Bent, but not broken

DAVENPORT, Wash. — First, if you haven’t spent much time on a farm, you should know what a grain auger is.

It’s a metal tube — as big around as a telephone pole and just as tall — that’s used to move grain into silos.

It was a grain auger that toppled on Davenport wheat farmer Gary Rosman on Aug. 19, 1989, pinning him against the steering wheel of his tractor, crushing his back, and changing his life.

“The accident made me a better person,” says Rosman, sitting at the dining room table in the sprawling home he built on his farm a few years ago. “Moments before the accident, I could tell you how well the crop was yielding and the grain price and how much it rained. I can’t remember that this year.

“What I will remember until the day they plant me is the first steps I took … It forever changed my view of life.”

Gary Rosman is a farmer and a businessman, but he has the mischievous smile of a little kid about to get into big trouble. There’s this glimmer in his eyes, the excited gestures that come when he says, “I’ve got a story about that.”

The guy welcomes a challenge the same way most folks welcome a sunny day and a cold beer.

He’s 51 now, but he was just 36, married with a 3-year-old son the day the auger came down.

Spokesman-Review writer Jim Kershner happened to be at Rosman’s farm, observing the harvest, on that day that changed everything.

“The first four minutes lasted forever, because that’s how long it took for us to lift the auger off his back,” Kershner wrote later. “The scaffolding was tangled in the forks of the tractor; the auger wouldn’t budge. Finally, we were able to shove the weight off of him, by sheer force of will more than anything else.”

A helicopter landed and whisked Rosman to Sacred Heart Medical Center.

“He arrived in pretty rough shape,” recalls Lori Taylor, who was a trauma nurse at Sacred Heart at the time. “He was having significant problems with his blood pressure. His blood pressure was very low. He had a spinal cord injury; he was paralyzed. … He was in pretty critical condition.”

For three weeks, doctors kept Rosman sedated so he wouldn’t start thrashing around and rip out the tubes and wires keeping him alive.

“Losing 21 days of your life is weird,” he says.

Not long after he woke up, Rosman was desperate to sit up in bed. But he needed a special device, called a body jacket, to allow him to sit. The guy who delivered the brace to the hospital said he couldn’t make it that day, so Rosman told his wife to bribe him so he would bring it then.

The delivery guy did. And he wouldn’t take the bribe.

The incident is an early example of how Rosman’ take-charge personality remained unchanged after the accident. He looks back at that moment now.

“That simply says, ‘I’m going to take responsibility for my own future,’” he says.

Doctors told him to expect never to walk again.

“They would say, ‘Go home and learn to live in a wheelchair,’ ” he says.

So, Rosman worked on accepting that – no easy feat for a man accustomed to physical labor.

“I had to learn to like myself in the wheelchair, and that was a big challenge,” he says. “To learn to like yourself for what you have here and now.”

But, through grit and force of will and just plain stubbornness, Rosman made progress in those hours and hours of rehabilitation.

It took a year-and-a-half of therapy, but Rosman – who still has no sensation in his feet or much of his legs – figured out how to use the muscles in his upper legs to propel himself forward.

“They stood me up for the first time with leg braces on, and I took six steps,” he says. “And I remember who was in front of me and who was behind me and looking at these tiles on the floor and what was going through my mind. I’m going, ‘Wow. I’m doing this again.’ “

Taylor, who had only seen him in a wheelchair, remembers seeing Rosman for the first time after he started walking. There he was, standing in her office doorway, and Taylor said the first thing that came to mind:

“Oh, my gosh. You’re tall.”

“He’s just a survivor,” Taylor says of him now.

Rosman rarely uses the wheelchair these days. He walks well, if a bit wobbly, with leg braces. He powers up and down the steps of his house with no fear.

Today, a hired hand does some of the farming tasks Rosman’s not able to do, like climbing ladders and fixing roofs. But he still does much of the work on his 1,400 acres himself.

“There’s still value to your own personal time alone on the tractor,” he says. “I need quiet time.”

Since he has no sense of pain in his feet or legs, he has injured himself by dropping things (once it was a hot welding rod) and not noticing.

He falls down sometimes, too.

“But I get up,” he says. “I’m real good at catching myself.

“You fall. Your challenge is to get up again.”