Self-reliance Is Good; Accepting Help Is Better

So we started out with the spaniel last Sunday morning with the intention of just getting out of the house and breaking up the cabin fever by avoiding I-40, drifting up back roads from Wilmington to Chapel Hill and walking around the Carolina campus for a while. But I hadn't had breakfast and was getting cranky, so we found a McDonald's in Burgaw.

Window service only. Long line. It's a right turn for me into the McDonald's lot. A guy in a battered red GMC Sierra pickup was in the left turn lane facing me. Technically, he was there before me, but since he was in the left-turn lane, he had to yield to me.

The line was long, and there was space for only one vehicle to turn off the road and into the line. I'm thinking, Well, he was here first but he's in a left-turn lane and there's space for traffic behind him to go around if he has to wait for another opening. But if he goes in first, I'll have to wait and traffic will back up behind me. So I turned into the lot. He gets off the road by turning left and stopping parallel to me, off the road but, according to the unwritten rules, he's behind me in line.

So we're sitting there waiting for the line to move. I'm thinking, You know, I'd be a bit annoyed if I was that guy, although I've been in that position many times. Get there first in the left turn lane, but have to yield to the right turn, and somebody who arrives after you gets in front of you. But that's just the way it goes. And I'm thinking, if I was that guy, I'd probably be muttering a few mild profanities right now.

The line moves, and a space opens up in front. On impulse, I roll down the passenger-side window and we motion him to go ahead. He nods and moves in front. I see a few more details about his pickup truck, including the big yellow "Don't Tread On Me" flag sticker high on the tailgate of his GMC.

Line moves slowly, but finally we get to the payment window and I hand the woman six bucks to pay for my coffee and #2 breakfast meal. But she smiles and says, "The gentleman in front of you paid for your meal." Wow, I say. Thank you. He's waiting at the pickup window in front of me for his order. I tap the horn to get his attention. He's talking on his cell phone, an old-style flipper. But he glances in his rear view mirror and I wave and mouth Thank you, and he nods, gets his stuff, and drives away.

A pleasant little reminder that common courtesy isn't dead and maybe humanity isn't as bad as I think.

But there's more.

An hour or so later we're on a nameless back road headed more or less toward Elizabethtown when we hear a strange noise. Then the steering wheel starts pulling weirdly and I realize the passenger side front tire has blown out. Luckily, I'm able to pull into the paved parking lot of a volunteer fire department station. Perfect place to change a flat.

I've changed many flat tires in my day, but I'm officially an old guy now and my  gray hair and gray beard don't project to the public the youthful self-image I still carry in my mind. In the time it took for me to size up the situation (Damn, I think, that tire is ruined), open the rear hatch, and get out the jack and the doughnut spare tire (hate those things), two pickup trucks have pulled into the parking lot offering to help.

The first truck has two young Hispanic guys asking if I need help and offering to change the tire. I thanked them, said I've changed many tires and thanked them again for stopping.

No more than a minute later another pickup truck stops. Two young white guys. Do I need help changing the tire? They're glad to help. Thanks guys, I appreciate it, got it under control.

A few seconds later I've got the jack positioned under the car and am just starting to lift the car when a young African American guy in an SUV rolls up. He doesn't bother to ask if I need help, just hops out of the car and says Let me give you a hand. And before I can say anything he's got the lug wrench and is loosening the nuts.

What the hell, I think, apparently I'm supposed to get some help changing this tire. So, a couple minutes later, the shredded tire is off, the doughnut is on, and the guy is telling a joke about a crazy guy in a mental institution who is smarter than the psychiatrist realizes.

And then he's gone and we're heading back to Wilmington because I'm not going to drive halfway across the state and back on that damn doughnut tire.

So that was our day--a clear reminder that, as annoying as people can be, they're not as bad as you think they are.

Alan Snel's Long Road Back To A Better Future

Cyclist and LVSportsbiz.com producer Alan Snel with his new book.

On a sunny morning in March 2017, Alan Snel got on his bicycle in Vero Beach, Florida for a routine (for him) 40-mile bike ride.

That ride changed Snel’s life and became the motivation for his first book, Long Road Back to Las Vegas.

A few minutes past 8 a.m., as Snel pedaled along Old Dixie Highway near Fort Pierce, a Chevrolet Cruz driven by Fort Pierce resident Dennis Brophy plowed into him from behind. Snel doesn’t recall the collision and doesn’t know how long he was unconscious. He came to his senses while lying on a gurney being wheeled through a hallway in a Fort Pierce hospital. “You were hit by a car,” the EMT told him.

Snel was lucky. Besides a concussion and other injuries, he’d suffered two broken vertebrae that came within a half-inch of either killing him or paralyzing him from the neck down.

The collision knocked Snel out of his old life and into a new one. Fifteen months after the accident, he was back in Las Vegas, where he’d worked as a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal before going back to Florida to take a new job in Vero Beach. Drawing on his expertise and deep experience in the highly specialized genre of sports business reporting, he’d launched a lively, insightful website called LVsportsbiz.com and was hustling to report on the city’s burgeoning sports market.

In between the near-death experience in Florida and the glittering lights and new start in Las Vegas were weeks of physical pain and a painful self-examination and frank reappraisal of his own life. Lots of people don’t recover physically or emotionally from such an experience. But as his friend and former South Florida reporting colleague Jeff Houck noted, “The road is hard. Alan Snel is harder.”

For the record, I’ve known Al for 25 years. Our paths crossed for the first time in South Florida in the 1990s at the dawn of the Internet age. We covered the same government beat for intensely competitive newspapers in an old-fashioned knockdown drag-out newspaper circulation war. A half-dozen newspapers from Miami to Vero Beach were entangled in an all-out fistfight for the same readers.

Al and I attended the same meetings and chased the same people for quotes. Amid the grinding daily competition, we discovered common interests, including sports in general and baseball in particular. By the time Al moved on to better things, we’d become good friends.

Anyone who has known Al for even a few minutes knows his zeal for bicycling. He describes cycling in Zen-like terms. Bicycling, Snel writes, is “the truth” because it “requires one thing of you—willpower.”

“There are no words that will propel the bicycle,” he writes. “Riding a bicycle is stunningly fair. You get exactly out of it what you put into it.  . . . You get to your destination using your own human power. There is no motorized propulsion. The motor is in your soul and the fuel comes from your food and your willpower.”

Snel talks candidly about the driver who nearly killed him and who recently died of an illness. The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department, which investigated the incident, did not write a ticket to the driver even though he admitted that he was not paying attention when he hit Snel and, by hitting him, violated a Florida state law requiring motorists to give bicyclists at least three feet of clearance when they pass.

The Sheriff’s Department’s reasoning for not writing a citation followed a mysterious and rather obtuse chain of logic: The driver did not intentionally hit Snel and did not set out to deliberately hit a bicyclist. So in the eyes of the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, Snel had no more legal standing than that perpetually unfortunate, ubiquitous roadkill, a possum.

After talking to friends in Florida and Nevada, Snel decided to return to Las Vegas and start his own sports business website. He picked a perfect moment. The city had just acquired its first major league professional sports franchise, the Vegas Golden Knights of the NHL, and was about to start construction of a spiffy—and very expensive—new stadium to house the soon-to-be transplanted NFL Oakland Raiders.

Snel’s book is full of insider knowledge of cycling and tidbits about the hard-earned wisdom he acquired while recovering from his injuries.

“This book’s message is simple,” Snel writes. “If I can overcome trauma, you can, too. But it’s not going to be easy. Overcoming trauma is hard. In fact, I can understand how it can be easy to get emotionally stuck and not move forward.”

The collision with the car “forced me to re-evaluate my life,” he continues. “Faced with mortality, decisions become easier to make because the mental clutter falls away.”

Copies of Long Road Back to Las Vegas are available for $16 either through PayPal to asnel@LVSportsBiz.com or by mailing a check to Alan Snel at 2601 South Pavilion Center Drive, Unit 1091, Las Vegas NV 89135. Snel will inscribe all books ordered from him directly. The book also is available through Amazon.com.

Listen to Willie Drye talk about the upcoming new edition of his book Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 , with meterologists Bryan Norcross and Luke Dorris. The new, expanded edition of the book will be published in July 2019 by Globe Pequot Press.

  

Memento Mori? I Wish I Could Forget

It takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to get through this life knowing that sooner or later it’s going to end and we don’t know when and we don’t know what happens next. We must accept the grim reality of death every time we lose someone close to us and feel the pain of irretrievable loss and the chilling, inescapable knowledge that, as Shakespeare pointed out, we owe God a death.

I’ve been pondering this since I was 17, when one of my aunts in her mid-40s died of a brain tumor. She had an open-coffin funeral, and that’s the first time I recall seeing a corpse. I remember being greatly impressed at first by the undertaker’s handiwork. At a distance, she didn’t appear to be dead. She seemed to have chosen a very odd place to take a nap, fully clothed.

But when I got closer, the artificiality of her appearance became glaringly apparent. There was something strange about her lying in a coffin looking as though she’d fallen asleep with too much makeup on.

A few years later I saw death without the cosmetics and preservatives when I witnessed an autopsy as an Army medic. It was the summer of 1973 and I was in training at Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia. A Navy chief petty officer in his early 50s had gotten up and gone to work like he’d done every day for 30 years, and then dropped dead while on duty. The poor guy began his day like any other and ended up on a cold stainless-steel slab.

The pathologist used his grim gleaming tools to open the man’s thorax. He removed the heart and used a scalpel to cut onionskin-thin slices so he could examine them for signs of a stroke. I was one of four medics, all in our early 20s, standing a respectful distance from the autopsy table.

This was an important part of our training, and the pathologist told us to step closer. “That’s OK,” I said, presuming to speak for the group and trying for a little wry humor. “I can see just fine from here.”

The pathologist, bending over the heart, paused for a moment, his scalpel poised in mid-air. He looked up at me over the rims of his glasses. On his face was an expression of obvious disdain. “This isn’t a pretty process,” he said. “You’ll have to get used to that.”

We reluctantly stepped closer and examined the precise slices of the heart. We also watched as the brain and other organs were removed. A couple hours later we went to the mess hall for lunch. The special was sliced roast beef. Couldn’t even look at it.

A couple years later I was out of the Army and back in school at Belmont Abbey College to get credits I needed for admission to the University of North Carolina. I was home for the weekend before final exams. It was early Sunday morning, and I was eating breakfast and thinking about the ordeal ahead.

The phone rang. My mother answered. It was my aunt, who lived a couple hundred yards down the road. Her husband had had a massive heart attack during the night. Please come, she said.

He was sprawled on the bedroom floor, cold and stiff. The expression frozen on his face indicated that his last moments had been a very unpleasant surprise.

A few more years passed. I was a student at UNC. I was taking a course in film criticism. We watched “M*A*S*H”, the classic dark comedy satire directed by Robert Altman about a front-line medical unit during the Korean War.

After the movie, the class divided into discussion seminars. A young woman in my class complained about the doctors, nurses and medics making jokes about death and dying. She thought it was crude, cruel and insensitive.

I raised my hand. I was an Army medic, I said. If you’re around that every day, the only way you can stay sane is to make fun of it. If you don’t, you’ll go nuts. 

I thought I’d been very helpful. But a long silence fell over the class until the grad student directing the seminar, sensing the awkwardness, changed the subject.

What did I do? I thought. It’s true. If you’ve been there you know. But I didn’t say anything more.

I also worked as a pharmacy technician at North Carolina Memorial Hospital. One day I was delivering drugs to a ward when I heard a woman shout from behind a closed door, “I don’t care who you get! Get somebody! Get anybody!”

The door flew open and a nurse stepped quickly into the hallway, looked around hurriedly, and saw me. I was wearing the white jacket that identified me as a member of the hospital staff. She pointed at me and motioned for me to follow her.

I saw two other nurses standing over a huge woman sitting in a wheelchair. She was going into cardiac arrest, and the nurses had to get her out of the wheelchair and onto a bed to perform CPR. I took her legs and two nurses took her shoulders. We struggled to lift her. But the dying woman weighed more than 300 pounds. I felt her slipping from my grasp, so I slid my knee beneath her buttocks to keep from dropping her. I felt something warm and damp on my knee.

At that moment the door burst open and the hospital’s cardiac arrest response team poured noisily into the room. The doctor in charge saw us struggling to lift her onto the bed. “Put her on the floor!” he shouted. We gently lowered her and stepped back. She was instantly surrounded by the medical team as they began the frantic, highly choreographed and ultimately futile struggle to revive her. I figured they didn’t need me any longer so I slipped quietly out the door and went back to my job.

Back in the pharmacy I discovered a brown spot on the left knee of my white corduroy jeans. I realized that the woman had died when I’d slid my knee under her, and at that moment her sphincter relaxed and her bowel emptied.

After I graduated from Carolina I got a job in Georgia covering the cop beat for the Macon Telegraph. My job was to chase cops and firefighters every time they moved. I became part of a small, select group that gathered when someone died violently or of unexplained causes—cops, firefighters, paramedics, the county coroner and me. Soon the cops recognized me when I arrived. They trusted me, and they’d wave me past the police line. I’d join the privileged group studying the death tableau. Sometimes after looking at the gruesome scene I exchanged knowing glances with the others.

I became a familiar sight on local TV stations’ coverage of untimely deaths on the 11 o’clock news. As viewers watched the TV reporters in the foreground do their standup, I’d be seen in the background, wearing aviator sunglasses, a leather flight jacket over a T-shirt or pullover sweater, jeans and sneakers. Walkie-talkie and portable police radio scanner dangling from my belt. Standing in front of flames or a wrecked car that had been torn and twisted and battered out of shape by the savage forces of high-speed impact. Talking to a cop and jotting notes in my notebook.

After a couple years of this I started seeing death as a tragic circus at which my presence was required. Sometimes I loved it. Sometimes I hated having to immerse myself in this public spectacle, learn every sad gory detail of the last moments of someone’s life, and write about it. Part of me got tougher. Another part of me quietly and secretly freaked out. Sometimes I thought I’d scream if I had to see one more stiff. Sometimes after my shift ended at midnight, I’d lie awake staring into the darkness until dawn because I couldn’t scrub a gruesome image or a tragic event from my mind.

Some of the angst gradually faded when I moved on to covering politics for other newspapers, but some of the memories have never left me. The sobbing, grief-stricken mother kneeling over the bleeding body of her toddler son who’d been standing on the sidewalk and was hit by a drunk driver. The horribly mangled farmer who’d fallen backwards off his tractor and been plowed into the Georgia earth by his huge, heavy plow. The teenager fishing from a small two-lane bridge over a creek out in the country who’d hooked a big one, tried to reel him in, forgot where he was, and stepped backwards right into the path of a car doing 60 mph.

As I got older, I realized that my experiences with death separated me from the masses and, like that moment in the film criticism class at UNC, imposed a different view of life on me. Not many people had seen a body clinically disassembled like so many spare parts, or had someone die in their arms, or watched paramedics pick up pieces of human brain after a terrible car wreck. I believed I knew something about life that others didn’t know and didn't want to know. I believed that knowledge had altered my outlook on life and separated me from others. I felt alienated.

When my wife and I lived in South Florida in the 1990s, I discovered that Key West’s dark sense of humor and quirky take on life are reflected in the city’s cemetery, where residents have long thumbed their noses at the Grim Reaper with hilarious epitaphs. A man who died decades ago took a posthumous dig at his doubting friends with the inscription, “I told you I was sick.” Another took a shot at the stratospheric cost of real estate with this parting quip about the only plot of land he could afford in the city: “I always dreamed of owning a small place in Key West.”

My favorite is one apparently written by a wife weary of her late husband’s constant philandering. She had her unfaithful mate’s tombstone inscribed: “At least I know where you’re sleeping tonight.”

Humor, I thought. That’s the only real answer. Show the Reaper you’re not intimidated by him and leave something behind to bring a chuckle to those who happen past your marker years after you've departed.

I searched for a one-liner to sum up my sense of alienation and my reluctant acceptance of life’s inevitable unpleasantness. Eventually something came to me. For the record, I want this inscribed on my tombstone: “At last, I’m part of the majority.”

Crudity vs. Cleverness at Hockey Games

I wrote about last Sunday's Vegas Golden Knights-Carolina Hurricanes game for LVsportsbiz.com. Sitting in the press box high above it all, I noticed a decided difference in crowd behavior from what I've seen at New Jersey Devils' games.


We've been to many New Jersey Devils' games, which are played in the Prudential Center (aka "The Rock") in downtown Newark. We sat in the cheap seats up near the rafters only once, and we won't do it again.

From what I've seen of Devils fans in the nosebleed sections, they tend to be loud, obnoxious, often drunk, and profane. Resolutely profane. Their favorite cheer seems to involve some variation of this phrase: "(Noun), (pronoun) suck!" That's about it, as far as I've heard after attending more than half-a-dozen games there. They also are fond of shouting in loud unison, "Rangers suck!" Even if they're playing, say, Montreal or Philadelphia.

Anyway, the press box at PNC Arena is actually looking down on the cheap seats there. Sunday night the section closest to the end of the press box where I was was filled with a bunch of guys, most of them middle-aged 30s-40s-50s as far as I could tell, who all seemed to know each other. I'm guessing that they all work in the same office, bought tickets together, and attend a lot of Canes games.

These guys were loud, and made noise throughout the game. Their chief cheerleader was a beefy, bespectacled guy with an old-fashioned flattop haircut who sat in the center seat in the section's front row. Sometimes this guy just sort of yelled, no words, growling loudly. Then he'd come up with a chant of some kind and start yelling that, and all the other guys would join in and chant it loudly for a little while.

The Canes basically got their clocks cleaned Sunday night, losing 5-1 to Vegas. But the guys in this section never tuned out the game, despite the one-sided score. They yelled encouragement and sometimes sardonic advice throughout. But they were getting more and more sarcastic as the game progressed and the Canes fell further behind.

Early in the third period, the chief cheerleader was in one of his inarticulate yowls, then apparently inspiration hit him and he started chanting "Please do bet-ter! Please do bet-ter!"

His pals picket it up and started chanting it, then some of the sections around them picked it up, and pretty soon maybe a few hundred Canes' fans in that end of the arena were chanting "Please do bet-ter! Please do bet-ter!" You had to be there to get the full effect (it really was funny), and you had to have been in a sewer-mouthed crowd like the cheap seats at a Devils' game to appreciate the contrast between the crowds in Newark and those in Raleigh. Crudity vs. cleverness. I hope the Canes succeed in returning the crowds to PNC Arena. It really is a lot of fun.