Man With Broken Neck Walks Six Miles For Help

Over and over, the words went through Doug Simonson’s head.

“I’ve got to keep going. I’ve got to keep going.”

He heard the words as he crawled through the narrow window of his mangled pickup truck. He heard them as he struggled for six miles down a lonely logging road in the remote mountains of northeastern Oregon.

Later, doctors would say that he never should have survived, not with a broken neck so severe that it wasn’t much different than the one that paralyzed actor Christopher Reeves.

But, as he sloshed through a creek and climbed over logs that had fallen cross the old logging road, Simonson, 64, kept thinking about his wife, about his grandchildren. Finally, he came to the highway, and there was a car coming. He straddled the center line to make the car stop. He had made it.

This week, as he spent Thanksgiving with his family, Simonson recalled his incredible Halloween journey.

Simonson has lived in Sumpter, a tiny mountain town 25 miles west of Baker City, since 1946. He owns a welding and repair shop. About 1 p.m., he was in the mountains above town, measuring an old fender he needed for a project. He had parked his pickup truck on a steep dirt road near an old gold mine his uncle had owned years ago.

He got back into the truck and intended to move it a few feet forward, but the rig careened down the hill out of control. He couldn’t stop.

“I was steering like mad, trying to keep it on the road,” Simonson said.

As the pickup headed toward the edge of a 100-foot embankment, Simonson jerked the steering wheel to one side to make the truck overturn.

After he crawled out of the wreckage through the passenger window, he could barely move his head and could feel the broken ends of his cracked right clavicle scraping together beneath his skin. He thought he had jammed his neck, because his chin was crammed against his throat. He was disoriented, then looked down the hill and saw the mine.

“I knew exactly where I was, but I had no idea what I was doing there,” he said. “I thought, ‘Where is my wife?”’

Simonson began to walk.

“Walking’s been part of my life,” he said. “To me, it’s no big deal.”

He had worked as a logger and a miner and knew these woods as well as anyone. After about a mile, he faced a big decision at a fork in the road.

One road, long abandoned, follows a small creek to the highway. The other, newer road, has more hills and curves and is longer.

Simonson chose the old road, one he had driven hundreds of times. But he forgot that no one bothers to remove the trees on the old road anymore.

Each log was a painful obstacle. Several times, Simonson stopped, convinced he couldn’t take another step. Then he remembered an uncle who had died alone on a mountain road. No one knew for sure what killed him. Maybe it was a stroke.

“I had my mind made up there was no way that was going to happen to me,” Simonson said. “I knew what I had to do.”

When Simonson got to the hospital in Baker City, X-rays showed his neck was broken. He was rushed to a bigger hospital in Walla Walla where a neurologist told him how close to death he had come.

“He said that if my neck had moved a quarter-inch in any direction, it would have severed my spinal cord and I would have died instantly,” Simonson said.

Simonson will have to wear a supportive vest and steel halo to immobilize his neck for a couple of more months, but his injuries should not leave any permanent damage.