Two days before I was due to present at the Sisters Festival of Books, I sprained my back. The Festival (staged by Paulina Springs Books in Sisters, Ore.) gave each participating author five minutes to introduce their book before moving to their table to sign copies. Here’s how my turn went down.
![On March 27, 1997, I suffered a crippling accident while skiing cross-country in Oregon’s Mount Jefferson Wilderness. With the cartilage and medial collateral ligament in my knee ruptured, I faced a powerful snowstorm hammering the backcountry. I had no tent to shelter me nor a shovel with which to dig a snow cave. In the frigid dark that evening, three men from the National Ski Patrol found me and hauled me out of the wilderness on a modular sled. I didn’t see their faces or get their names. Twenty-nine years later, my friend Dave Haake—whom my wife and I had been regularly hiring for carpentry work for the past two decades—read the chapter in my outdoors-adventure memoir Miscalculated Risks recounting my harrowing struggle for survival and ensuing rescue. To his (and my) astonishment, Dave realized he was one of the anonymous NSP volunteers who had hauled me out of the wilderness twenty-nine years ago. It’s a small world. [Photo: Dave Haake (left) and me in April, 2026]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:433cvypooepv3bp4q3jj6xdm/bafkreibwhmpofaw4gjaqhm4l7trlys2rkhxm6m25q4atoleg7wwtawwlsu)
