (it was a six or eight point white tail buck, but i really couldnt tell from all the breakage.

the man was apparently with a few friends, cycling down highway 10 and came around a bend when a deer jumped a ditch. they smacked head on and the deer went right back into the ditch dead on impact and the man flew from his bike in the opposite direction. his bike went under a truck. local paramedics were on the scene in two or three minutes. local residents, i'm guessing because one came in a nice truck and another came in a rumbling camero that smoked. the man was breathing and he started moving his eyes, but in too much shock to respond to friends and medics.

no vehicles were allowed to pass. we had to move our car because that was were the copter was to land.

i didnt take video or pictures of the guy--even though the camera was in my back pocket the entire time--because i'm not a heartless fuckhead, but i'd never seen med flight save a person's life before. so i did capture that from a distance.

note * our first video camera, and the first weekend i'd been able to use it, as it is very new. so there is definitely some shakiness. also, i took many short videos, so i could edit them later and splice the ones together that i wanted together. i had twenty-plus minutes of footage that i compressed to three, and it is comprised of seven different takes, so it's gonna be even more choppy, especially since i am just now learning the software *

the man is at baptist hospital and the feeling is he'll be fine after extensive physical therapy. i think he'll be riding again in a year or less. jen took away pain and sorrow. i took away that a man's life was saved. how often does that get to happen to you? sometimes that's as good as it gets because it is exactly enough.

the men of the firetruck cleaned the road and the cars were allowed to pass. we made it home around four thirty. family was over at five and we trick or treated and gave out candy and put the kids to bed and stayed up too late partying. like we're young anymore. my sister and her husband were on a blowup mattress in the livingroom, more family was in the spare bedroom, and jen and i were asleep in our room down the hall from the computer. i went to bed right at four. at five in the morning, jen tells me in the dark that she hears a voice in the house that she didnt recognize. i quickly assessed that eight people were running around that house all day and night and i told her she was dreaming and to go back to bed. she jumped out of bed and ran down the hallway. after a few seconds she screamed my name. i responded while i dashed out of bed and snatched my jeans that "Okay, but i'm gonna be pissed" because i knew nothing was out of place. and there was a kid, probably twenty, sitting at my computer chair wearing a shirt and boxer shorts and that was it. he looked like he was going in and out of slumber, was probably muttering to himself--what jen likely heard.

i grabbed his shoulder.
"Why are you in my house!"
"How did you get into my house!"

that's when it dawned on me. last night, at approx. four in the morning, anyway, my sister and i headed out the side door to smoke. she lives in the country and i came back into the house first. it may now be ingrained that in little rock, you lock your fucking doors.

anyrate. out front, big truck in the driveway. passenger, kid of similar age and ethnicity. white with a touch of asian, young, drunken stupor. i asked him a few questions that led nowhere really. i kept getting "I don't know". what's your name? "I don't know."

back in the house, dude's putting his pants on. he was certain he was drinking at this house last night. he came back to sleep it off. he chose the wrong house. probably had something to do with drinking himself retarded. the front door was locked, so he tried the side door. (jen did this once when she was about his age.) thankfully, my sister didnt stir because she always keeps knives handy (she's always been fascinated with them and needed to be proficient with them for one of her earlier vocations.) he daughters were on the couch and she would have put knife holes in the kid. dave woulda put him in the trunk and buried him in the fields in austin, ar. luckily it was jen and i, because i think he was a good kid who didnt need to die. but had he been near my nieces when i saw him, hands would have stopped his breathing. but he was by himself at the computer chair in and out of soft slumber and when he realized he had in fact NOT been here last night drinking, he kept apologizing while getting his shoes on. he ran out to his truck. i went out there and told them both they could sleep right there, in the driveway, but to NOT come back into the house.

odd fucking twenty-four

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