Strawberry Point Ambulance

Strawberry Point is proud of our ambulance crew and EMTs.  Many times their efforts go unnoticed, but Dan Simmons did notice.  The story is below.

Dan's Car

One of our 2 units

Chris Palmersheim and Roland Evans

A small miracle for Christmas: A young man's journey took a near-tragic turn on a snowy Iowa highway -- but one by one, strangers lighted his way out of the darkness

For passing motorist, paramedics and nurse -- 'it was the right thing to do'

 In one of my last memories before the truck hit me, I was sitting in the driver's seat of my mother's Honda Civic. It was stuck in an 8-foot snowdrift that blocked the northbound lane of Route 13 in rural northeast Iowa. The wind was screaming across the fields, sending tornadoes of snow spiraling over the blacktop.

I was heading north from a Christmas gathering in Iowa City, trying to get as far as I could to catch a flight out of the Twin Cities the next day. But by early afternoon, conditions shifted from unpleasant to impassable. Blowing snow cut visibility to 10 feet at most, then a drift swallowed up the Civic.

Someone knocked on my window, a well-bundled stranger. "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 at their farm about 40 miles away and was growing increasingly worried. The two-lane road had disappeared in the whiteout. But he stopped anyway when he spotted my taillights, 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 in that snowbank. And my story, about the 27 hours that followed -- losing consciousness after a jarring collision, getting stranded in a little Iowa town, meeting strangers who embraced me as family -- never would have unfolded.

Earlier this month, I retraced my journey to reunite with some of the people who rescued me, sometimes at risk to their own lives and at great inconvenience. I wanted to thank them, again, for their enduring reminder of what makes the Midwest the Midwest and Christmas the season for small miracles. When I caught up with Schmidt, he was just thankful I came out all right. He -- like everyone who helped me that day -- isn't much for words, preferring to let actions speak. He spoke gratefully of his parents as he tried to explain why he 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 from behind as I gunned the engine. Wheels spun. Snow flew.

Then he heard skidding tires and instinctively jumped off the side of the road into a ditch just as the heavy-duty pickup truck slammed into my car.

"Basically it was just a huge crunch," he said. "The truck was going about 50 when it hit."

The impact shoved my Honda deeper into the snowdrift, submerging it.

Schmidt frantically dug through the snow and, with some effort, got the car's mangled door open. My 6-foot-4 frame was sprawled across the front seat, he said, with my feet on the dashboard.He slung my right arm over his left shoulder and dragged me to his black pickup. We were joined by the driver of the truck that hit me, a young woman who wasn't injured.

Awhile up the road, I started talking, Schmidt told me later.

"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.

He had the woman call for an ambulance to meet us at the gas station 15 miles away in Strawberry Point. 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."

At the gas station, the volunteer paramedics -- Chris Palmersheim and Roland Evans -- had a quick huddle. Palmersheim, who was driving, decided against heading south to Manchester -- the Highway Patrol had closed the road after a trooper's car got hit three times while he was out trying to help stranded motorists. Instead, he steered for Mercy Hospital in Oelwein, about 20 miles west.

But getting there was only half the battle.

"You weren't keen on coming with us," Palmersheim said. "You just wanted to go home."

Evans tried to put a C-collar on me, which I promptly 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," he said. But he appreciated my belligerence, as it provided an "excellent diagnostic tool" to alert them that I had a head injury.

Palmersheim wended through snowdrifts blowing across Highway 3. His full-time job as a nationally competitive, over-the-road truck driver came in handy.

The 19-mile trip took about 40 minutes, but we arrived unscathed at the 25-bed Mercy Hospital, decorated with Christmas lights and wreaths. When Palmersheim and Evans rolled me through the emergency entrance, I was conscious again.

Suddenly, it was as if none of this had happened -- the crash, parking-lot spasms and the wrestling matches with the paramedic. By then, I was feeling surprisingly fine.

There was a knot on the back of my head, but a CT scan showed I hadn't suffered any brain damage. And since I didn't have other symptoms, I was told I could be released. The doctor warned there could be lingering effects, and I did end up with near-constant headaches for the next seven months. But at that moment I was elated to know I was OK. I asked nurse Deb Hamilton about how to find a taxi so I could get a hotel room.

"There are no taxis in Oelwein," she told me. "We'll get you a room at the inn."

I knew no one in the town of 6,692 or any of its history -- as a one-time railroad boomtown known as "Hub City" that in recent years had fallen on hard times, hit by a methamphetamine epidemic chronicled in the best-selling book "Methland." The book explains the ruined lives and hollowed-out town left by meth, Oelwein at its worst. I was about to meet it at its best.

Hamilton showed me to the hospital's Room 2, which is reserved for stranded patients and staff who have to stay the night due to storms. She handed me some pajamas and told me 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 a note with 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 explained when I reunited with her. "I just thought it was the right thing to do."

It wasn't until I woke up on Christmas Eve that I learned the extraordinary lengths to which she carried this notion.

Shortly after 10 a.m., she called and matter-of-factly told me that she would be there soon with her husband, Bob, to take me to my car and help me on my way.

They picked me up in their black Chevy Suburban and drove me to the lot of a towing company a few miles from town that had pulled my mother's car out of the snow.

The beige Honda looked like a pop can that had been crushed. The trunk was in the back seat, the front door a tangled mess of glass and steel. The front seat was packed with snow.

After conferring with her husband, Deb said they decided they would like to drive me up to La Crosse, Wis., 100 miles north, so I could catch a bus to St. Paul and make a flight to San Diego, where I worked at the time. At this point, I was overwhelmed with guilt. How could I possibly let these people go farther out of their way? Especially on Christmas Eve?

When I shared this with Deb, she told me they had celebrated Christmas with their daughters in Phoenix the previous weekend, so not to worry. Besides, I realized there was no other way out of Oelwein. So I decided I should just accept their kindness and pay for gas.

The ride passed with the Hamiltons telling me their family story. Soon enough, we saw the snow-covered bluffs along the Mississippi River near La Crosse, where 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 told me he had been in the Navy and knew how it felt to be stranded away from home over Christmas. He also thought taking me home was a kind of adventure.

We stopped periodically -- Bob guzzles coffee, and the Suburban guzzles gas -- but they fended off my every attempt to pay for gas or buy them anything.

When we finally got to my parents' house, it was my turn to pull a surprise. I'd made a couple of surreptitious cell phone calls and arranged for a candlelit Christmas feast of ham, scalloped potatoes and asparagus served on their finest china.

My dad tried to give them a check to cover gas and wear and tear. They refused it. My mom insisted they spend the night, but they said they were fine to make the five-hour trip back, that Deb had to start work at noon on Christmas.

My parents were in awe of their small-town generosity. They were in awe of my parents' suburban hospitality.

"I grew up with 'Leave It to Beaver,' " Bob said, "and there we were having dinner with Ward and June."

A week later, Deb sent my mother an e-mail. The experience, she said, gave her a chance to remind herself that she was born to be a nurse and take care of people -- and what Christmas means.

"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