Lending a Hand
680 wds
A personal statement not included in the incident report
Approaching the aircraft in which she was about to fly, a Tyler woman stumbled and in falling forward, reached into the spinning blades of the propeller. The propeller cut off her right hand above the wrist and flung it about fifty yards away into tall grass. The woman, age forty-eight, was taken to an Austin area hospital.
The pilot, airport manager and every other available employee searched for the hand without success. They knew it had to be within a hundred yards of the aircraft which remained, silenced, on the taxiway where the incident occurred. To me the aircraft had a forlorn look, a cowling hung low look of guilt or outrage. I examined the prop but could see no blood on it. I didn’t touch it, in case the engine, in a fit of anger or indignation, coughed and also trimmed me.
An airport rep came over to us at the skydiving facility and announced, in a voice echoing through the tall ceilings over the long tables where we used to pack our chutes (in the old days we jumped round canopies and needed long narrow surfaces to stretch them out on to clear the lines) that the airport would pay one hundred dollars to any person who found the woman’s hand. We rushed the door, about ten of us, and headed for the search area.
The grass was very tall on one side of the taxi-way. It had been scheduled to be cut the week before but something happened to the lawn mower and then something happened to repairing the lawn mower, so the grass was three weeks tall ~ very thick.
My method of search was to look where no one else had looked. The grass on the other side of the taxi way, between it and runway 9-27, was short, sparse and gravelly. There was a drain in the middle of it but no blood on the steel grid covering it and i was told by an airport employee a light was shined down into it and the gravel floor of the drain sump was clear of the severed hand.
On the tall grass side of the taxi-way the men formed a line walking side by side, parting the grass with their feet, the airport manager shouting, “Walk careful, don’t tramp down the grass over it. Look close; make sure you look carefully,” and other things, a typical military routine of mildly irritating noise to keep us on edge and alert.
Al Coovert found the hand, and there was no better skydiver to get that lucky hundred bucks. Al was poor and spent all his money and most of his time on jumps. He was a big, husky guy, direct and practical. I had joined the line and turned when Al shouted and we saw him in the middle of the line with the hand. He turned it and clasped it, handshake style, and said, “Glad to meet you ma’am.” The fairly cleanly cut stump leaked as he shook it. The leakage could have been caused by Al squeezing it. He then examined the rings on the fingers and said, “Hey, this gal has some gold, lookee here!” Coovert was a vet. He had been a navy medic on the Ike. At that moment the airport manager arrived at his side and Coovert dropped the hand into a plastic bag full of ice.
“Please follow me, sir,” the manager said and he and a couple of his men turned to walk toward the terminal, Al close behind. For a quick moment Al marched stiffly, turned to us and gave us a left hand salute with a big grin.
With hand in bag the authorities went to the cafeteria where it was iced more and taken to the hospital. The hand was reattached, we were amazed to hear, and after some physical therapy the thumb and two of the fingers worked came the news a few months later. These medical people like surgeons can do some truly remarkable things.
end of “Lending a Hand”