He loaded me and my younger brother into the back of his Pontiac and we headed to the river. For my birthday, I had received a brand new pole, a shiny new tackle box, and a rainbow collection of lures that I just could not wait to use. I was armed and ready to land a fresh water leviathan of truly epic proportions.
It was a truly beautiful day: warm with a few lazy clouds playing across the sky and early enough in the year that the humidity wasn't oppressive. The three of us spent the entire morning sitting on the riverbank, waiting for the fish to bite. They never did.
But I still had the time of my life.
When we finally began to head back home, we stopped to let a pack of Sunday bikers to pass before pulling out onto the lonely stretch of country highway. But when my dad finally turned onto the road, he didn't speed up to head toward home. Instead, he pulled off to the shoulder. I was confused at first until I saw three of the motorcycles lying on their sides in a dozen twisted pieces, their riders and passengers strewn across the highway like so many sacks of dirty laundry.
Very calmly, my dad turned to me and my brother and said, "Stay in the car." Then he left the car and ran to the closest person on the ground.
I won't get into any of the unseemly details, but suffice it to say, there was panic, there was pain, and, yes, there was blood. Yet my father ran into the chaos, calmly moving from person to person as he addressed their injuries (he had been an EMT for the local volunteer fire department for almost a decade). When the ambulance finally came almost half an hour later (we were in the sticks long before the days of cell phones), my dad quickly briefed the EMTs of the situation then directed traffic so that they could do their jobs without having to worry about dodging passing cars.
When the last of the injured had been put into the ambulance and the bikes were moved onto the side of the road, my dad came back to the car where my brother and I waited, riveted by the drama that had just unfolded before us. "You boys okay?" He asked. All we could manage were silent nods. "All right. Then let's go get some cake and ice cream."
No one died in that accident. I have no idea if that was because of my dad or not, but I can't imagine a scene as horrifying as that not resulting in at least one fatality. Yet as gruesome as it was, my dad was there, without a moment's hesitation, doing what he could to help.
He was, in a word, heroic.
If I hadn't been too grief-stricken, I would have shared this story at my father's wake. I wanted all those gathered to know why my father had always been, and always will be, my hero. And it's not just the way he helped those bikers nearly thirty years ago, or how he spent nearly 8 hours under constant fire from Viet Cong while he provided cover for medics trying to extract his fellow marines who were wounded and dying, all with his leg a tattered mess from bullet wounds, or the lives he saved as an EMT, or how he provided food and shelter for his family as a carpenter during Reagan's 80s, how he fell thirty feet and shattered his shoulder only to suffer through months of grueling physical therapy just so he could swing his hammer again, how he made my troubled friends always feel welcomed in his home, how he taught me to drive at 14, or how to build a fire, or how to cut down a tree, or how to read, or how to ENJOY reading, or how he inspired me to become a writer, or any of the other myriad reasons.
Dad is my hero because he is who I want to be when I grow up.
James W. Nelson 1948 - 2009
Photo by little Ary McKenna Nelson, age 3
