Revisiting a tragedy that became a ‘miracle’

Reporting from Iowa — 

In one of my last memories before the truck hit, I was in the driver’s seat of my mother’s Honda Civic, stuck in an 8-foot snowdrift on a rural Iowa highway. The wind was screaming across the fields, spawning tornadoes of snow.

I had been heading to Minneapolis to catch a flight the next day. But the blizzard cut visibility to 10 feet, at most. Then the drift swallowed my car.

A stranger knocked on my window. “I’ll try to push you out from behind,” he said.

I now know him as Steve Schmidt, a father of six who owns a construction company in Iowa City. He was on his way to celebrate Christmas with family about 40 miles away. But he stopped anyway when he spotted my tail lights, two red dots in the blowing snow.

Schmidt wasn’t the only stranger to help me that day -- Dec. 23, 2007 -- but he was the first. If he hadn’t stopped, I might have frozen to death in that snowbank.

Earlier this month, I retraced my journey to visit some of those who rescued me, sometimes at the risk of their own lives and at great inconvenience.

Schmidt was thankful that I came out all right. He spoke of his parents as he tried to explain why he’d stopped.

“They were smart enough to teach us to help out anybody in a time of need,” he said. “I knew it was dangerous but . . . I wasn’t going to just leave you there.”

He recalled how he pushed as I gunned the engine. Wheels spun. Snow flew. Then he heard skidding tires and instinctively jumped into a ditch -- just as a heavy-duty pickup truck slammed into my car.

The impact submerged my car in the snowdrift.

Schmidt frantically dug through to the door and opened it. He dragged me to his truck, where the driver of the pickup joined us. She was unhurt.

Awhile up the road, I started talking, Schmidt said.

“I seem to have lost my shoe,” I said a couple of times.

“I was like, ‘Oh, man, something’s going on here,’ ” Schmidt said.

They called for an ambulance to meet us 15 miles away. By the time we got there, my condition had worsened.

“Your arms and legs were jerking, your eyes were rolling, you were breathing really erratically,” Schmidt said. “Then you started breathing normally again and just kind of looking around. I kept asking you your name, and you wouldn’t respond.”

The volunteer paramedics -- Chris Palmersheim and Roland Evans -- had a quick huddle. With road conditions worsening, they decided to head for Oelwein, about 20 miles west.

“You weren’t keen on coming with us,” Palmersheim said. “You just wanted to go home.”

Evans tried to put a neck brace on me, which I ripped off. He tried putting me on a stretcher, which I shoved away. I was drifting in and out of consciousness.

“You were disoriented and an extremely uncooperative patient,” Evanssaid. But my belligerence provided an “excellent diagnostic tool” to alert them that I had a head injury.

Forty minutes later, when the paramedics rolled me through the emergency entrance of the 25-bed Mercy Hospital, it was as if none of this had happened -- the crash, the parking-lot spasms, the wrestling matches with the paramedic. I felt fine.

There was a knot on the back of my head, but a CT scan showed no brain damage. Since I didn’t have other symptoms, I was told I could go.

I asked nurse Deb Hamilton how to find a taxi so I could get a hotel room. I knew no one in the town of fewer than 7,000.

“There are no taxis in Oelwein,” she said. “We’ll get you a room at the inn.”

She showed me to Room 2, which the hospital reserves for weather-stranded visitors and staff. She handed me some pajamas and said they’d send my wet clothes to the laundry. A maintenance man had already bought me a pair of shoes at the local Kmart.

Then she gave me her home phone number and told me not to hesitate to call.

“If my kids were stranded away from home, I would wish someone would take care of them,” she said when I reunited with her. “I just thought it was the right thing to do.”

Shortly after 10 a.m. on Christmas Eve, she called and said she would be there soon with her husband, Bob, to take me to my car.

But when we got to the towing company, the beige Honda looked like a crushed soda can. The trunk was in the back seat, the front door a mangled mess of glass and steel. The front seat was packed with snow.

After conferring, Deb and Bob said they would drive me to La Crosse, Wis., 100 miles north, so I could catch a bus to St. Paul, Minn., and make a flight to San Diego, where I worked at the time.

I was overwhelmed with guilt. How could I possibly let these people go farther out of their way? Especially on Christmas Eve?

Deb said not to worry; they had celebrated Christmas with their daughters in Phoenix the previous weekend.

When we saw the snow-covered bluffs along the Mississippi River near La Crosse, I got another surprise. Deb said they would feel more comfortable driving me all the way to my parents’ house in St. Paul, 2 1/2 hours up the road.

Bob said he had been in the Navy and knew how it felt to be away from home at Christmas.

They fended off every attempt to pay for gas or buy them anything. But I managed to make some surreptitious cellphone calls. When we got to my parents’ house, a feast awaited us, served on fine china.

My dad tried to pay the Hamiltons. They refused. My mom insisted they spend the night. They said they were fine to make the five-hour drive. Deb had to work on Christmas.

A week later, Deb sent my mother an e-mail. The experience, she said, reminded her that she was born to take care of people. It also reminded her of Christmas’ true meaning.

“Bob and I feel honored to have been chosen by the Lord that night to do his work and help him by helping one of his children,” she wrote. “You were all my Christmas miracle!”

dtsimmons@tribune.com