The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

David Hicks is pretty happy these days, but he almost died to get here.

The youngest of eight kids, he grew up on a farm in East Valley. His dad was a manager for Crown Zellerbach and was transferred first to Seaside, then to Vernonia, later Port Angeles, finally returning home in 1974 and commuting to Portland. Except for the final posting, the farm was rented and the family moved with him.

"I vividly remember being two or three years old and trying to take the styrofoam surfboard out to the beach in Seaside," Hicks said. "And I loved Vernonia. It was the sweetest thing. It was a great time and a great town to be a kid.

"Port Angeles was the complete opposite," he continued. "I found out what it meant to be bullied. One time I watched a kid in my class walk over to the pencil sharpener and then sharpen and blow on his pencil. He sat down next to me, not his usual seat, and buried the pencil in my thigh.

"Port Angeles is when childhood ended and I figured out life wasn't fun," he continued.

After graduating from Wahkiakum High School, Hicks meandered a bit, working in restaurants or doing a little construction.

"I didn't know anything about the world," he said, but I was familiar with tools because dad always had that kind of stuff. I was comfortable around them."

His parents always pushed school, but Hicks didn't want anything to do with it. He wanted to work with his hands.

There was a time when he thought he might like to be a journalist for the Coast Guard. He'd been the school photographer for four years, even taking classes with David Lee Myers at LCC at night. Alas, it was a coveted position, and there wasn't an opening.

Uncertain of his future he

signed up for the Air Force without telling his parents. When the time came he asked for a ride to Portland. They didn't know what to say to him.

From there, he flew to San Antonio, Tex.

"I remember stepping off the plane at 3 a.m. and a blast of air hit me like a blow dryer," Hicks laughed. "'Yeah, I thought, I'm liking this. Little did I know what the next six weeks were going to entail of marching around in that."

After finishing boot camp, he was sent to Wichita Falls, Tex., as a carpentry specialist. They taught him everything from the ground up, hand tools and all.

One evening in Wichita Falls, also known as part of Tornado Alley, he was walking back from the bar, feeling good. There was no one on the street. Where is everybody, he wondered. He got back to the barracks and everyone was huddled under their mattresses because of a tornado watch.

I laughed at them.

"I just walked a half mile in it!"

When Hicks was done with training, the Air Force moved him to Las Vegas.

"The first time I saw it I thought it was like the moon," he said. "It was stark and desolate, but after eight years I fell in love with it. The beauty of the desert in the early morning and early evenings is spectacular. You can't beat those sunrises and sunsets down there."

He had become part of a combat engineering outfit, Redhorse, which stands for Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operation Repair Squadron Engineers. According to Hicks, their goal was to be anywhere in the world within 72 hours and start building a runway.

"We were our own tight-knit, 300-man unit of carpenters, electricians, painters, engineers and architects. We even had bug people to keep the mosquitoes down," Hicks said. "If you wanted a base built, we were the guys to call. The first thing that gets built is not that runway, however, it's going to be a bar. Nobody is going to be happy at a remote location behind enemy lines without a bar nearby."

He paused.

"Boy we worked hard."

Hicks eventually got out of the Air Force, tiring of red tape and bureaucracy.

He tried the east coast, working in Boston and Florida. Eventually he headed back to Las Vegas. He was working two jobs when he fell from a great height and shattered both his wrists and suffered compound fractures on both arms. He came back to East Valley then and let his dad practice physical therapy on him.

"We figured out how to time the pain meds," Hicks said. "Dad would climb on my back and start working on each finger, beginning at the first knuckle, one at a time, twice a day. I would almost buck him off it was so painful. But if he hadn't done that, I would be disabled today."

Eventually he went back to work in Las Vegas, roofing. His coworkers had to tape a hatchet to his hand to keep it from maiming them every time he reached back.

Then some magic happened. He met someone and fell in love. They married and she followed him to Skamokawa, and he found a job at the Wahkiakum PUD.

In 2006, he lost a beloved brother, Mark, to pancreatic cancer. It wasn't much later that his father was diagnosed with the same disease and slipped away. The farmhouse burned down and both of Hick's dogs died of old age.

Unhappy, his marriage began to fall apart.

In 2009, while on his way to work in the early morning hours, Hicks rode his motorcycle into a car on Cornelius Pass. To this day he doesn't know how or why it happened.

"I remember going straight into that fender at 55 mph," Hicks said. "I hit the windshield, flipped up, upside down, backwards. It was long enough for me to think, this is going to hurt."

Healing required more physical therapy, and he dealt with physical therapy by walking. And walking and walking.

"I would do these insane hikes," Hicks said. "Once I got started I couldn't stop. At the end of the south jetty I found a brand new pair of binoculars. There was no one there and I wondered if the person had gotten there and jumped off."

About a year later, while still working for the PUD Hicks felt a tinge in his back when he stepped out of his truck. That night he woke up in so much pain he could barely move. It took him 10 minutes to reach the phone on the nightstand.

"I could not move," he said. "My neighbor had a key and raced upstairs to help me. Cindy Faubion got me some morphine. Thank God, it made the pain tolerable. The ambulance transported him to a local hospital that told him he was a drug seeker and sent him home with some medications.

The meds didn't help and it wasn't long before Hicks was on the phone again with a 911 operator. He was taken back to the same hospital and got the same response. Drug seeker.

"They literally wheeled me into the lobby and said find a ride," Hicks said. "I went through the meds they gave me and again, it didn't touch the pain."

Soon he was going through the same routine at the local hospital. A young doctor stopped and asked how he was doing.

"I came unglued," Hicks said. "I was so angry and in so much pain. You're not doing anything, I told him. I know back pain, this is nothing like that. My leg is going numb."

"You mean to tell me you've been here three times in the last five days and no one has taken a picture?" asked the young doctor. "ER is going to hear about this."

The doctor disappeared and it wasn't long before a crowd showed up. They took him up to imaging and found an abscess that had swelled and was cutting off the blood flow to his sciatic nerve. He spent nine days in ICU.

Apparently I was so out of it," Hicks laughed, "I was trying to sell hay to the Amish or Cadillacs to anyone who would listen."

According to Hicks, the local hospital realized they couldn't help him and sent him to Oregon Health and Science University. Fifteen minutes after arriving there. He was in surgery where they removed a hematoma from his abdomen. He had sepsis, pneumonia, staph and was anemic. The staff at OHSU had to intubate him and put him on life support because everything was shutting down.

"They didn't know if I was going to live through the night," he said. "I was unconscious for three days. I had a huge gaping hole in my abdomen, and they put a Wound Vac in there."

Insurance wouldn't pay for the Wound Vac when OHSU tried to discharge Hicks, so the doctor told him he was going to have to change his own dressings, twice a day.

Twice a day for five or six months he was up to his knuckles in his abdomen.

"When I got home I had a walker and an oxygen machine," Hicks said. "I decided I had to get my lawn mowed. The third day I was home, I got half of it done before I'd decided I'd done enough. My neighbor finished it for me."

A couple close friends would check on him periodically, as well as a home health nurse. He had to get his own groceries and would drive to Longview and stop at Fred Meyer.

"I'd sit down at a bench with all the little old men with their oxygen and their Hoverounds," Hicks said. "One would ask, 'What are you in for? and someone would say he was waiting for his wife."

"I'm 44 years old," he told them, "and I'm messed up."

Hicks laughed.

He spoke to an attorney about his experience at the hospital but was advised to let it go.

When Hicks started back to work at the PUD, despite all the good things about it, he simply became more and more unhappy. It just wasn't a good fit.

"I didn't feel any sense of fulfillment," he said, "and the whole experience of the last 10 years was too much."

Things began to turn around again. He met a nice woman and got back to doing what he knew how to do, carpentry.

"I got all my ducks in a row and started letting people know I was back out there," Hicks said. I even got calls from people from 20 years earlier who were glad he was back at it.

"It's so much better," he added. "I've got to work with my hands. I drive every nail, I drive every screw. I don't hire it done, because I don't trust anyone to do it the way I want it done. I haven't worked this hard for 16 years or been this fulfilled in 16 years.

"After being sick," he said finally, "you never know when your last day is going to be. I've gone to Europe, Scandinavia, Fiji now. I put together a recording studio to see if I still had any interest in it. I didn't, but at least I tried. I've been taking a lot for granted for a long time."

He doesn't plan to do that anymore.

Hicks shares his home with two cats, Puddin' and Bub, and 10 guitars.