Lori Messenger
Wood, Found cart wheels, Plaster, Gel Transfer
June 2026
Dear Left Foot,
You are so white, like bone, like childhood ghosts. I can look at you and see that you still exist, but I cannot feel you. I miss the sensation of warm garden dirt under you as I swing a hoe, of drying summer grasses scratching you as I stride around the yard pulling hoses, of an ant crawling over you as I nap under the maple tree.
In the hospital 3 ½ years ago a doctor told me that I would likely never walk again, that my T11 vertebrae was crushed. Every morning and night the nurses rubbed lotion into my feet with their latex-gloved hands. So much was happening that it took a week before one of them explained to me that the lotion was medicated to remove calluses in order to prevent cracks and sores that could get infected. I wanted to fight them and their lotion, wanted to protect my calluses that I had worked so hard to acquire – running and skiing mountain trails, backpacking, fighting fires, playing with my children. Who would I be when my calluses were erased?
It is not your fault, dear left foot. You were doing your job, following the guiding brain impulses I sent, walking me across Reserve Street that January evening in 2023 to visit mom, who lives on the other side. But a driver was speeding, racing another car, not paying attention to where he was going. He thought maybe he had hit a deer, he told the jury at the trial. He was driving his mother’s SUV. It smashed into my left side, sending my body flying 97 feet. It broke every rib on that side, plus my wrist and ankle in two places. Surgery scars mark the ankle just above this plaster replica. The crash also ruptured my spleen, bruised my diaphragm, split both my carotid arteries, and damaged the nerves branching through my left arm.
This all turned out to leave my left side so traumatized that when I tipped a sitski over onto my left shoulder during a downhill ski lesson March 2026, my body freaked into intensely guarded pain for a whole month before it began subsiding just a little. The fall onto an ice patch sprained my left shoulder and then two days later my neck became so inflamed that I could barely hold it up. Just like my first month in the hospital, in 2023, I could once again barely move my left arm. I slept fitfully in a recliner.
Today my feet are so soft and white, somehow more naked, so vulnerable. They do not look much like they used to. After we made plaster casts of our feet in June, I had surprising trouble recognizing mine. They are still long and wide, but since they no longer carry my body weight through my days, they have changed shape. They rise higher and puffier, like bread dough. They turn inward, pigeon-toed. My first thought was that they resembled giant maggots, but those creatures wiggle and my feet do not. Blood still flows through them, but the neural path is broken. This has been a horror story, but this has also been a love story. In all of its tough and beautiful reality, this is, after all, MY story; I am living it.
January 15th 2023, where it could have gone either way, I decided to live. I continue moving forward with my people. I am no ghost or maggot. My anguish is bloody real. My heart sends its pulse all the way down through each toe each time it beats.
Sincerely, Lori
July 2026
Dear Right Foot,
While you held the lee-side position when the SUV struck, the end result of paralysis affected you equally. The doctors, PTs and Ots diagnosed me paraplegic – T11 Complete. Both sides, legs and feet, nada. Left, right, left, right, left. The refrain from my marching band days.
I hear disabled friends say they took various things about their previously able bodies for granted. I must have as well, but I also did not, really. I loved the places you carried me – into the woods and mountains, and even around the towns I have lived in and visited. I ran, hiked and danced upon you. I jumped into lakes naked, with glorious abandon. I loved all those minutes, really.
When I cartwheeled as a kid (which I did numerous times daily for years), I started with my right foot forward.
I mark time now as “before” and “after”. Before January 15, 2023, I walked everywhere – including, sometimes, the three miles to the high school I taught at, especially when there was snow on the ground not amenable to bicycle tires. So when I didn’t walk, I usually biked. Either way, I felt the texture of the earth below me.
My heart is broken, but it still beats. I stretch tentacles of hope out into the world seeking to heal what can be healed and to remake my life around legless-ness and footless-ness. I am no amputee, however. I do still have legs and feet. I can look down and see them stretching out below me over the wheelchair seat. In the black sweat pants I currently wear they even look about the same as they used to. But when I lay my hand upon my thigh, I can feel the fabric of the pants with my fingers, but the flesh of my leg has no sensation in response. I cannot feel my hand lying there. And when I try to wiggle my toes (as I still do periodically) nothing happens. Last year when I had an ingrown toenail the podiatrist was preparing the needle to deliver Novocain. I told him I was pretty sure he didn’t need to do that. I would throw a giant party if it turned out to hurt! So he operated on my big right toe. Blood spurted when he cut and my leg even kicked out, but I couldn’t feel a thing. If I had not been watching, I would have had no idea he was cutting on me.
Left, right… left, right, left.
Sincerely Yours,
Lori
August 2026
We Know This Forest
The metaphoric forest that I traverse daily sometimes still feels like the Land of the Lost. Do you remember that show as a 1970s child? Well, I didn’t watch it very often, but it still triggered nightmares for me – those kids wandering that stone labyrinth where at any moment they could encounter a dinosaur clearly intent on killing them. The blocky Styrofoam “rocks” were so clearly fake, as were the predatory reptiles, but I had experienced enough “monsters” in my life already that I was plenty scared and could relate to the panic of those kids as they ran through tunnel after tunnel seeking safety.
Only now I can’t run. You know what they say about “low hanging fruit.” Hmmm… who is the monster likely to catch first?
Clearly my forest is not a peaceful one today. I think more of Dorothy’s dark woods on the route to Oz, where she and her scarecrow friend discover the cowardly lion, who hopes to loom scarier than he actually does. Or the even darker woods from Lord of the Rings… until those travelers discover the Ents, that is, those powerful ancient trees who walk about and whose personalities are fantastically non-human and alive.
It occurs to me that all those stories are adventures. Am I having an adventure? I have thought of my experience after getting smashed into by a speeding SUV as a journey, but never as an adventure. For some reason that word implies access to all the muscles and sinews in a fully able body, not my screwed together, post-shattered spine and inert legs.
But of course this is an adventure story. It would read that way to a 3rd grader, wouldn’t it? Especially if there was a forest to find one’s way through and companions alongside who also had to face their own fears and employ their own talents to meet the unexpected obstacles: the rivers or cliffs, the hornets or grizzlies, the poisonous poppies or, now, simply a tree root or stone too large for my wheelchair to pass.
BIO: On a chilly but snowless January evening, 2023, I was smashed into by a speeding car while walking across a street in my town of Missoula, Montana. The impact catapulted my body 97 feet through the air. At 53-years-old I found myself suddenly paraplegic – paralyzed from the waist down. The grief has been steep, but I hold tightly to the bark boat of my changed life, paddling hard through the currents to stay upright. Periodically I capsize anyway, which teaches me rugged lessons about patience. From the hospital, I started writing Caring Bridge posts (which you can access here https://www.caringbridge.org/site/1ce22643-198c-322e-8704-fb95bc72651c) and gradually realized that I had the material for a memoir telling the story of trying to love this busted body.
Decades ago, I began explaining to people that I grew up in the Church of Aerobic Exercise. Mostly they did not understand that I was speaking pretty literally. I had a precociously physical childhood - raised rural in the 1970s and 80s by physical educator-farmer-outdoorsy parents. I backpacked into Colorado’s Rah Wah Wilderness the first time when I was 6. I ascended 14,000 foot Pikes Peak at 8. I was a high school distance runner and a collegiate Nordic skier. For my first career I was a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service and for my second career I was a high school English teacher.
I became an athlete because it was my birthright and I became a reader-writer-thinker by choice.
2026 finds me working towards a first full draft of a memoir that is forming as a triptych: the story of my body moving through the world before, during and after this injury. I combine my love of language with my love of movement to re-build a life I can want. Just as previously I refused to let people’s limited notions of being a woman keep me away from the wild lands of the intermountain west, now I refuse to let similar small mindedness about disability keep me away. None of this has ever been easy, but I have learned that bruises can heal.
Now I push to bring readers along as I learn to navigate my life from a wheelchair. Three ½ years post injury, I begin to discover that joy remains available to me – that I still possess memory, imagination and a body… and that when I speak, people listen in a new way.
Some Publications
Caring Bridge Blog Site. https://www.caringbridge.org/site/1ce22643-198c-322e-8704-fb95bc72651c January 2023-Present.
“Blazing a New Trail – The Difficult Journey.” Smokejumper Magazine. July 2024. https://smokejumpers.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Smokejumper_Issue_126_July_2024.pdf
“A Leap of Faith: 30 Years of Women Smokejumpers.” Montana Magazine. May/June 2013.
“Born Into the Church of Aerobic Exercise.” 2009. Blew, Mary Clearman, and Phil Druker, eds. Air: Essays by Idaho Writers. (Eastern Washington University Press).
“Milk.” 2006. In Bove, Jennifer, ed. A Mile In Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild. (Palo Alto, CA: Travelers’ Tales).
“Ignition.” 2005. Blew, and Druker, eds. Forged in Fire: Essays by Idaho Writers. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press).
