HE FELL OUT OF BED AND CHANGED OUR LIVES

It was late autumn and the frost was thick the night the phone call came that would change my life. And as these matters of fate so often unravel, I had yet to be born. Not many people back in the 1950s had two telephones in their house, but the extra one was in the master bedroom, situated on the lower shelf of the built-in bookshelves, several steps from the bed, so the doctor would have to stand and truly wake up when he said his sleep-graveled hello. It was a rare night when there wasn’t a call in the middle of the night.
“Doc, could you please come to Hemlock right away? My husband’s fallen out of bed and I’m afraid he’s broken his hip. He’s just in awful pain and can’t hardly move. I’m going to put my neighbor on the telephone and she’ll tell you how to get to the house – I need to get back home to him.”
The doctor closed his eyes and listened carefully as the neighbor gave directions, only interrupting once, “She’s in her 80s and she walked over a mile through the wilderness to get to your house, with only a lantern to light her way?” He hung up and gently whispered to his wife that he probably wouldn’t be back until daybreak, he and Brier were headed to Hemlock, 22 miles away, the last half on roads barely wide enough for a school bus. He grabbed his black bag from the kitchen table where he had been rubbing it with saddle soap the evening before, checked inside it for morphine and a syringe, and headed out into the Milky Way clear darkness. The collie dog was ready and waiting by the door.
“Ah, Brier, Hemlock, West Virginia – the site of one of the seven wonders of Upshur County, Upshur Mountain, the highest point in the county, over 3,000 feet. We’re going to be riding up a few ridges tonight, might even see some snow.” The dog and the man rode in companionable silence as they headed through Tallmansville, past the turn off to Ten Mile and Sago, over the bridges at Lower and then Upper Queens, and began the steep ascent up the narrow passage on Taylor Hill to Hemlock Ridge. The road became dirt, the houses fewer, and the quarter moon as silvery as the foxes curled up in their nearby dens. At the fork in the road, the left turn heading to the one-room schoolhouse and the Methodist church, the doctor took the hairpin curve to the right, leading to the combination country store and post office, keeping his eye out for a “lane you might miss, Doc, and if you get to the wooden bridge, turn around and go back a piece and you’ll see it.”
The old man and woman didn’t have a car and the road was a path, the doctor’s old Army jeep bouncing through mud holes, scraping on branches, and running perilously close to the steep bank of the creek, a tributary to the Middle Fork River. As he came around the last curve and up the rise to the meadow, the doctor stopped as the cabin came into view - wide logs, a tall chimney of huge rocks, two towering Hemlock trees alongside, planted, no doubt, on the day the couple was married and moved into their home.
Though writhing in pain, the old gentleman did not have a fracture and after the doctor lifted him into bed with his strong arms and administered a shot of morphine, the man smiled and fell asleep. “Doc, I want to show you something,” the old woman said. She took up the lantern by the door and led him across the field to a trail running alongside the river. They wove in and out of the trees, through thick moss, under rhododendron and mountain laurel branches, stepped over an old corduroy logging road, and came out onto a huge rock in the river where the waterfalls filled the quiet of the frosty pre-dawn. He turned to the woman and said, “Ma’am, you live in Paradise.”
The doctor and dog were quiet on the ride back home. His wife was making a pot of coffee and he went over and gave her a kiss. “Lois, I’ve never coveted anything before, but I am in awe right now. I’ve seen the place of my dreams and I hope we can have it someday. It would be the greatest gift we could ever give the children.”
It was a number of years after that nighttime house call, after the deaths of the old man and woman – and the passing of the doctor’s own father, leaving him a simple inheritance, the exact amount needed to buy that hundred acres of heaven – that my father’s prophetic wisdom came true. It was the greatest gift to his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. No matter where we roam over this vast planet, and we do seem to be wanderers, each of us knows there is a spot in the mountains of West Virginia that calls out to us, cradles our spirits, and holds precious memories of first loves, camping trips, digging ramps, driving lessons, horseshoe games, tree houses, dam building, fire circles, hiking, wildflowers, soothing tears – and giggles over how our Tom Sawyer parents invented the ‘wish being granted on the third rock thrown into the big mud hole’, which hole, of course, no longer exists. (I swear to this day that third rock wish is how I got my first husband). And the waterfalls has become the Mecca one conjures up while in the dentist chair or caught by stopped traffic in the city – the mere image brings a smile, a sigh, and memories of holes worn in the seats of our pants as we mentally slide down the falls into the cold, clear mountain stream.