Waltinomo Falls, and So Do I!

By Jared 

"Screech!" I woke up with a start as my dad's rusty red 1946 Buick stopped with a high pitched wine.

We got out of my dad's creaking car and stretched under an awe inspiring and dazzling sight. A huge mountain, green with shrubbery raced up to the sky while at the same time, a giant waterfall screamed down the side of the mountain with majestic grace and splashed in a pool of water at the bottom of the mountain in a cascade of colors.

"Wow, are we really going to climb that?" I asked.

"Yeah, that's Waltinomo Falls," my dad said with a grin.

We started up a long path of twists and turns. We finally reached the top of the mountain after a grueling hour. We sat down on a small hill to eat the marvelous lunch that my dad had made.

After we finished lunch we sat for a while until the lunch had settled.

"I'll race you down!" I yelled over the tremendous noise of the falls.

"Ohhh! You are toast boy!" my dad yelled back at me. He shot off down the path of complicated twists and turns without a look back.

I took off like a rocket to catch up to him. After a few turns, my dad stopped and yelled something that was unintelligible to me because I was going so fast that I couldn't hear him.

Suddenly, I knew what he had said and what would happen just before it did.

I hit the drainage ditch with such force that I went flying through the air. I landed on the pavement with such a sickening thud that it made me feel like I had been thrown from a two-story building just to land on rocky, cold pavement. I slid after hitting the ground and I was soon covered with red, lava-like blood. My dad picked me up and rushed me into his car to get to the hospital.

When I woke up after being unconscious for the car ride I looked around me and found that I was in a hospital. I was in a bed with white sheets and about 4 feet off the ground. I had bandages all over my arms, where they had been completely torn apart from the fall. I looked down at my legs, but I couldn't see my injuries because they were covered in very thick gauze. I suspected that they were worse than my arms because they were more heavily bandaged. My chin was also bandaged with gauze and other cloth. I thought for sure that I would have scars somewhere that I had hit the pavement, but I didn't get any. When the doctors came in and told me what had happened to me, I was amazed that I lived through it. I had gotten stitches on both my legs and my chin. I had also sprained my ankle, probably when I hit the ditch.

In the hospital, I was eating gruel and mush instead of the good smelling and tasting food that I usually get at home. After a few weeks in the hospital, I was up and running again. I was more careful running after being hospitalized for 3 weeks so that I wouldn't have to go into that rotten place again. I learned that a person really could just fall and get seriously hurt, even while only running.