I’m working with Moose Miller.  He tells stories naturally, but when he thinks about telling his story

1. Rained hard -> It was raining in sheets of water, like the waves of an ocean – “The sun had just barely come up, and that was amazing by itself because it was raining so hard that the water on ground was bouncing up and hitting me.
2. Have you ever walked on a log?  If you never walked on a log, it’s like a pirate adventure.  The kind of adventure you have when you’re forced to walk the plank and plunge into the deep sea where crocodiles are waiting to chomp you up in little bits. I was walking on logs.
3. There’s one good thing about walking a plank–only one that I know of–and that is that at least it stays in one place.  Logs, on the other hand, can tumble down a hill, particularly when the ground is as soft as pea soup.  That’s what it was like on this particular Thursday.
4. I’m on top of this log, trying to get above it, to the top of a hill.  The hill is almost straight up and down.  It’s like a canyon, and I stepped on a buck-out–that’s logger language for a log that has fallen and hit a stump, and broke–it won’t make lumber.  It can’t be used at the mill.
5. I just went to step on, and BAM, it shot me backwards, and I started rolling down the hill, and every time my hands and feet would come to ground, I would push so I would go side hill, inside of rolling straight down, the way the logs were going.  Speaking of logs, one rushed past me; I thought I’d be okay when it went by me, and then one hit me.
6. When it hit me, it pushed me into the mud.  Thick cold mud that probably felt like frozen cookie batter.   I didn’t even notice the mud because the pain was so intense, like nothing I’d ever felt before.  It’s hard to describe, you can imagine it when you know that the log broke all but the top four ribs on both side, my back L3, 4 and 5.  I thought it the worst was over, and all of the sudden, the buck out crushed my leg from my knee to my ankle.  It pushed up my body into my head, and it burst the blood vessels in my eyes, and everything went black, but I was still conscious.
7. I could hear the long whistles blowing.  Long, sharp sounds that cut through the rain, and I knew  was in trouble because when a man is down, you blow 7 long whistles.
8. It seemed like I laid there for an eternity before anyone got there to help me.  I was embedded in the ground. When they finally got to me, they couldn’t get a helicopter in to help me out, so they had to pack me up twelve-hundred yards to a landing, in a storm that was so bad that there was mud sliding down the hills threatening to wipe out my saviors.  It took them forever to carry me up. They hooked a wire up to the basket because they couldn’t carry the basket up the hill without it.
9. When they finally got me to the landing where the ambulance was, they took me to the hospital, and I scribbled my signature on a paper because the doctor told me that he only had two-to-four minutes  to save my life.  I remember them pushing me down the hall, and the nurses were shaving me on my way to the surgery.
10. When they pushed me into the operating room, they didn’t even take me off the gurney.  The doctor had a scalpel in his hand, and the last thing I remember was him stabbing me below the chest, at the bottom of the sternum.
11. My scar is not anywhere close to a straight cut.  There was no time for a nice straight cut.  It goes down, and over and around, but I’m here, and I’m here to tell you that logging is an dangerous professional, and if you ever do it think three times before you start scrambling up logs in the pouring rain.  Indeed, those logs could turn into a plank, and you just might get eaten by crocodiles.