Things They Lost in the Flood
Dil and Sue Griffiths were still recovering from one life-altering tragedy last December when the worst storm in a generation sent Lewis County through a wash cycle of swelling rivers and mudslides, inflicting millions of dollars worth of damage.
AS FOR THE FIRST THING DIL GRIFFITHS LOST IN 2007, nothing will bring it back. Not federal aid, not state-commissioned studies on river hydraulics, not the love and good will of well-meaning neighbors. Funny, all he was doing when he lost what can never return was mowing the lawn. Out on River Road they called it brush hogging—mulching down the monster growth of tangled weeds that explode from the soil in this damp, cloud-covered corner of southwestern Washington. When your field needed brush hogging you called Dil Griffiths, the Welshman with the shock of silver hair. Known throughout western Lewis County for his llamas—eight head of the shaggy, long-necked animals on his 10 acres—Dil also raised and sold hay and took up small carpentry projects, skills learned growing up in the old country, in the village of Talybont, Wales. Call Dil to brush hog your land and he’d wheel his bucking, sputtering 1958 Massey Ferguson tractor down the highway, towing a low-slung rotor-blade mower, roll onto your property, and rid your fields of overgrowth.
So there he was on a summer day, August 8, brush hogging a neighbor’s weed-choked pasture when they swarmed. Hornets. Dil’s deathly allergic. Ten years earlier a sting sent a wave of numbness over his body before he slurred to his wife Sue that he was going to the bathroom to sit in a cool, dark place, where he slumped off the toilet and onto the floor. Paramedics were called to revive him. The next time, on the back steps of the house, a hornet sting rendered him mute. Sue could see the whites of his eyes as the pupils rolled toward the back of his skull. He collapsed like sunflower stalk hacked at the base. Paramedics again, and a hospital bed. He bought epinephrine—an injection could save his life from a sting, the doctor said—and he usually kept a dose of the drug close at hand.
Not today. Atop the tractor, he felt a prick at the side of his neck. Hornets orbited his head. Shit. Must’ve run over a nest in the weeds, stirred the buggers into a frenzy. He hit the tractor’s kill switch and jumped. But the machine had momentum and when he hit the ground the back wheel rolled over his legs. The left leg, still pinned, went under the mower. He watched the tractor and trailer slow to a halt and tried to stand up—and tumbled back down. Tried again. Fell down. Finally he looked: a growing puddle of blood where his left foot should’ve been.
Help. No one heard him. He yelled again. The owner of the field was in a nearby shed but a football game on the radio canceled out Dil’s screams. On his hands and knees, Dil crawled toward the nearest house. As the shock wore off and the reality of the severed foot set in, waves of pain rolled up his leg, wringing his cries with an extra twist of desperation. He wriggled 50 feet through the grass before a woman in a nearby home thought she heard an injured animal.
She stepped outside to look. Dil Griffiths?
By the time Sue arrived the residents of River Road had crowded around her husband, covered him with a blanket, lit him a few cigarettes. She thought she was there to rescue Dil from another sting. When she first received the phone call—emergency, come quick—she grabbed his epinephrine from the house, thinking, “Stupid man, forgot to take this with him.”
But the first thing Dil Griffiths lost in 2007 wasn’t just his foot. It was most of the left leg. Life-flighted to Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, he winced as the doctors told him that if he was to ever use a prosthesis they’d have to cut off everything below the knee.
It was the worst thing that ever happened to Dil, the event by which he would divide his life—before the accident and after the accident. That’s how he looked at it for the few months he spent tinkering around the farm on crutches. But something much worse than a mower blade would soon spin into the farmer’s life, a force much hungrier for devastation gathering thousands of miles away over the Pacific. Soon Dil, his wife, their neighbors, all of western Lewis County, and beyond would learn a new definition of loss.
Published: December 2008
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