The Time of My Life (24 page)

Everything happened in an instant. I pulled the horse sharply back to the right, and he cut like a stick of dynamite— he changed directions so fast that I just flew right off his back. The only thing that saved me from crashing headfirst into that oak tree was instinct: In a split second, I grabbed his mane with both hands and flipped myself over, smashing into the tree legs-first.

The sound was like a two-by-four snapping in half. The impact broke both my legs and tore tendons in my shoulder, and I collapsed to the ground. I didn’t know right away how badly hurt I was, but I knew something was wrong, since I could feel a strange pressure in my right thigh.

My longtime stunt double, Cliff McLaughlin, was at my side in a flash. He heard me say, “Let me just walk it off. I’ll be okay”—the same thing I’d said on that high school football field nearly thirty years earlier. But I wasn’t going to be walking away from this accident. I tried to sit up, but I could feel myself
going into shock, which was incredibly dangerous out here in the woods with the nearest hospital miles away. I lay back down and tried to move my legs, and that’s when I finally realized my right femur had snapped in half.

The set medic wanted to strap my legs together with oak branches and drive me in a Chevy Suburban to UC Davis, about fifty miles away. “Hell, no,” I told him. “Do not touch my legs.” I had a GPS device and a radio that could communicate with air traffic, which would help a medevac helicopter locate us out here in the boonies. We made the emergency call, gave the coordinates, and talked the chopper pilot in to our location, but it still took them over an hour to get to us.

Meanwhile, I was lying under that tree in agony. I willed myself not to think about the pain, but it came in ever-intensifying waves, until it was absolutely blinding. My broken femur was resting on my femoral artery. Luckily for me, it hadn’t actually punctured that artery—if it had, I would have bled to death in minutes. I tried not to move, even as the pain grew even more searing. It felt like an eternity before the helicopter arrived, but that wasn’t the end of the ordeal by far.

The medical guys on the chopper tried to put my leg into a traction splint, but they had the bone out of alignment. As they tightened the splint, I could feel something was very wrong, but I was still afraid of moving too much since the bone was on my artery. It was an excruciating few minutes, but I finally hoisted myself up and readjusted my weight. Despite the intense pain this maneuver caused me, I managed to get the bone aligned properly.

Lisa didn’t see the accident, but she got there quickly after it happened. She was worried, of course, but also upset with
me for having been riding at all. Cliff had been ready to jump in as my stunt double, but I’d told him to relax, as I really wanted to do the scene myself. I couldn’t think of anything more fun than shooting through the woods bareback on a horse—it was the kind of thing I loved to do, and here I was getting paid to do it.

But Lisa had another reason for not wanting me to ride: I had come off that same horse just the day before, while rehearsing for the scene. In that accident, I had torn some ten-dons in my shoulder, and had even gone to the hospital to get it checked out. With my shoulder hurt, I shouldn’t have been riding at all the next day. “Let Cliff earn his money!” Lisa told me. But I was stubborn. And now I had two broken legs to show for it.

The funny thing—and believe me, there weren’t many funny things about this accident—was when the set medic called the hospital to say, “Patrick Swayze’s had a horse accident and is coming in,” they replied, “Yeah, we saw him already. He was in here yesterday.” He had to explain that I’d come off the horse again, and that this time it was more serious.

By the time the medevac helicopter got me to the hospital, the pain was unbearable. The doctors went right at it, giving me pain medication, CAT scans, the works. Luckily for me, the hospital at UC Davis had the world’s foremost expert on a new way to treat femur breaks. It used to be that anyone who broke a femur had to have the leg split open and go through months of healing time. But this new technique required only a small incision and a long drill bit, which meant you didn’t have to heal muscles that had been sliced open. Three hours after
surgery, the doctors had me get up and walk. And three months later, I was back at work, which would have been unheard-of even a few years earlier.

But even though my physical wounds healed quickly, other wounds did not. This was the first accident I’d ever had that really came close to killing me. If I hadn’t managed to flip myself over the horse, I’d have gone into that tree headfirst. I would either have been killed instantly or have broken my neck and been left paralyzed, as Christopher Reeve had been not so long before. I’d done some crazy stunts on horses, but this accident made me realize that no matter how good a rider you are, when you’re riding bareback on a horse, you’re nothing but a human projectile.

It was as if the invisible shield that had always protected me had finally broken. I’d always acted as if I were invincible, because I always felt invincible. Now, with a shock, I realized I wasn’t. I had always made fear work for me. But now fear was getting the better of me. There’s a line I say in
Point Break
that really rings true: Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation causes your worst fears to come true. I had never been hesitant before, but now I was.

I had nightmares where I’d see myself flying off the horse and smashing into that tree. I’d wake up in a sweat, my heart beating like crazy and fear coursing through me. It got so bad that at one point, I even went to a doctor who specializes in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. I had to find a way to get over the fear that was paralyzing me, but I didn’t know how.

With time, I was able to get back the courage the accident stole from me. I went back to doing everything on horses I’d done before the accident, and loving it. And the nightmares stopped. But even now, when I remember the feeling of hurtling
toward that tree, my heart starts pumping again. Even with all the movie stunts I’d done, that was the first time I’d had a real brush with death.

Less than two years later I’d have another, even more dramatic brush with death. And for that one, I still don’t know to this day how I survived.

In early May 2000, after a particularly dry spring, the National Park Service set a controlled fire in northern New Mexico to burn off brush and grass. For months, the area had suffered record-setting high temperatures, and the landscape was as parched as it had been in decades. So when fierce winds suddenly whipped up the flames, the fire quickly got out of control. Within days, huge swaths of New Mexico were ablaze.

Lisa and I were at Rancho Bizarro in Los Angeles, but we became more and more worried as we watched the news coverage of the wildfires. Tens of thousands of people were being evacuated, and their homes were going up like tinder. News reports showed walls of flames and fleeing residents, and President Clinton declared a state of emergency in several New Mexico counties. All I could think was that our beautiful ranch—our haven and spiritual home—was in danger.

We sweated things out in LA for a couple of weeks, but as the fire drew closer to our ranch, I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit thousands of miles away as the place I loved went up in smoke—it wasn’t the Swayze way to sit idly by when action might help. When we heard the authorities were
evacuating the canyon where our house was, that was the last straw. I decided to fly out there and get into the canyon somehow, to at least bulldoze a fire break around our house.

Late on the night of May 31, I told Lisa I was flying to New Mexico the next morning. “You’re what?” she said. “Buddy, they’re evacuating the canyon. You won’t even be able to get near the ranch.” By now, I was operating more on emotion than on logic, but I couldn’t just stay put. All I knew was, if I stood aside while that raging fire destroyed our ranch, I’d never forgive myself for not having done something.

Lisa tried to convince me not to go, but I was determined. Because I was at an emotional fever pitch, I hardly slept, and before the sun rose, I threw some clothes into a bag and headed out to the Van Nuys airport. I settled into the cockpit of our Cessna 414a to make the three-hour flight to New Mexico just before dawn broke.

About a month earlier, Lisa had encountered a dangerous situation while flying the Cessna near the Grand Canyon, where she’d come to visit me on the set of
Waking in Reno
. Lisa had taken up flying at my urging, after initially not being all that interested. But when she started taking lessons, she loved it, and she even learned how to do aerobatics—doing flying loops and other stunts in the air. She got so good that when she entered aerobatics competitions, she placed ahead of instructors who were competing. She was—and still is—an experienced, coolheaded pilot.

She had been climbing to a higher altitude, when all of a sudden, she heard a screaming noise in the cockpit. The noise startled her, but she quickly realized that the noise meant the cabin wasn’t pressurizing properly as she climbed. An outflow valve was stuck, inhibiting the free flow of air—the squealing
was like the noise a balloon makes when you slowly leak air out of the neck. We had a bad habit of occasionally smoking in the cockpit, and the sticky residue on the outflow valve was a result of tar from cigarettes.

Luckily, she was losing pressurization slowly, so she had time to come down to a safe altitude. Otherwise, she’d have been in big trouble. When an airplane’s cabin isn’t pressurized properly, there’s not enough oxygen, which leads to hypoxia and possibly death. That’s exactly what happened to the golfer Payne Stewart, who died along with five other people when the Learjet they were flying in lost pressurization. The pilots passed out and eventually died from lack of oxygen, and the plane just kept on flying for several more hours until it finally ran out of fuel and crashed. Fortunately, Lisa realized quickly what was happening, so she was able to descend to a safe altitude and finish her flight. And we got the plane serviced right after the incident.

On the morning of June 1, I decided to fly at a relatively low altitude—thirteen thousand feet—in case the pressurization problem recurred. I brought the Cessna to thirteen thousand feet, set the autopilot, and settled in for the rest of the flight. And that’s the last thing I remember, until suddenly becoming aware of green and brown around me, and everything spinning. I looked around for blue sky and tried to aim for it. But the plane was at a very low altitude, and when I saw a strip of pavement with a strange oval at one end, one thought managed to penetrate the fog in my brain:
That must be the airport.

I hooked a hard left to line up with what I thought was the runway. The next thing I knew, there were electrical power boxes in front of me, and I vaguely remember trying to push
the plane over or around them. Then suddenly, I was on the ground. I sat stunned for a moment in the cockpit. I was so groggy and disoriented, it didn’t feel like whatever had just happened was real. But when I turned around and saw our two dogs, Boda and Jazz, wagging their tails in the cabin of the airplane, I knew it must be.

I opened the plane’s door and stepped down onto the street, still thinking I was in New Mexico. I had no idea that I’d just had an off-airport landing, or that my airplane was damaged. In fact, I had just landed on the street of what was to become a new housing development in Prescott Valley, Arizona. It was just being constructed at the time, so there was hardly anyone around to see my plane descend, clip two light poles and a power box, and still somehow land without crashing.

A couple of construction workers came running over, and I vaguely remember one of the guys telling me I’d clipped something on the way down. I walked around the front of the plane to look at the wing, and when I saw that it was damaged, I got upset for the first time—this plane was Lisa’s and my baby, and I’d hurt it. I still didn’t understand the enormity of what had happened, but little by little, the truth started penetrating the fog of my hypoxia-addled brain.

The first thing I did was call Lisa—a call I dreaded making, as I knew she’d be upset. “Lisa, I’ve had an off-airport landing,” I told her. “I thought I was landing in New Mexico, but I ended up in a housing development in Prescott, Arizona. I’m okay, but the plane is damaged.”

As Lisa told me later, she just went numb as I told her what happened. It was almost too much for her to take in, after the difficulties we’d been dealing with over the past few years.

What made it worse was the fact that hypoxia slurs your speech, so it sounded as if I’d been drinking. This effect wore off quickly, but because I called Lisa so soon after landing, all she knew was that I’d damaged the plane in an unscheduled landing, had nearly killed myself doing it, and on top of it sounded as if I was unfit to fly.

The next call I made was to the Federal Aviation Administration, to report the incident. I described what had happened, and the FAA representative told me he’d call the National Transportation Safety Board. So all the official wheels were in motion for dealing with the incident. Then, I made a decision that seemed sensible at the time, but that created its own problems.

I was carrying some beer and wine on board, which was of course legal—Lisa and I often brought food and drink from LA to New Mexico, since it was a long drive from the ranch to the nearest store. I should have just left it where it was, but instead I gave it to the construction workers. There was no doubt that photographers were on the way, and I had a feeling that if word got out there was alcohol on board, they’d try to twist the story into “Patrick Swayze Flies Drunk.” I was trying to minimize possible complications, but when the story came out that I’d gotten rid of the alcohol, people assumed I was trying to cover something up.

I was anxious to get away from the scene before photographers showed up, so I asked one of the construction workers to give me a ride to a hotel, where I could settle in and take care of things. Lisa and our longtime flight instructor, Frank Kratzer, joined me there as soon as they could, and we waited for the National Transportation Safety Board investigators to
arrive at the site, so we could meet with them and answer any questions they had.