What lay beyond the snow

A phone call draws us into an ordeal that ends with a Christmas like no other

Headline in the Jan. 18, 1978, Corvallis Gazette-Times.

Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.
— President Teddy Roosevelt

LIKE A LOT OF CHRISTMAS STORIES, this one begins with falling snow — but not the usual happy December kind. Instead, a snowfall coming down so hard that as Sally and I headed west from Bend over Santiam Pass on this Sunday night in March 1977, I was getting dizzy driving through it.

A minor disturbance, however, compared to the one that had triggered the trip to Salem in the first place.

“What did the hospital chaplain say again?” asked Sally from the passenger seat of our Datsun B-210.

“That we needed to come ASAP.”

I sniffled.

“That ‘Your mother has been in an automobile accident … and she may not make it … through the night.’”

Then quiet except for the thrum of the engine and the occasional sweep of the wipers. And the silent touch of Sally’s hand atop mine on the gearshift knob. And the blinding snow shielding the unknown that lay beyond.

The nightmare had begun two hours earlier when I’d gotten the phone call in Bend, where I was the 24-year-old sports editor of The Bulletin newspaper and Sally, 23, worked at U.S. Bank.

That afternoon, following a day of cross-country skiing in the Cascades, my mother Marolyn, six days shy of 50, and father Warren, 53, were heading home to Corvallis. About 40 miles east of Salem, as they neared Mill City on Oregon 22, my father lost control of the car at 50 mph. The vehicle veered across the highway — fortunately no oncoming traffic — and struck a tree.

“My first thought,” my father later told the Corvallis Gazette-Times, “was, ‘Oh, God, we’re dead!’”

A wicked jolt forward. A crunch of metal on the fir tree. A flash of pain in Dad’s left arm. A scream of anguish from Mom. A sudden disquieting quiet.

“She just seemed to be lying there, hurting,” my father told reporter John Marshall.

Dad had only broken an arm but the seatbelt had severed Mom’s intestines.

That night, at Salem Memorial Hospital, the surgeon who did the initial operation on her took my father aside when he was finished.

“I did what I could,” he said, “but your wife has only about a 20 percent chance of surviving.”

My father’s knees buckled; he fell to the floor.

Sally and I arrived about 10 p.m.; my sister Linda Crew and her husband Herb, who lived south of Corvallis, had already joined Dad in the ICU with Mom.