Messy knee!
To set this story up, I first need to say that even though I am English born and bred, I've always been happiest when walking in the Scottish Highlands. My favorite place in the world, in fact, is the Isle of Skye in the Inner Hebrides, and that is where the following story takes place.

Twas the summer of 1999, the month before I started secondary school as it happens, and my family and I were camping in a small campsite just north of Portree. This, for those of you unfamiliar with Skye, is a rather small town which is still, for all intents and purposes, the capital of the island - there being no larger settlements. Tourist hub and all that jazz. Anyhow, it was a bright and sunny day with no sign of this changing, and we decided to get our bikes out and cycle to the Braes (a mountainous coastal region to the south) and back. All went well until we reached the beginning of the road up to the Braes, when things got rather difficult. What followed were 2 hours of labour as we rode along a twisting, steep path up the valley, until we reached the outskirts of the Braes, with some miles to go before turning back.

By this time it was raining. My parents told me to go ahead while they took a photo of my brother. I went round a bend but, before I could brake, momentum carried me down a very steep and sharply turning road. The wind was blowing rain in my eyes, and I couldn’t see anything. I hit my brakes, but the rain had saturated them beyond use. But I stayed on my bike until I reached the bottom of the road, where unknown to me the rain had washed loose gravel from the road and hillside into a collection point. I hit said patch of gravel on the road, and the sudden change in momentum flung me off my bike. I landed head first, and I am certain that my helmet saved my life. The rain had made the gravel loose, and I skidded along the ground before coming to a stop, tearing open my jeans at the knees in the process. I lay there for what seemed to be years, but must have been only seconds. I heard a car coming, but the sound, while seeming close, was in fact being carried across the valley. I dragged myself off the road, along with my bike, and soon my family arrived. Now I saw my injuries were mainly grazes, but my knee, where the jeans had ripped away, appeared to be severely messed up, with blood everywhere.

The car I had heard passed by. The driver asked if I needed help, but we politely refused as we didn't want to cause a fuss. Also we didn't yet realise how badly my knee was damaged. However, minutes later he came back, and insisted in bringing my father and I to his house, to clean me up and to get my wounded knee seen to as much as possible. When we arrived I was given hot, sweet tea to remedy my shock, while my knee was being cleaned. This took around one or two hours as so much gravel had gotten into the wound, also a large amount of flesh was gone or damaged to the point where it would in time fall away, and it took some time to stop the bleeding. Amusingly, the man (a farmer as you may have guessed) put a large amount of high-power antiseptic vetinary cream intended for livestock on my knee. Which makes sense, really - when you are that far out, you need powerful medical tools to prevent your herds dying from relatively small injuries becoming septic. In any case, I was lucky - the farmer told us that hill was an accident blackspot, and that only a month before a young man had been killed when something similar happened to him, but on a motorbike. He had been thrown over a fence at the side of the road, but failed to clear the metal fencepost fully and had been killed instantly.

We eventually said our goodbyes and (very slowly, as my knee was moreorless paralysed with pain and swelling) we made our way back to the campsite. Before leaving the island later that week, I wrote the farmer a thankyou letter. The wound itself took several months to heal, as it carried on weeping a foul smelling fluid for a long time, and in fact turned out to contain a very deep seated infection which would have festered a lot longer had I not knocked my knee at school a few months later and torn the wound again - this time releasing the pressure of the infection and letting it heal. Nowadays, the scar is almost invisible believe it or not, as a combination of time and the natural paleness of my skin has let it fade.

So that is my story of the nicest thing someone ever did for me - the farmer who, despite my insistence that I would be okay, turned his car around and took an injured 11 year old and his father in to ensure they were okay, not because he had to, or because he owed us something. Just because he could, and believed it was the right thing to do.
(Lord of Balrogs, Sun 5 Oct 2008, 14:57, 1 reply)

*click* for two reasons
1 - That farmer sounds absolutely ace.

2 - You're the same age as me :D
( Agnostic Antichrist Baltimora, Mon 6 Oct 2008, 11:41, closed)