The Hanover Scene
OUR severest critics have never stamped us an afficionado of the snow-swept hills, and our dearest friends would not con- fuse us with an ice gnome - certainly not one marching from the Norways or even West Lebanon. But despite the fact that we might be considered one of the less likely prospects for mishap on an icy slope, our Sitznummer came up in mid- December on a shortrun - ice base, 1/8" powder cover, fast. Lacking the proper wax on our overshoes, we went the course, all six inches of it, ending as a feature if not an embellishment of the middle of North Main Street.
This was our first experience with either a broken bone or the D.O.C. Rescue Patrol. The former is disconcerting, the latter amazing. Almost before we could have said "Jack Robinson," had that comparatively inoffensive expletive occurred to us, we found ourself surrounded by stalwart mittened forms, a blanket under us, a sheepskin covering us, our head resting on a Chemistry text, and a lighted cigarette placed between our lips. We were stretchered, station-wagoned, emergency-roomed, x-rayed, and launched into an extended Christmas vacation within miuntes of our original sin.
From a fractured femur it is but a step, or stretcher ride, to quiet weeks in bed. Skiers know and accept this as part of their mysterious trade, but the more sedentary are apt to chafe at the denial of ambling privileges. There is, of course, an initial interval of "discomfort," only partially relieved by nostrums and ice packs; but this is not a discourse on pain - a tiring so ephemeral that only a poet could recall that "the faded dreams of Nineteen Ten were hell in Nineteen Five." Our sharpest recollection is our resistance to ropes and pulleys and sandbags - a combat against the Traction Interests as Quixotic as any waged by a municipal reform administration in the wicked early years of the century.
But that belongs to the period when we were being fattened for the ritual, which consisted of the insertion into our skeletal structure of a silver nail as magical in its properties as any bullet reserved for the Emperor Jones. Here, rather, we would treat of the post-op- erative era, while bones indulge in knitting - so intolerably dull and unhurried a procedure than one can sympathize with Mme. Defarge's occasional display of ill nature.
Patience is a quality most extolled by those not called upon to display it. Griselda would have made an ideal hip case, and we are surprised that she did not add this to her calendar. Many of us, however, lack this virtue and must, perforce, substitute a sullen resignation and an attempt to finish FinnegansWake and Remembrance of ThingsPast. There is a certain lack of variety in remaining flat on one's back twenty-four or twenty-five hours a day, and the current practice of inserting a sheepskin between the linen and one's pressure points creates the illusion of being continually back in the saddle again (Yippeel). Supine eating is difficult for those who were brought up not to slump at the table, and toothbrushing is as complicated as removing one's trousers in a lower berth.
There are long periods of monotony, as there are in warfare, but the very routine may become diverting, and every slight advance is a dove popping into the Ark with a sprig of olive. To sit up enough so that swallowing need no longer be around an awkward corner of the gullet, to touch a tentative toe to ground and, Antaeus-like, renew our strength, to be accorded even limited courtesy of the post —joy is it in that day to be alive.
And the nearest one can come to not being in a hospital, though hospitalized, is to be in Dick Hall's House. It is even better, some undergraduates aver, than taking mid-year exams. Our word to anyone considering the advisability of breaking a hip is: (a) don't do it; or (b) if you insist, so pinpoint your performance that the Ski Rescue Patrol is at hand and that Dick's House is just around the corner.
