Rebecca SmithFollow

Date Collected

Fall 11-22-2018

Place item was collected

Brigham City, Utah

Informant

Zeke Post

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Zeke Post is my brother in law. He has been married to my sister for 22 years. He writes computer programs for a government contracting company called L3. Zeke graduated from Utah State University with a degree in business.

Context

The broken pelvis story is pretty infamous in our family it’s something we laugh about all the time. Rachel (my sister) had told Zeke she and I would be talking about the incident as I was gathering stories, legends and traditions about Utah State University for my collection project for my Introduction to Folklore class (English 2210). I thought it would be fun to hear his official side of the story so I talked to him immediately after talking to my sister. I decided to talk to them separately because I didn’t want what either of them said to influence the other person We spoke in my dad’s office while everyone was in the dining room having thanksgiving breakfast. When Zeke talks about calling Miles and Jerri he is referencing my and Rachel’s parents.

Text

RS: So this is with Zeke Post on 11/22 and this is his side of the story [laughing while talking].

ZP: So what happened [pause]? Is that, is that what you’re talking about [asked a little aggressively].

RS: Yeah I want to hear what you remembered happened.

ZP: Ok so we were, so we were on a date, I love sledding, loved sledding in high school I love sliding down hills on tubes. In fact I always thought everybody loves skiing, but skiing is so expensive so I grew to love sledding and I was on a date with Rachel and we decided to go up on Old Main hill in Logan, Utah which is a very famous hill to sled sown, uhh this was before they had the big staircase that goes down the center of it. [pause] And we decided to ahh, we, we get up there and there’s a group of people going and they’d created two huge ramps basically that were made out of hay bales they’d created a huge jump and I told Rachel I said ‘you wanna come with me?’ and she said ‘sure’ and I had a big, probably a five foot tube which was plenty big for two people. As we’re walking up the hill I can see people hitting the jump and they were flying over my head, so they were at least five six feet tall the jump would send them pretty far. Any rate we get up top and I told Rachel I said ‘now once we start going down if the tube shifts you need to umm bail, we need to get off cause it could get dangerous if we, if we don’t get off the tube.’ Sure enough we start going down and we were maybe down twenty feet and all of a sudden the tube starts to shift around to where we’re going backwards. And I started to yell to Rachel ‘Bail! Get off! Jump! Get off!’ [all said with exclamation mimicking shouting] and she clambers to me [makes arm motions of grabbing someone] she grabs onto me tighter which was not good. So we hit the jump backwards and the tube goes flying out from under us and we both go flying in the air [raises hands, gestures flying]. And then we land and Rachel [small chuckle] so much lighter than me was underneath [motions with hands one on top of the other] and I landed right on top of her [claps top hand to bottom hand] and just [loud clap] squished her into the snow and I rolled off, so I hit and rolled off and she just went [clap hands to motion smashing into the ground] slammed straight down [pause] and I get up, and I kind of brush it off and I’m like ‘ohh goll’ and I was fine and I look back and I’m probably twenty feet past Rachel I look back and she’s sitting in the snow with her face down [pause] not moving, and so I run up to her and all these people that where watching us hit the jump ere like ‘oh my gosh are you ok are you ok’ [voice mimics concern] she wasn’t talking and I get right up next to her on the snow and I lean down and I say ‘Rachel are you, are you ok?’ and she says ‘I’m fine just let me rest for a minute’ and I said ‘well honey there’s other there’s people up the hill that are trying to go down and you’re right in their way so c-can we just move you aside?’ and that’s when she’s like ‘I can’t move’ [pause] so we [chuckles a bit] we called 9-1-1 and we actually called I think Miles and Jerri, no we called 9-1-1 the ambulance came and said ‘we’ve got to transport her something could be broken’ so we called Miles and Jerri and they said ‘just, just do it’ [pause] and I go to hop in the ambulance and they wouldn’t let me go cause I wasn’t her family so I drove behind and got in the ambulance and we got to the hospital and they did x-rays and sure enough her pelvis had broken in two places. And it was [laugh while talking] it literally was because of me cause I landed on her [uncomfortable laugh while clapping hands in smashing motion] and just crunched her poor pelvis. She ahh, yeah, she had broken her pelvis [laughs while talking] in two places…

RS: And that was that.

ZP: That’s the story, yeah.

RS: That’s hilarious.

ZP: It’s a good story.

Texture

Zeke seemed to vacillate between sounding like he thought parts of the story were funny and parts of it genuinely scared him and he felt bad for what happened. Zeke is a hard guy to read and we’ve never been particularly close so it was told rather matter of fact manner as quickly as possible.

Course

English 2210

Instructor

Lynne McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G7: Human Traits

EAD Number

3.9.1.27

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