Cannon misfire victim
Dairy farmer adjusts to life after losing right hand
By TRAVIS PURSER
Express Staff Writer
Three months after an accidental explosion that sent him
by air ambulance to a Salt Lake City hospital, Bill Johnston greets people
with a friendly shake of his left hand.
Bill
Johnston’s daughter, Beverly, left, and his wife, Sharon, have been
helping him adjust to life after last fall’s cannon misfire accident.
The 50-year-old dairy farmer seems to have mostly
recovered, both in body and spirit, from the misfire of a ceremonial
cannon during Ketchum’s Wagon Day’s parade in September. The blast
gruesomely obliterated most of Johnston’s right hand, which has left him
and his family with $50,000 in medical bills. Now, working his financially
tight, family-owned dairy farm near Richfield has gotten even more
difficult, and important, than it was before.
There is more to life after the accident, he said at his
home recently, than just coping with the physical injury.
He still has no guarantee his insurance company will pay
for any of the medical care that followed the loss of his five fingers.
His insurer keeps delaying payment, and constantly requests more
paperwork, he said. Even worse, the company flatly refuses to compensate
him for the $18,000 air ambulance flight from Hailey to Salt Lake City.
Meanwhile, he has learned to tie his boots with one hand,
and continues to relearn the day-to-day tasks that keep his 37 Holstein
cows producing milk. One of the most difficult things, he finds, is
hammering nails—almost impossible to do with one hand, but essential for
the constant maintenance his corrals, fencing and stalls need.
Buttoning his shirt cuffs, pounding fence posts, repairing
machinery, operating the giant sheers that remove horns from cattle,
artificially inseminating cows—all these tasks are now major logistical
problems.
Even with two hands, running a small diary is not easy.
Because small farmers don’t wield much bargaining power, they seldom are
able to make good financial deals for themselves. For example, Johnston
must pay to have hay, one of his most important feeds for producing milk,
delivered to his farm. Then he pays again to have his product, raw milk,
hauled away to market. The price he gets—currently $8.95 per 100 pounds—has
been steadily falling in recent years. For a viable dairy, the price needs
to be $10, he said.
Despite his recent difficulties, the obviously robust and
sometimes stoic Johnston is not about to quit a business that he inherited
from his father.
He has a family that helps. His oldest daughter Beverly,
25, has taken over the task of milking the cows each morning at 6:30.
Often, he and his wife Sharon work together, he providing the brute
strength and she providing the fine motor skills. His two other children,
Michelle, 17, and Cody, 18, lend a hand when they’re not at school. And
there’s his extended family, many of whom live nearby, and constantly
stop in to see if he needs any help.
There have been hundreds of anonymous supporters, too,
many of them parade spectators, who have wished him well and donated
money. So far, through American Legion donations, a chili feed benefit and
individuals’ contributions, people have raised about $10,000 for the
injured Johnston. During the last few weeks, he and his wife have mailed
over 160 thank you cards and still have 60 more write.
Taking the good with the bad, Johnston thinks he can
continue doing most things he has always done, though he does worry about
the added physical demands that running his farm next summer will bring.
"I don’t plan on giving up my profession," he
said. "My kids like it too much, and I just enjoy my cows."
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The day of the accident he recalls with startling clarity.
"I can give you the details," he said,
"because I was awake the whole time."
The firing team he belonged to had fired dozens of
harmless salvos from the homemade Civil War-style replica over a period of
20 years for Richfield’s American Legion. "So, yeah, I would say we
were experienced," he said.
But it was a cold, rainy day in Ketchum, unusual
conditions that he now believes may have contributed to the problem.
Nobody in his group had ever shot the cannon in the rain, and not
suspecting anything unusual, he rammed a third of a pound of black powder
into the cannon’s three-inch-diameter muzzle.
The cannon had been fired only moments before to signify
the end of the Black Jack Ketchum shoot-out reenactment. So, perhaps a
glowing ember, or a piece of still-burning fuse was caught in the touch
hole or the barrel, he speculates now.
The cannon’s muzzle stood at head level, Johnston’s
right hand still gripped the three-foot-long wooden ramrod, and "then
I seen the blast coming," he said.
It shattered the ramrod—a section of which he has since
recovered and keeps as a souvenir—and shot it three blocks away. The
Civil War style military cap he was wearing sailed over a nearby sporting
goods store, spectators recall. He said that he still hopes to recover
that, too, somehow. His body was slammed face down on the asphalt, where
he lay with a blackened face and bleeding profusely, spectators recall.
He later heard that "people thought it was all part
of the enactment."
The first sensation he remembers was that he couldn’t
feel anything in his fingers, yet he felt an excruciating pain.
An off-duty doctor and nurse rushed out of the crowd to
assist him.
"I’m glad I was conscious, but I wished I was out
because of the pain."
Johnston had no idea of the extent of his injuries until
later, because the blast had temporarily blinded him.
The Ketchum emergency services dispatcher received a call
at 12:42 p.m. about the accident, and within 10 minutes, an ambulance
picked him up and transported him to the hospital in Sun Valley. Later, he
was airlifted to University Hospital in Salt Lake City, where he underwent
emergency surgery that lasted until 11 p.m. Afterwards, he began
recovering in the hospital’s intensive care unit.
No one else was injured in the cannon explosion.
None of Johnston’s family was in Ketchum during the
accident. His wife, Sharon, was shopping in Twin Falls, and learned of the
accident when she was paged at 3:30 p.m. over the intercom system of a
department store in which she was shopping. A milk truck driver had
learned of the accident and spent much of the afternoon trying to find
her.
Sharon Johnston said she "almost lost it" when
she saw her husband in the Salt Lake City hospital hours later. She said
she wasn’t prepared for the sight of his severely swollen face. The
blast had given him grapefruit-sized eyelids, she said. She lamented the
permanent tattoos the powder has given him. Even now, she said, she still
occasionally pulls out toothpick-diameter pieces of wood that resurface in
his skin.
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Johnston said he doesn’t know whether the American
Legion will fire the cannon in next year’s parade, or ever again, for
that matter.
Some people have suggested pouring cement down the barrel,
or retiring it as a permanent display in a Richfield park.
For his part, he said he would fire it again, though
perhaps only once per event.
As for his injured hand, he said he has regained his sense
of touch and can again feel hot and cold. He can move his wrist almost as
freely as he could before, and can move what’s left of his thumb.
Dr. Charlotte Alexander, the Ketchum physician who has
been helping him recover over the last three months, suggested removing
two of his toes and using them to replace his missing fingers. But
Johnston said he is "not leaning toward" doing that because of
the damage it would do to his feet. The operation also would be
time-consuming and expensive.
Instead, Dr. Alexander might remove some of the skin
between what’s left of his thumb and his palm, so that he can better
grip small objects, he said.
In the meantime, he and his family display remarkably high
spirits, joking about things like the special gloves his wife makes for
him.
He looks forward to the day in 2008 when he plans to make
the last mortgage payment on the 720-acre farm that his father first
financed in 1964. After that, he might switch from milking cows for a
living to breeding them.
"Why have a bad attitude?" he said.
"Accidents happen."
He’s alive, his wife said. It could have been much
worse. Then she summed up the effects of the accident this way: "He
always joked that I’m his right-hand man. Well, now I am."
