Photograph by Matt Marcinkowski
Pat Rummerfield spent every weekend working on his ’63 Corvette, putting on side pipes, buffing the midnight-blue finish. Someday he’d race cars for a living, not work in the mines like everybody else in Wardner, Idaho; but that would take a while. Meanwhile, he spent some more of his restlessness playing basketball on his high school’s varsity team. He was 6 feet tall, with dark-brown hair and green eyes. He had a lopsided grin. He didn’t date much.
Then he noticed Erin Goodman. She was tall, with red-gold hair that fell almost to her waist, although she kept it banded when she ran track. She’d been voted the prettiest girl at Kellogg High School, and she didn’t date much either. They started shooting hoops together in the high-school gym. Pat found out that she liked to fish. One night during his senior year, he asked her out, with a group, for a milkshake. They were a couple from that night on.
In the spring of 1973, Erin told Pat she was going to Seattle for college. She wouldn’t be seeing him for a while.
“You’re—kind of forcing my hand here,” Pat blurted.
He said he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
Erin lit up. She wanted that too, she said.
When Erin went to Seattle that fall, Pat went to work in Bunker Hill Mine. It was temporary, he said, just until he could save some money.
In the fall of ’74, Pat turned 21. Two weeks later, he and his best friend, Kevin Berg, decided it was time. They’d propose to their girlfriends the next day. So they had one last night of officially being single. They bought some beer and went cruising in Pat’s Corvette. Berg was driving, and he was pushing it, the speedometer at 100, then 110, 120... When the beer was gone, they’d switched to Boone’s Farm apple wine. Pat was holding the last bottle in his lap when Berg rocketed up the I-90 entrance ramp.
Pat had started life in California, as Duke Stover. When he was 3, his mother, JoAnn Stover, left him, his three brothers, and his sister at a Christian orphanage in Boise, Idaho, and took off.
Duke was a scrawny child, his arm still in a sling from his father’s last fit of rage. Scrappy from the start, he was put in with the older boys, which only made him tougher. They used to dump him in a little red wagon and race it down a gravel road, zigzagging. They never managed to flip him out. When he was told he could keep only one Christmas present, he chose a die-cast NASCAR car.
For the next four years, Duke and his siblings did what older kids at an orphanage do: watch babies and toddlers get adopted. When Duke was 7, his sister and brothers went off to large, cheerful families. Then his great-uncle, Tom Rummerfield, showed up for him.
Tommy was a 53-year-old bachelor. Orphaned young, he’d been raised by a bachelor himself, a mining prospector. He brought the boy home to Wardner and gave him a new name: Patrick Rummerfield. Then he asked him what he liked for breakfast.
“Oatmeal,” Pat answered; it was all he’d ever had.
“Well, that’ll be easy,” Tommy said.
He bought Pat white T-shirts and blue jeans, kept it simple. He taught Pat to fish, and when Pat got 10 feet of line tangled, Tommy just grinned. “That’s easy,” he said, and snipped away the snarl.
The only complicated part was keeping his new son out of fights. Pat was still edgy, ready in a flash to defend himself.
In Wardner, all it took was a jeer or careless word to start a brawl. The town lay in a crevice between two of the Coeur d’Alene Mountains, their rocky faces the only horizon. Men drank hard and fought harder, never sure they’d come out of the silver mines alive and whole the next day.
Tommy had none of their truculence. He’d wanted to be a journalist, but hadn’t been able to afford college. He taught Pat that every man had the luxury of his own opinion. They spent hours talking, replacing the past.
By the time Pat hit his midteens, he and Tommy were squabbling like a true father and son. Tommy had gone from riding in a covered wagon in 1910 to watching a man walk on the moon, from an almost Quaker existence to free love and Woodstock.
Pat wanted to grow his hair long. He wanted to go to dances.
“You’re going to get in trouble,” Tommy told him. “You stay home.”
Tommy stopped worrying when Pat fell for Erin. Pat was planning for their future, and it steadied him. Tommy wanted him to become an electrician—the only safe job at the mines—but instead Pat took a job 5,800 feet underground, drilling and dynamiting, making quick cash. He wondered every day whether the pressure on the walls would build and his part of the mine would blow. When you blasted a tunnel that deep, the earth was always trying to squeeze itself closed again.
On Friday, September 20, 1974, Pat came up from the mine with his usual relief. He and Kevin Berg took off in the Corvette, slugging their first beer and joking about their solemn, married futures. Soon the sky was black velvet and they’d driven far away from worry.
Pat’s friend Neil Parkins was driving home from the evening shift at Sunshine Mine when he saw the wreck. “That’s Pat’s ’vette!” he yelled, pulling over.
Berg was sitting on the ground with his legs straight out, disoriented. He’d been thrown from the car. He’d chipped a tooth.
Parkins moved closer and saw Pat curled in the floor well of the smashed car. He went to call an ambulance.
The Corvette had glided onto the I-90 entrance ramp and, instead of merging, shot straight across two lanes and into a ditch that caught the front tires. It flipped end-over-end three times, twisted, and landed on its wheels on the opposite side of I-90. The Idaho State Police estimated it had been going 135 mph before it flipped.
The Boone’s Farm bottle had flown out of Pat’s lap and shattered, slicing through his eyelids and popping his right eye out of the socket. His head had gone halfway through the windshield. Part of his scalp slid off. His neck snapped in four places.
The ER doc in Kellogg sent the ambulance to the top of the mountain and through the Fourth of July Pass to Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane. Tommy met there with a team of orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons. They gave Pat 72 hours to live.
Tommy called Pat’s mother. He’d sent her reports from time to time, when Pat hit a home run or his basketball team won a tournament. She’d never wanted Pat to know they were in touch. “If you want to see your son alive, you need to catch the next plane,” Tommy told her now. Then he went into the ICU and, sobbing, repeated the doctors’ verdict.
Pat was paralyzed from the neck down. He couldn’t even wipe away Tommy’s tears, which stung the cuts on his face. He felt like he was drowning.
“Guess I better not buy any green bananas,” he said. It was one of his and Tommy’s favorite sayings.
As a child, Pat had gotten really good at going somewhere else inside when bad things were happening. “Concentrate,” he told himself now. “Relax. Don’t panic.”
A week after the accident, the surgeons announced that Pat had beaten overwhelming odds. He wasn’t going to die, not yet. But he’d lost 85 percent of the connections across his spinal cord, and he’d be paralyzed forever from the neck down. In those days, quadriplegics had a life expectancy of three to five years.
The doctors suggested a convalescent home, but Tommy just couldn’t see it. Not for a 21-year-old. Then a nurse told Pat about a program in San Diego that trained people to operate an electric wheelchair by mouth. The sip-and-puff method was new and crude, and the wheelchair weighed 900 pounds, but Pat couldn’t think of anything better to do for the next three to five years. His mother, who was now living in Southern California, made the arrangements.
A few months later, Pat was breathing hard after a long session of quad-chair training. Two nurses settled him back into his bed, drawing up the sheets. He closed his eyes, and his breathing slowed. He saw himself behind the wheel of a Corvette, racing a road course. Then the picture changed: He was leaping up, slamming a basketball through the hoop…
His eyes flew open in panic: He was falling out of bed! No, no, he wasn’t. It was his left big toe. It had moved.
He stared down, willing it to happen again. Instead, he felt excruciating pain. He screamed. His body started jerking violently, legs jumping and abs contracting. This was the spasticity they’d warned him about, accompanied by a searing neuropathic pain that felt like being burned alive.
The nurses rushed in and sedated him. When he woke, he could still—maybe “move” was too strong of a word—flicker that big toe. He informed his doctors that by the end of the week, he’d be walking.
“We don’t think you’re going to get any more than what you have right now,” one of the doctors said gently.
“I’m pretty sure I’m going to be walking by the end of the week,” Pat repeated.
Pat spent the next month moving that left toe back and forth. Then he called his doctors in: “Look at this! Grab onto my toe and ask me to move it!”
They smiled politely. How much could he do with a left toe? But other toes followed, and then his right foot. Myelin was recoating his damaged nerves. They were carrying his brain’s insistent messages all the way to his muscles.
After nine months of rehab, Pat went home. Kevin Berg hung around like a guilty shadow. “Geez,” Pat said, “it was as much my fault as yours.”
One day, Berg was driving him around town and they stopped at a garage sale. Berg pulled out $5 and bought Pat an electric stationary bike, the kind that pedaled automatically. When they brought it home, Tommy thought for a minute. He got Pat onto the bike’s seat, shoved a pillow between his legs, and tied them into place with elastic cord. Then he duct-taped Pat’s feet to the pedals. Instant range-of-motion therapy.
Pat “pedaled” for hours every day. They didn’t have a remote, so he wound up watching whatever came on TV and got hooked on Guiding Light and All My Children. His friends would come by, leave to buy beer, and forget he was stuck. There was nothing Pat could do but spit on ’em when they got back. Tommy wasn’t much better: He’d run out to his workshop to finish a project, and when he came back, Pat would say, “Where have you been?”
“Don’t scream at me,” Tommy flashed back, only once. “It’s your own damned fault.”
Every day they experimented, and Tommy wrote the results in a notebook. Their main project was combating urinary-tract infections, a constant danger because Tommy—as both men winced—had to catheterize his son daily. Cranberries helped prevent these infections, which are one of the main causes of death for quads.
What about chokecherries, even sourer, from the Coeur d’Alene Mountains? Pat remembered where they grew from his boyhood, and Tommy climbed into the mountains to pick them. Pat swallowed a couple every day, puckering at the bitterness. “You can learn to eat anything,” he says. “If it’s something that’s going to save your life, man, you’ll gobble them up.”
Erin wanted to quit college, get a job, marry Pat, and support them. “I just don’t see how that’s going to work,” Pat said brusquely. He urged her to go on with her life. When gentleness didn’t work, he stopped returning her calls.
He put everything he had into rehab. Miraculously, his bones fused, and in the right alignment. In 1978, three and a half years after the accident, he started walking again.
He had to concentrate hard, and one side of his body dragged, but he was upright. For the next four years, he strengthened his legs. In 1982, he decided he’d learn to ski.
It wasn’t as daredevil an idea as it sounded: He wouldn’t have to watch his feet if he were skiing; all he had to do was transfer his weight properly. He tried, and broke his leg. As soon as it healed, he went back to the slopes.
He was just starting to make some headway when he met a friend of a friend, a young woman named Connie Dougherty. She was sweet, conservative, open-hearted. They started dating, and soon married.
The following year, he went to his class reunion. He was talking with one of his buddies when he looked up and saw Erin walking toward him, an odd smile on her face. He knew she’d married, too.
“I’m happy everything worked out for you,” she said, looking straight into his eyes, direct as always. “And I can’t believe how upset I’ve been at you all these years.”
Pat and Connie stayed in Wardner and had two daughters, Breanna and Hailee. Tommy adored them. Then he was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, and he lost the strength to spoil them. In 1990, he shot himself.
If he’d lived one more year, he would have seen his son run and ride a bike.
After Tommy’s death, Pat trained like a madman, breaking one record after another as “the world’s first quadriplegic to…” Connie sat back and watched. The harder he drove himself, the wider the distance between them yawned.
In 1992, Pat entered the grueling Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. To the best of his doctors’ knowledge, he was now the world’s first fully functional quadriplegic—still missing 85 percent of the connections across his spinal cord, yet able to run, bike, and swim. He’d been running every step of this race in his dreams for a year.
It went better there. In real life, he didn’t pace himself well in the 2.4-mile ocean swim. Then he jumped on his bike for the 112-mile course, but halfway through, his derailleur broke. He was spinning, getting nowhere. He drank too much water, trying not to get dehydrated, and ended up losing potassium and getting dehydrated anyway. He lost control of his bladder. “You have 17 hours to finish,” he told himself. “Seventeen hours and one minute, you’re disqualified, and the whole thing is for naught.”
He made it through the bike section. “If I run, I’m going to pass out,” he told himself. “I’ll just walk, and see how far I can go.” He forced himself to slow down, stay calm. He put one foot in front of the other for 26.2 miles.
The winner, fourth-time champion Mark Allen, finished in a record 8 hours, 9 minutes, 8 seconds. Pat, the first quad to participate, finished in 16 hours, 18 minutes, 54 seconds. Of 1,364 participants, he came in 1,291. Sixty-six participants didn’t even finish—and none of them were quads.
After the Ironman, Pat started getting national speaking gigs. A physician from Washington University heard him lecture and offered him a job doing marketing and patient-liaison work. He soon began working with Dr. John McDonald, the neurologist who helped quadriplegic actor Christopher Reeve regain muscle mass.
At Wash. U., Pat also met Eric Westacott, who’d suffered a spinal-cord injury strikingly similar to his in 1993. Westacott, too, was a jock, driven to action, impatient with self-pity. He liked Pat’s sense of humor: Instead of being grim, driven by some Nietzschean will to overcome any vulnerability, Pat cracked jokes about his digestion being so screwed up, he’d bend over to pet the cat and squirt the parakeet. With the guys, there was plenty of locker-room innuendo; with his daughters, Pat’s jokes grew progressively sillier as he waited for the inevitable “Aw, Dad!”
He was serious, though, about his rehab. McDonald, who was now his physician as well as his boss, was refining what’s called activity-based restorative therapy. Repetitive motion, for hours on end, could reawaken damaged nerve endings.
Five years after the Ironman, Pat was in Antarctica, running through 50-mph gusts at 5 degrees below zero, crossing glaciers and frozen streams and getting chased by sea lions because he’d trespassed on their breeding ground. Colder than he’d imagined possible, he looked around in a daze and saw penguins everywhere. He was one of only 82 people to finish the full 1997
Antarctica Marathon.
In 1999, he resurrected his first dream by putting on a helmet and strapping himself into a race car. Driving the White Lightning electric car, he set a Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile world land-speed record for electric vehicles at 245.5 mph. He held that record for
11 years, until the Buckeye Bullet team from Ohio State University broke it this past August.
In 2004, McDonald left Washington University to direct the International Center for Spinal Cord Injury at Baltimore’s Kennedy Krieger Institute. He offered Pat a job there, so Pat began commuting between St. Louis and Baltimore, spending hours doing outreach and talking to patients.
His life spelled instant hope for anyone with a spinal-cord injury. “False hope,” some of McDonald’s colleagues called it—Pat’s example would only set people up for disappointment if their own recovery didn’t proceed so miraculously. But McDonald had never seen that problem materialize. What bothered him was the neurosurgeons who said flatly, “You have had a severe spinal-cord injury, and there is no hope for recovery.” They were, in his opinion, lying to half of their patients. The only false thing, in his mind, was “false removal of hope.”
Still, McDonald was the first to admit that Pat was extraordinary, especially given the primitive state of spinal-cord treatment in 1974. If his injury were to occur today, he’d have surgery early, to decompress the spinal cord. Steroids would reduce the swelling. His surgeon would expose the bone around the spine and screw fixation hardware into several vertebrae, stabilizing his broken spinal column so he could get up and start exercising immediately. In 1974, there was no surgery, no fixation. Pat just got duct-taped to a bike.
It was a miracle his bones fused correctly. But there was another miracle: his head injury. The brain lesion he sustained would soon heal, but in the wake of the accident it loosened caution, dissolving fears that might have paralyzed him emotionally. And paradoxically, McDonald told him, having a brain injury as well as a spinal-cord injury actually helped his brain adapt, revving his nervous system’s ability to heal.
Pat and Connie divorced in 2002, when their daughters hit their midteens. Two years later, Pat was having a drink at Brio Tuscan Grille in Frontenac when Barbara Katz walked in. Her stride was confident, her smile warm. “Wow,” Pat thought. Then he introduced himself.
Just past 40, Barbara had made her peace with being single. She had a great career in pharmaceutical sales, a comfortable home, wonderful friends; why jeopardize all of that? Pat’s openness caught her attention, though. She liked the lopsided grin, barely noticed the slight limp. He invited her to a reception at Forest Park—he’d been selected to carry the 2004 Olympic torch part of the way through St. Louis. Reporters and celebs buzzed around him, but he just kept asking Barbara if she was OK, if she wanted a drink of water. She waved him back, intrigued by his lack of ego. He’d devoted most of his life to recovering, yet he’d kept his focus outside himself.
The following week, Pat drove a souped-up Camaro at California’s Irwindale Speedway. It was his first NASCAR race. Any funds he raised would go to help people with spinal-cord injuries. He started at the back of the field and zoomed past 16 drivers to finish 18th out of 34.
Barbara didn’t mind how driven Pat was. She worked hard, too. They were giddily romantic with each other, but also comfortable. In August 2005, McDonald, who now considered Pat his best friend, flew back to St. Louis to be the best man at Pat and Barbara’s wedding.
The following year, Pat flew to China to compete in the Gobi March, organized by Racing the Planet. He was looking forward to that long, stark trek across the Gobi Desert. But two weeks before the race, the heavens opened.
He found himself running in knee-high mud, pulling up hard with each step so the ground wouldn’t suck his shoes and socks off. It was 95 degrees. The air reeked of yaks and camels. He made it through 27 miles of gumbo, then dropped out. X-rays revealed stress fractures in both ankles.
On a recent fall day, Pat Rummerfield walks into the Saint Louis Bread Co. near his Ballwin home, so upright that it’s hard to notice he’s casually looking down, watching every step. He’s 57, but his hair’s dark. He looks fit. Businesslike at first, he keeps his answers short and to the point.
He gets up for more coffee, his eyes down again. He still has no feeling below his knees; if he doesn’t watch where they land, he’ll trip. “I fall down a lot,” he says cheerfully. “There’s an art to it. You want to land on your strong side and curl up, kind of in a ball.”
His hands and feet both lack fine motor coordination. Yet St. Louis guitarist Fernando Padron has taught him to play the bass guitar, he says, excited now. He’s mastered his feet well enough that he drove as a pro in the 2009 American Drag Racing League
World Finals.
McDonald keeps a close eye on him these days, reminding him that most physicians wouldn’t let him try some of these record-breakers. On the other hand, McDonald says, Pat’s reaction speed is faster than that of most men his age.
Unfortunately, his age is increasing faster, too. Because Pat’s nervous system has been damaged, his body will likely age about
20 years earlier. At any point, he could suddenly lose the use of his legs again. If that happens, he says, he’ll become the fastest wheelchair driver around.
He changes the subject; he’d rather talk about his new memoir, Green Bananas. Or the Prosperia Wellness Research Institute of St. Louis, which he co-founded with Dr. Hani Charles Soudah, who created a natural remedy for urinary-tract infections with the aronia berry. Such tangible improvements take the edge off of Rummerfield’s frustration with medical bureaucracy and costs, but it’s still right below the surface. “I was guaranteed 24 months of inpatient rehab,” he says. “With today’s insurance, you’d be lucky to get 60 or 90 days.”
He also gets tired of all of the assumptions—“that quads can’t think,” for example. “That if you’re using a wheelchair, you’re hard of hearing.” He jokes away awkwardness, figuring it’s up to him to relax well-meaning strangers. But what he can’t joke away is the assumption that someone who’s paralyzed from the neck down would rather be dead. “Hey, I’ve lived in diapers,” he says easily, oblivious to the couple eavesdropping at the next table. “Believe me, there are a lot worse things... I always want to live.
“I’ve always thought, ‘If life was going to end tomorrow, what would I want to do today?’”
Climb Mount Kilimanjaro, that’s first. Do a few more professional drag races in NASCAR. Set another world land-speed record.
Be the first to drive a Corvette more than 300 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats.
You’d think he would’ve had enough of Corvettes.
After the accident, Pat’s temper mellowed, the fuse longer every year. Meaning came to him in different ways. He took different kinds of risks.
His daughters had heard his stories, of course, and they’d seen a few flashes of the old, defensive pride that got him through the orphanage days. But those flashes never lasted more than a few seconds.
Then, when Breanna was 15, Pat drove downtown to fetch her and two friends from Fair Saint Louis. He brought McDonald along, and they all stayed to watch fireworks. Afterward, they stopped at the White Castle on South Broadway. The place was packed, loud, and rowdy.
They stood a few paces back from the counter, trying to decide what to order. A woman tried to squeeze by; McDonald didn’t hear her ask him to move. The next thing he knew, some guy was swinging at him. A brawl erupted, bodies slamming into each other, stuff flying.
The girls were huddled behind McDonald. There was no clear path to an exit. Then Pat stepped forward, cocked his arm, and threw the hardest punch McDonald had ever seen. Then he glanced down to see where his feet were, reached for his daughter’s arm, and guided them all out the door.
He learned to fight a long time ago.
