In the fire services there is an agency that tracks “near misses.”  Essentially it doesn’t wait for a serious injury or death to occur before they investigate a situation that went wrong – instead, they investigate and publish accounts of things that went wrong but through nothing more than sheer dumb luck ended up with no deaths or serious injuries.

They would have liked to see what I did the other day.  I fell off a ladder while repairing a gutter.

I’d like to point out that I have been on ladders all my life – I’ve been a painter since I was in sixth grade and I’ve been a firefighter for more than a decade.  This isn’t the first time I ever climbed a ladder.  It is, however, the first time I ever climbed one and then took the short way down.

My problem started when I was attempting to fit this gutter repair into a short window of time, so everything was hurried.  I carried a ladder around from the back of the house only to realize I had gotten a ladder that was too large to set against the house underneath the gutter.  The smart thing to do would have been either postpone the project until I had more time or simply go get the correct ladder.

You ever had one of those moments where you say to yourself, “This is really not going to work,” but you decide to do it anyway?  This was definitely one of those moments for me.  The problem was it carried the risk of serious injury.  Just as my father who broke his neck falling from some staging in 2001.

So I set this completely incorrect ladder for the job against the building at a ridiculously low angle.  I could have bailed at any time – I was just looking at it and pretty much seeing the future.  But my haste got the better of my and I climbed the ladder anyway.

Like all evil inanimate objects, the ladder was tricky and remained fairly stable while I climbed it.  Then as I reached the top it kicked out and dropped straight down.

I wasn’t watching the situation from a very good vantage-point, but I like to think I hung onto the roof and gutter just long enough to look like Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff and hanging in mid-air before plummeting.  I can tell you this – I stayed there long enough to grab the gutter, thus ripping it off and turning this simple five minute repair into an hour repair.

When I fell down, my leg landed between the rungs of the ladder which was propped up slightly – I have no idea how I didn’t break my leg at that point, but luck was with me and I merely bruised and scraped my shin.  However, the granite steps and the paving stones of the front walkway cushioned my fall and I didn’t die.

I have to start painting the back of the house today, so I’m going back up on the ladders.  If you don’t see any more blog posts, you can guess what has happened to me.