The morning Allan Strissel lived out every farmer`s nightmare began as it often does in this isolated community just south of the Canadian border: with neighbor helping neighbor.
Strissel, a powerfully built man in his late 50s, climbed down from his tractor to pull loose a hay jam in his baler. He was mowing grass along Montana Highway 432 near his farm, helping to keep the roadside clear and picking up a few bales of hay in the bargain.
This morning, July 10, 1991, the unusually wet grass repeatedly jammed the rollers that compress the hay so it can be coiled into a roll.
To save time, Strissel left the tractor motor running, still engaged to the baler. He did it once too often.
”I got in too big a hurry,” Strissel said. He pulled the hay loose, but then, as he says, ”I didn`t let go soon enough-you get away with it 1,000 times and the 1,001st time it grabs you.”
The rollers caught his hands. In a moment, they pulled in his arms up to the elbows. Strissel braced his chest against a hitch bar on the baler. The rollers continued to spin on his arms.
”If I`d passed out, it would have sucked me in,” Strissel said. He remembers trying to stay calm and ”praying a little, I`ll tell you.”
Sometimes an hour or more goes by between vehicles on Montana 432. This morning the minutes ticked by, the tractor motor chugged, and nobody came.
Strissel`s ordeal began far from sight and sound of any other person. But in time, it drew in neighbors, the townspeople of Rudyard, and finally the whole region of the Hi-Line, named for the northernmost rail line in the country. Unseen ties bind this place together, turning emptiness into being.
About a mile away, Elaine Hadford, who had lent Strissel the tractor, was getting ready to take her 5-year-old granddaughter to Great Falls, a two-hour drive to the south, when another neighbor, Clarence Lynch, telephoned, asking her to tell Strissel to come over to his farm and cut a few acres of hay. Although Hadford had other things to do, she decided to pass along the message.
As she drove toward Strissel`s house, she saw her son, Gary, driving toward her from that direction. Gary kept looking back up the highway as though he had just seen something wrong.
They went back and found Strissel.
”All I could see was the bottom half of him sticking out of the baler,” Elaine said. Gary shut down the tractor engine.
”Please help, I`m caught,” Strissel said.
Gary, 39, tried to loosen the rollers on Strissel`s arms, but failed. Strissel told him, ”I think I`m passing out.”
Gary said: ”No, you`re not. You`ve got to tell me how to get you out.”
`You`ve got to come`
Elaine Hadford went back to her farm and telephoned Rudyard`s volunteer ambulance crew. The call logged in at 11:53 a.m., ringing at the same time in various businesses and homes.
When it rang at Bobby Toner`s Tire-Rama shop, someone ran to alert the registered nurse, Coleen Vestal, 44. An ambulance volunteer for 15 years, she runs a wholesale picture framing business in town with her husband, Ronald.
”I thought we would be facing a bleeding problem,” Vestal recalled, matter-of-factly.
Within four minutes, enough crew members had assembled to head out to help Strissel.
Steven Brownlee, who had trained as a volunteer but never had been on a run, heard about the accident while home eating lunch. He jumped into his pickup truck, drove into town and nearly crashed into the ambulance.
”You`ve got to come, we`re short of help,” Vestal shouted to Brownlee. Despite his lack of training, his presence on the crew turned out to be vital. On the way, Vestal and Brownlee rehearsed what they would do about the severe bleeding they expected to encounter.
Bobby Toner and one of his Tire-Rama employees, Rick Pester, took one of their service vehicles and beat the ambulance to the scene. They arrived with plenty of tools, including a cutting torch, but still could not separate the rubber rollers holding Strissel`s arms.
”As we pulled up, Steve and I jumped out,” Vestal said. ”We could see Allan in the kneeling position. I assumed it might be too late.” It was 12:02 p.m., according to the ambulance log, about 40 minutes after Strissel had been caught.
Vestal asked if he was ”still with us.”
”They said: `Oh, yeah. He`s talking to us,` ” she recalled.
Polite and calm
She got down beside Strissel. He still had on his glasses. Straw mixed with sweat had jammed between the glasses and his eyes.
”Take the damn things off,” Strissel said. Vestal did, and brushed the straw from his face.
Brownlee, meanwhile, had an idea. The baler looked the same as one he had used two weeks earlier on leased grazing land. Brownlee had freed a jam in that machine by turning a nut backwards with a heavy wrench.
”I ran to see if this baler had that same hex nut on the main drive shaft,” Brownlee said. It did. Lying directly beneath the hex nut, as though by an act of providence, was a 36-inch crescent wrench, the proper tool for the job.
”Turn this and it will roll him out,” Brownlee shouted. Bobby Toner and Gary Hadford together leaned into the wrench. The nut turned, and Strissel`s arms backed out.
Amazingly, there was no bleeding.
”He smelled of burned skin. He arms looked black and the meat was gone,” said Vestal. ”I think the rollers cauterized the wound and that probably saved his life.”
Five minutes after the ambulance got to the scene, Strissel was on his way to Liberty County Hospital, 20 miles away in Chester.
”I`ve got to have something for pain,” he told Vestal. The ambulance carried no painkillers.
”He was polite and calm,” Vestal said. ”Often people are angry and agitated and take it out on attendants.”
After initial treatment at Liberty County, he was flown to Salt Lake City by medevac airplane. The decision was made to amputate both arms several inches above the elbows.
While Strissel was gone, the accident began to haunt this town of ”596 nice people . . . (and) one ol` sorehead,” as a road sign proclaims.
Townspeople discovered fears and sensitivities they didn`t know they possessed. Before the story ended, insofar as it has ended, those fears and Strissel`s loss would bind them together into something more than town or man could have been alone.
And along the way, Strissel would face a crueler test and suffer a graver loss than he did even that July morning.
In the days immediately after the accident, those who had been at the scene began to have trouble sleeping. They worried if they had done all they could to help; they became irritable and lost appetite; they suffered flashbacks.
One began asking his wife to wear heavy perfume and to perfume their bedroom, though he had never liked scent before.
”You can`t get rid of the smells,” Vestal said. ”You think they`re in your nose, your clothes, your hair, even after bathing and shampooing. It keeps haunting you.”
Several got together at a debriefing arranged by Jeff Olsgaard, pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Rudyard, Strissel`s parish. They discovered their common fears. And they tried to put together a coherent picture of what had happened. They solved the mystery of the well-positioned crescent wrench when Brownlee learned that the Tire-Rama men had brought it with them.
”This wasn`t a therapy session, it was a chance to talk about what happened and see how things fit together,” said Olsgaard, who has a master`s degree in clinical psychology.
Even with that help, people worried about what was to come. What would Allan be like when he got home? Should they look at his arms? Would they be able to ask questions about how he coped?
In Salt Lake City, Strissel worried about the same thing. As he lay in his hospital bed, he said later, he worried what it would be like to come home so changed in appearance.
He asked a nurse what he should do. ”She told me, `You do everything you can just the way you did it before,` ” Strissel said. ”If you want to know what guided me, that was it.”
Strissel came home July 19, barely 10 days after the accident. The next morning, heavily bandaged and still needing help for even the simplest tasks, he went for coffee at the Rudyard cafe, as he would usually do.
”I heard Allan was having coffee,” Vestal said. ”I wondered what I should say. I wondered what he would look like.
”Allan saw me and first thing he said, `There`s my No. 1 nurse!` That made it all right. I walked over and gave him a hug. It was like seeing your uncle. He`s back and everything`s going to be OK.”
`Dark territory`
Last summer was good to the Hi-Line. Much rain fell, a true rarity, setting up a bumper crop.
With the town behind him, Strissel started to pull his life together. Before the accident, he had pledged his acreage to a federal crop reservation program, guaranteeing a steady income. But with a record crop in the fields, he applied for a hardship waiver to delay retiring the land.
When he went to the county seat, Havre, on Aug. 31 to sign the papers for the waiver, his neighbors took advantage of his absence to arrange a surprise. They pulled a fleet of 11 combines into his fields and brought in his crop. He came back to town and found trucks loaded with his grain parked up and down Main Street in a parade-like salute (the salute was unintended; the trucks were backed up because of a snafu at the grain elevator).
That evening, his crop secure and his future at least possible, Strissel got a numbing telephone call.
His son Rick, 23, was among the missing crew members in a head-on collision of two Burlington Northern freight trains not far from Rudyard. The single line of track where the accident occurred is called ”dark territory” by railroad crews because there are no signals to warn of approaching trains. The call left Strissel in his own dark territory.
He sat on the sofa in his front room. Neighbors showed up. Jeff Olsgaard talked to him.
”They can take my arms,” Strissel said, ”but don`t take my son.”
Searchers, some using bulldozers, found Rick`s remains in the tangled wreck the next day. The community held one of the largest funerals seen on the Hi-Line, with services in Havre-where the family of Strissel`s wife, Delores, from whom he was then separated, lived-as well as in Rudyard.
Strissels have lived along the Hi-Line since 1909, when Allan`s father, William, came from South Dakota to homestead. He was too young to file for homesteading until two years later, but he wasn`t too young to work. He soon had a half section, 320 acres.
If you`re a quitter, you don`t last long on the Hi-Line. The land around here is so dry that farmers plow only half their acreage, alternating strips of wheat with strips of non-crop vegetation. The unplowed strips husband enough water in a year to raise grain the next.
Another new start
After the death of his son, Allan Strissel began rebuilding his life a second time. His other children, two sons, David and Bill, and a daughter, Lana, have helped.
Some friends turned Strissel`s shower stall into a kind of human car wash, with an old automobile washer-wiper mechanism that spins a buffer on top and makes two brushes go back and forth at leg level. A stationary hair brush allows him to scrub his head. Other locally invented gadgets let him work in the kitchen and even drive his pickup truck.
”If it hadn`t been for the community, I don`t think I`d have made it,”
Strissel said.
Strissel was outfitted with mechanical arms in a series of therapy sessions, in Utah and last winter in Texas. With them, he can use a fork and spoon, though cutting meat is better done by someone else. He has to work so hard at eating that he breaks a sweat.
But there`s no precision, so he uses sticky matting, the kind found in motor homes to keep cups and plates from sliding, to hold his plate still. Because he likes to eat with other people, Strissel keeps a piece of the matting at his regular spot in the Rudyard cafe.
Today, science offers far better than conventional mechanical arms. An advanced electro-mechanical arm can allow a well-trained person to button buttons, eat with comfort and pick up objects as difficult as cigarette ash.
They can cost $50,000 each.
”If somebody out here has a problem-diabetes or broken legs-we do a breakfast,” said Katherine Norenberg, who went to school in Rudyard with Strissel. ”This was more elaborate.”
With the goal of a ”bionic arm,” as it came to be called, the community threw Strissel a wing-ding. More than 1,000 people showed up for a barbecue, auction and dance that lasted the weekend of Oct. 11 and 12. Organized by Norenberg and others, they roasted seven pigs, served more than 500 hamburgers, set out 13 kegs of beer, made untold pots of chili and cooked uncounted numbers of hot dogs.
Some big-ticket items were donated for auction, including two sets of car tires from Tire-Rama, a used Ford, prints by a noted regional artist, and a live colt. A Lutheran welfare society put up a matching grant of $600.
At the conclusion, the community presented Strissel with about $46,000, enough for him to plan on one new artificial arm when what`s left of his real arms finishes healing.
`Never cried for himself`
Strissel has brought something different to life for himself and this community. He lives with his troubles, which include a divorce that became final last fall and several years of treatment for prostate cancer, without apparent self-pity and even with good humor.
He has avoided becoming the ”ol` sorehead” the road sign claims lives in Rudyard. Nobody averts eyes or speaks in hushed tones around him.
”He never cried for himself,” said a cousin, Richard Strissel.
When a grandson invited him to be a show-and-tell exhibit for his 3rd-grade class at the Blue Sky school, he went. He answered all questions and passed his mechanical arms around for inspection. Everybody enjoyed it, Strissel said, including himself.
He went hunting last fall with a specially rigged rifle-he locks his mechanical arms` pincers onto two eye-bolts in the stock and pulls a string attached to the trigger with his teeth-and got a deer and an antelope the same day.
He has tried to help others similarly afflicted, and had some success counseling fellow patients in physical therapy. But Rudyard lies a long way from any population center where that could be full-time work. Strissel`s future lies here.
”These are Montana farmers,” said Olsgaard, the minister. ”To live out here you have to know how to survive. Allan typifies their hopes of how they might act if this happened to them. There is a sense of learning from experience.”
In a place like Rudyard, you don`t waste things, not rainwater nor a horrific experience nor pity. You store them for times when they will count.
