Of Arms and the Knight I Sing

By Sir Guillaume de la Belgique
Copyright Scott Farrell, 2005

Phase I: Stupidity

Riding along through the snow with the wind in my face, 20 miles away from the nearest automobile or telephone, I began to imagine I was a medieval knight out on a sleigh ride, bundled up in a heavy cloak, gliding through an icy forest, knowing that a blazing hearth was waiting for me on my return to the castle …

Unfortunately, there were a few problems with my little winter fantasy, as I steered my snowmobile down a frozen hillside in Idaho last December.

First, a medieval knight would not have been out in weather approaching 40 below zero because he would not have had a GoreTex parka and battery-powered, heated gloves to keep him from freezing to death. He would have been at home, in front of his blazing hearth, whipping his servants for neglecting to put enough cloves into his hot mulled wine.

Second, a medieval knight would have been riding on a sedate, horse-drawn sleigh, not a neon green, high-performance snowmobile powered by a 1,000 cc racing engine capable of 0 to 60 mph acceleration in under 4 seconds.

Third, and perhaps most important, while daydreaming about a medieval sleigh ride, I had neglected to notice that the inside of the Lexan visor on my helmet had frozen into a solid sheet of ice, thus preventing me from seeing that I was headed directly toward a 40-foot fallen log which had cleverly camouflaged itself with a coating of approximately .03" of snow.

A moment later the tinny buzz of my snowmobile’s engine was replaced by the sound of crunching plastic and aluminum, followed almost instantly by the sound of wind rushing past my head as I flew through the air and the staccato rhythm of snowmobile parts hitting the ground all around me.

When I finally plopped down into a snow bank, my first thought was, “Well, that wasn’t as bad as standing up to a Drafn shield charge. Heck, I didn’t even get a scratch.” Then I stood up and brushed away the snow … and I noticed my left hand was sort of twisted around at a 45-degree angle and pointing off to the side like I was trying to hail a taxi in a Salvador Dali painting.

Fortunately, just at this time Felinah, who was riding her own snowmobile, drove up and — drawing upon years of medical training and diagnostic experience — said, “Um, you don’t look so good.”

Phase II: Immobility

Six hours later, I was in the surgical recovery ward of Rexburg County Hospital. There were two pins in my arm holding together the various hunks of bone that formerly were my wrist, and my left arm was encased in fiberglass and nylon.

Lying there, half-dazed on medication which I’m sure was originally developed for livestock use, I began to wonder what would have happened to a real medieval knight with a similar injury after taking a bad fall from his horse during a battle or tourney. Contrary to popular opinion, not all doctors in the Middle Ages were ignorant butchers. A wealthy duke or baron would likely have enlisted the services of a physician who’d studied anatomy in Italy and seen surgical procedures performed by doctors trained in Greece or Persia. For a loud-mouthed Belgian knight who had insulted the king once too often, however, medical care would probably have come in the form of a country hack who studied anatomy behind the barn with Geraldine the milkmaid, and whose training in surgical technique consisted of helping his father cut fence posts with an axe.

I imagined a crippled knight, trying to survive one-handed without any discernable job skills other than the ability to whack people with a sword. I imagined a once-great warrior reduced to relying on the generosity of friends and relatives, or perhaps begging in the street for his meals.

Then I began to imagine how, exactly, I was going to put on a pair of pants with only one arm.

(Follow along with Guillaume’s painfully funny account of recovery, rehabilition and repentance in his new book.)