Our hometown has hosted an event called “Thrill on the Hill” for several years now. The event takes place on one of the most significant hills in town, which also just so happens to be one of the town’s busiest streets. Usually, a couple of days before the weekend-long event begins, traffic on that road is rerouted and the road is closed, for preparations. When the event first started, it was a winter event, so the hill became a snow-covered tubing hill for a few days.

Years later, due to the popularity of the winter event, a summer event developed. This event was a street-sized waterslide, with a wading pool/water play area at the bottom of the hill.

From where my family lives in our town, these events occur about a third of a mile away, so they have a draw simply because they are happening so near-by.

The winter event is less reliable, since you can never really tell, in January or February in our area, whether it’s going to be snowy and in the teens, or clear skies in the mid-thirties. In the nine or ten years (I’m guessing) that the event has been happening, they’ve probably cancelled the winter version of it as many times as it has occurred.

The summer version of the Thrill on the Hill happened for the first time in 2016, but we were out of town on vacation at the time. The second annual summer Thrill on the Hill happened in 2017. While we weren’t on vacation at the time, we were involved –my wife and I– in building a wall.

Our family lives in a home that we moved into in the late summer of 2009. Between 2009 and 2017, my wife and I had been arguing, on and off, from time to time, about what we were going to do about the retaining wall that needed to be built in our front yard. I wanted to build a wall out of cinder block, because it would match the retaining wall that our neighbor hand in her front yard and the retaining wall that her neighbor had next to her.

My wife, on the other hand, wanted to do something different. We argued about building materials and plans for almost eight years. Then, in 2017, we decided that it was time to stop the arguing about the wall and time to start moving forward in making progress.

On August 5th, 2017, the Saturday of the summer Thrill on the Hill weekend, I’d rented a jackhammer from a local tool rental shop, and I was working on destroying the buried retaining wall that we were going to have to remove in order to be able to build a new wall with nothing in the way. While I was working on the jackhammer, my wife and three kids went to the Thrill on the Hill, mostly to stay out of my way.

They were doing their thing, and I was doing mine. And a few hours passed.

Until, while I was working on the jackhammer, a golf cart pulled up in front of my house with my wife and twin daughters on the back bench and my son, sitting pale and in shock, next to a local firefighter, driving the golf cart.

Before I was able to put any of what I was seeing together into a coherent understanding of what was going on, my wife said to me, “You need to bring the car around because Garrett needs to go to the hospital.” I looked at the firefighter, who is also my trusted mechanic and a personal friend, and I could see the look in his face that said that things were serious and I needed to do what I was being told.

My son had fallen in the wet slipperiness of the Thrill on the Hill and broken his arm.

Our garage, which is behind our house (we live on a corner lot) on an alleyway, never seemed so far away. I got my car out and brought it around to where my family was, in front of the house. We loaded my son into the car and took him to the hospital emergency room. To keep his mind off of the pain he was experiencing during the drive, we quizzed him on basic math facts.

We got to the emergency room and got our son checked in. He was given the pain medication that he needed to have, while x-rays were taken and then the break was “reset” and wrapped so his swelling could go down.

We ended up setting him up afterward with an orthopedic specialist, to continue to handle his case moving forward. He ended up having a “closed reduction”, done by the orthopedic specialist and held in place with a few pins and a cast.

The situation was a little more complicated because he broke his right arm. It was even more complicated because he was going to be an eighth grader that fall and had received a draft pick into the high school band. And a right handed trumpet player, with a broken right arm, has a significant mountain to climb, for sure. Garrett ended up playing his trumpet that fall by holding it up with his left arm and activating the valves with the fingers sticking out of the end of his cast.

If you’ve ever had to use your left arm for something that you’re used to using your right arm for, you’ll quickly discover the difference in the strength levels of the two arms, quite often.

Needless to say, we’ve not been back to the summer version of the Thrill on the Hill.