It’s not often people have a brush with death, but in this week’s episode both our storytellers are sharing stories about their near misses.
Part 1: When Abraham Norfleet’s dad asks him to clean an underwater pump on their family farm, he tries to do it one breath.
Abraham Norfleet is a writer, multi-disciplinary artist, and comedian. Back when he was still trying to be respectable he worked as a commercial artist in advertising, often working triple shifts putting the sparkle on a diamond or the steam on a steak under looming deadlines and immense pressure, just to earn a “high salary.” Now he performs internationally* and is a regular on the award-winning web series Goodstein.
*did an open mic in Canada once.
Part 2: Hana Schank wakes up in a hospital and has no idea how she got there.
Hana Schank is an author, designer, and technologist. She is a Senior Advisor for Public Interest Technology at New America, a think tank in Washington DC, where she works to improve how government serves the American people via technology and human centered design. In addition to her research and design work, Schank is the author of three nonfiction books and a Kindle Single. Her most recent book, POWER TO THE PUBLIC, received praise from Pres. Obama, who called it "worth a read for anyone who cares about making change happen." Hana lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with her husband and two children, where she hopes to write more books that Pres. Obama enjoys.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
I grew up in a small town in northern California called Philo. I say small town and you all think you know what a small town is. No. Think smaller.
In the 1970 census, they counted 93 people there. And we moved there shortly after that, so it was a little in-joke in our house that now there were 98 people. But we were the only ones that knew that. We kept that as a joke only in our house because the other 93 people in that town would not have liked that kind of joke.
They were real country people there. It was a farming community and this was the beginning of the 1970s but the attitudes and the mores of this area were more like the ‘50s, the 1850s.
And unbeknownst to me at the time, my parents, my father especially, they were not country people. They were city people. They were hippies. They'd met in Los Angeles. And then my mom got pregnant with me and I got born.
My father was trying to start a coffee shop and it was going bankrupt, I think because he found it distasteful to make a profit on the LSD. And so he took the last of his money and he bought an old school bus, a short bus, and ripped out all the benches and put in a playpen for the baby, me, and a wood stove with a chimney going out the top.
They decided to set out and find some place to go back to the land. They wanted to be back‑to‑the‑land hippies, like they read about in the Whole Earth Catalog.
And they also decided to become Born Again Christians. I'm not sure why. I suspect it was the LSD.
So they set off from Los Angeles with this bus and they went all the way across the country to Florida and then all the way back across the country to California and my dad crashed the bus right outside of Philo, so that's where I grew up.
Abraham Norfleet shares his story with a limited audience at The Tank Theater in New York City, NY in November 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
Water was a problem back then too. It's even worse now. But the house we ended up in had a small cistern from a spring that was enough water for the household usage. But my father had this fantasy of having a farm and being back to the land. He wasn't really a farmer. He was actually a union carpenter is how he made his living. But he really wanted this farm and I think because that was the only way he could figure out how to utilize the free child labor he had.
In order to get water for the farm, there was a cliff out behind the workshop and then the pig pen and then there was this 50-foot cliff down to a creek. So he ran a line down to the creek and put in a 220 volt submersible pump and a plastic hose that went 50 feet up the cliff to a big holding tank that just had a flotation switch on it. That was the water that supplied all of our garden and the animals and all that.
When I was ten years old, so fast forward ten years, 1979, it was late in the summer and I was chilling, doing something. I heard my dad whistling this crazy loud whistle he could do that I never learned and yelled my name.
I was like, “Oh, no,” a really dreadful feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hustled over as quick as I could. I wasn't sure what kind of a beating I was going to get.
He had a scrub brush and he told me that he thought the irrigation pump was too clogged with algae to be efficient and he wanted me to go down and clean it off. For a second, I was kind of irked that it was a chore out of the blue and then I was like, “You know what? It's swimming in the creek. That's what I do for fun. So I'm just going to adjust my attitude and make this a good time.”
I took the scrub brush and you couldn't go right down the cliff. You had to go about a quarter mile down the hill until the hill got down to the creek level and then hike back up upstream to where the geology of the creek where it met the cliff. That's why the cliff was there. It sort of formed this borehole in the winter when the water was high and it made a kind of steep little pit right there. That was why the irrigation pump was there. It was deep. The rest of the creek was ankle deep at this time of year.
So I get down there and I go in the water and it's up to about my waist. Only about two or three feet to the pump, but by then it'll be over my head. I'm looking at the algae on the pump and there's these really diaphanous streamers of algae. I'm thinking, “Okay, I can do this. I can do this on one breath.”
At the time, I knew I could hold my breath for a little over two minutes. I knew this because the only high-tech tool I had was a stopwatch. Us kids were totally unsupervised all summer and so we just had this contest all the time of who could stay underwater the longest. That summer, I was the champion. I even beat an older kid. He was about 13. And I learned from that there's a certain type of country person where if a younger kid beats them they become your enemy for life.
So I set myself this goal of finishing the whole thing in one breath. Hyperventilated for a little while, get the oxygen up. Took a big breath. Dove under.
I found that I had to kind of hold onto the pump with one hand. The intake of the pump was a stainless steel cylinder, about two feet long, about as big around as a coffee can. There's a grill on it.
As soon as I started scrubbing it the algae looked very weak and soft, but it turned out to be really tough and hard to scrub off. The intake of the pump was keeping the algae matted up to it even as it scrubbed off. It was fouling the scrub brush and I had to keep kind of shaking the scrub brush out. I got about halfway across and had to switch hands, so I was doing it left-handed.
I was definitely starting to need air at this point so I started letting a little air trickle out my nose. That's a little way you can trick your brain into giving you a little more time. I was almost done. It was just one little strip to go and my chest was starting to heave a little bit, that subconscious urge to take a breath. And I was like, “Okay, I didn't make it. I give up. I got to get air.”
I always had a cinematic imagination. So I imagine myself pushing off the bottom and blowing out my air while still underwater and then the bubbles sort of breaking the surface and my face coming right up to the bubbles to get my breath of air. So that's what I did. I blew out all my air and I pushed off and I reached up and I grabbed the pipe that was coming off the top of the pump. I also grabbed the 220-volt electrical line that my dad had made the connection with twisting the wires together and wrapping them in electrical tape.
So 220 volts immediately clamp my hand down on the pipe. And I was like, “Oh, shit. Let go, let go, let go,” and I couldn't. That much electricity puts every nerve and every muscle onto full clench so I was immediately in a position where whatever muscle group the flexors were fighting the extensors, whichever one was the strongest one and I was just in the position of wherever the physical limit of that range of motion is.
Abraham Norfleet shares his story with a limited audience at The Tank Theater in New York City, NY in November 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
So I was arched over backwards, my head upside down, my eyes are open. I could feel the electricity pouring into my hand, a really strange feeling, and down my arm to where it hit the water. And where the water was, it felt a ring of it flowing out into the water. But I could still feel a lot more of it still flowing all through the rest of me. I could feel it flowing out of my elbow underwater, out of my armpits. My other hand I could feel it flowing out of my palm and my fingertips, out of my groin, my knees, the bottom of my feet.
I could feel that my heart was just clenched like a fist. It had a distinct feeling of not beating. It felt like it was buzzing like the sound that a funky fluorescent light makes, but far more painful.
I was kind of surprised. My internal monologue at this point was calm and it was just like, “Well, that's it. You can't let go and you're out of air already and now your heart's not even beating so you're dead. That's it. You're done.”
And I was like, “Okay.”
I could see the rocks underwater. My head was upside down so it was kind of I was looking up to the bottom of the creek. I could see minnows swimming around. I could see it's only about an inch or two of water in front of my eyes. I could see the shore. I could see the sand and the willow trees and I could see a lot of bright blue sky and I could see the sun.
And I thought, “Well, this is taking a long time. Isn't my life supposed to flash before my eyes or something?”
As soon as I thought that, I saw that the sun was kind of shimmering and I couldn't move to look at it but it sort of became the focus of my attention. The shimmery edge of it looked like there was something spinning around it, these concentric circles right around the sun and kind of coming closer. They looked like little black buzz saws.
And there were two sets of them and they were spinning in opposite directions but missing each other each time they went around. And it looked like they were getting bigger or coming closer and there were more and more of them coming off the sun. As they got bigger, they looked like a bunch of paisley smashed together or maybe a starfish, maybe, spinning.
Then I noticed that it looked like there was like a drop of dew in the middle of one and my attention went to that. It felt like peeking through a keyhole. I saw a scene that was like I was on the ceiling of our kitchen in the house I grew up in and I was looking down on my mom's head and back from above. Standing next to her was a little toddler holding her skirt for balance and I realized that that was me and I was looking down from this strange vantage point on a scene from my life. I was like, “Oh, this is what it must mean to have your life flash before your eyes.”
So I looked into another one of those weird shapes and it had the same effect. I looked through that hole and I saw myself when I was maybe three years old and we'd just gotten our puppy Molasses and I was playing with the puppy.
And then I looked at another one and I was a year older. I was like maybe four or five and one of my chores was to put the chickens back in the coop at night. So it was dusk and it was the same vantage point, looking down on the top of my head and me and Molasses were herding the chickens into the coop. And I was like, “Oh.”
I looked into another one and it was a scene of a kid older than me. It was wearing a yellow t‑shirt and blue jeans and blue nylon sneakers and crossing a creek that looked very much like this creek but wasn't. And stepped on a dry rock to cross and the rock shifted. His foot went in the water and he kind of jumped the rest of the way across.
And I thought, “Oh, that's bullshit. That's not me. That's older than me. This isn't really my life flashing before my eyes. This is my brain getting cooked by electricity and just showing me what I thought I was supposed to see.” I was really disappointed and upset about that.
Right then there was this strange click feeling and the power shut off and my hand let go. I was like, “Oh, I'm not dead yet.”
Now, at this point, these black shapes that were still coming off the sun and still coming closer, there was just thousands and thousands and thousands now and they were swirling around, covering up almost the entire sky. I just had this intuition that as soon as I couldn't see any more of the real world and all I saw was these black shapes then that means I'd be really dead.
And I thought, “Okay, I'm not getting electrocuted anymore,” and I actually felt my heart beating again. And I was like, “Why am I still seeing the shapes?” I was like, “Oh, yeah, I didn't take a breath yet.”
So I just sort of tipped my head up a little bit and I took a breath. As I took the breath, I felt pain just flooded back in and I realized it hadn't really hurt for a while there. It hurt right at first and then there was that whole time I was looking at the picture it didn't really hurt. And now it hurt a lot and I went back underwater and my right arm didn't work at all and my face was kind of bumping on the rocks underwater and I couldn't get my wits about me.
I thought, “This is really dumb. I'm going to drown now.”
But it got shallow quick and the current was taking me to where it was shallower and I got my hand down and I managed to get some air. Then I recovered a little bit and managed to crawl up under the sand. I think I passed out for a little while. I was shivering and crying and finally I could get up.
I looked up at the top of the cliff and right there was my dad and he was coiling up the hose. He had just finished cleaning out the pig pen.
I yelled up to him, “Dad.”
And he's like, “What?”
I said, “I got shocked. I need to come up.”
He goes, “Did you finish cleaning the pump?”
And I was like, “Ahh…”
And he could tell because I hesitated that I hadn't finished yet. He's like, “Oh, finish cleaning the pump and then you can come up.”
And I was like, “Oh, man.”
And my right hand, my fingers were all puffy and kind of cooked-looking and my thumb was all puffy and cooked and my right arm didn't work, but I was like, “Well, I was on the left-handed part now anyways.”
And I was like, “Oh, the scrub brush,” and I started looking around for the scrub brush. Then I saw it like an eighth of a mile down the creek just bobbing along on the creek. And I'm like, “Ah, there's no way I can catch that.” It's faster than I am at this point.
So for the first time ever, I deliberately disobeyed my father and went back up the trail. Before I got to the gate, I snuck through the tall grass and waited till he was invisible and then I climbed over the fence and snuck into the house and went straight to my mom.
Recovered. I never went to the doctor or anything. My arm feeling came back over the next couple of days and I could use it again. Wrapped up my hand with bandages and stuff and put some sunburn cream on it.
Then a couple of years later, I must have been about 13, we were at the next town over Booneville visiting our friends. I was down in the creek playing with the kids and I'm crossing the creek and the rock shifts. My foot goes in the water and I jump across. I look down and I'm wearing those bright blue nylon sneakers and blue jeans and a yellow t-shirt and I realized, “Oh, that was the last scene I saw that pissed me off so much. That was my life flashing before my eyes.”
Now, up to that point I've been raised pretty fundamental as Christian, which is weird for a hippie kid, but my parents decided to be Born-Again Christians. I had actually gone to a Christian elementary school and now I was back in a junior high school in public junior high and sort of learning the other kind of science which tells you evolution is true as opposed to how to refute evolutionists, which was the first part of my education.
But when I realized that I had actually seen the future and that was possible, it meant that there was something fundamentally missing in everything I'd learned so far and nobody really knew what the truth was. I realized that the only truth that I knew was real was that there was a part of me that was watching over me and somehow existed outside of time.
The end. Thank you. My name is Abraham Norfleet.
Part 2
I used to be the kind of person who said things like, “I just need to unplug.” I had all of the books on how to slow down and all of the meditation apps. I would go to a yoga retreat and I would be the person standing in my room at the yoga retreat checking my email and just sending ‘one last email’ and ‘one more phone call’ before racing down the hall so I could relax.
In summer 2019, we were in Vermont getting ready for some relaxing of that style, because it was about to be August and it was about to be vacation and we'd rented a house in Vermont for the month. But before we could get to all of that relaxing, we first had to pick my daughter up from sleep‑away camp.
So we spent the morning watching 10-year-old girls cantering and posting and doing horse‑related activities. Then we pack up the bag and throw it in the car and we have a conversation about where we want to go for lunch. Do we want to go to the diner or to the burger place.
I don't remember which one we chose because the next thing that I know, I am being woken up repeatedly by doctors who insist on telling me this story that I'm sure is wrong. They wake me up and they say, “You were in a car accident and you are in Dartmouth‑Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire.”
Hana Schank shares her story with a limited audience at The Tank Theater in New York City, NY in March 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.
Wrong. I started the day in Vermont. If I crossed a river to a different state, wouldn't I know it?
And then they say, “There was a motorcycle that was on the road. A pickup truck tried to pass it and it hit you head-on 70 miles an hour. They didn't see you coming. They were going up a hill. Your husband has broken his leg, your son's collarbone is shattered, your daughter has damage to her lower intestine from the seat belt and she's had surgery. She also has spinal fractures.”
And they tell me I've also had surgery. So I lift up my hospital gown and I see this angry red line and these industrial-sized staples running down my torso, so I know they're right.
And then they say, “And you got your bell rung.” This is the phrase that they used to tell me that my brain slammed against the side of my skull and bled for a while. The bleeding has stopped but I have what's called traumatic brain injury.
I'm acutely aware in the hospital that I have absolutely no idea what's happening. I can't keep together a linear narrative about the accident. I keep asking, “What happened?” and, “When did that happen?” and, “Who did what?” and, “What was with the motorcycle and there was a pickup truck?” and, “I don't understand what happened.”
And my husband is telling me for like the thousandth time who has what injuries. I can't keep any of the injuries straight. I can't remember what happened to our son and who has a broken collarbone. I have no idea what's happening. My brain feels sluggish and walled off and I can't access anything before the accident.
Eventually, we get discharged. We are in the Airbnb in Vermont having what was supposed to be a vacation and now is something entirely different. My husband is cooking dinner and he says to me, “Will you hand me the parmesan?”
So I open the fridge and I look and I look and I shrug and I said to him, “I can't find the parmesan,” and I close the fridge.
My son opens the fridge and he pulls out a block of parmesan and he hands it to my husband. Sometimes you just can't find the parmesan?
Turns out no. When I roll into occupational therapy a bit later, we do a test that confirms that I have trouble scanning a field for visual objects.
She says, “We're going to work on it.”
So I'm like, “Okay. That's good. We're going to work on it.”
And she pulls out a deck of cards and says, “We're going to play a game.”
I'm like, “Oh, boy, a game. Great!”
She says the game is she's going to turn over one card and then she's going to turn over another card and I have to say the color and the suit and the number of the previous card.
I hate this game. I am so bad at this game. I want to physically reach into my skull and remove my brain and throw it against the wall. I am furious. I will never play this game again as long as I live.
When we get back to New York, I noticed that my brain is different. It used to race all the time, making plans and skipping from an article I want to research to a project I want to do at work to whether my kids are happy and in the right after-school programs to like where are we going for MLK weekend. Now, it does none of that. It's really quiet, which I find highly suspicious but also kind of soothing.
Hana Schank shares her story with a limited audience at The Tank Theater in New York City, NY in March 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.
When we get back to New York, I'm taking the subway to a lot of doctors’ appointments. There are endless doctors’ appointments for everybody in the family. And I notice that when I get on the subway, I just sit. I don't take out my phone. I don't take out a book. I don't listen to music. I just sit on the subway and I'm just a person riding the subway. I welcome the quiet but I'm not so sure.
So I realize after a while, we start trying to get back into our lives and it becomes clear that the biggest problem for me is going to be stamina. I am tired a lot and I get tired out easy. I get brain tired, which is kind of a different thing than being physically tired.
We decide we're going to take a staycation. It's December and we decide we'll take the kids to the Empire State Building. They're lifelong New Yorkers so, obviously, they've never been.
So we get tickets and the day comes and I'm just too tired. I just can't do it. So instead, I spend the day researching and finding a doctor, finding specialists with expertise in traumatic brain injury and fatigue. I find a guy on the upper east side and I make an appointment. I go see him.
and I say to him, “Will I ever be able to have the life that I thought I was going to have? I work at a think tank. I work really closely with people who are going to go into the White House or into the administration or the federal government. I know that's not a thing that I'm going to do right now, but I kind of always thought that would be a thing I would do down the road, maybe. Like is that even an option for me?”
He says, “Well, look. You have the brain that you have and you're going to have to learn to live with it. But…” and then he tells me the story about a patient of his who is a high‑powered, fancy lawyer at some high-powered, fancy law place and she has traumatic brain injury. And she just takes a nap under her desk every day and she's fine.
So I picture this woman in her like fancy designer lawyer suit curling up on the floor of the office under her desk with the paper shavings and like Cheez-It dust and I just know in that moment that that is not the life that I want to have.
So after that appointment, I think about what he said about living with the brain that I have and I start to make some changes. The first thing that I do is I stop multitasking. Did you know that you can just listen to the radio? Like that is an activity unto itself. I used to listen to the radio while doing dishes and the crossword puzzle and knitting a sweater. You don't have to do any of that. You can just listen to the radio.
So I experiment with taking a walk in Prospect Park near where we live and I walk without headphones. Total silence. I'm just in the park and I see the kids playing flag football and I'm listening to the sound of football and heavy breathing as runners are passing me on the park loop. And I smell the moldering leaves under the wet winter snow and it's kind of amazing.
So I try the new me out at this book launch event. I have a bunch of friends who are going to a book launch. So a book launch has two parts to it. There is always like the book talk part and then there's the drinking and socializing part.
I say to my friends, “I know that I'm going to have energy for the book talk part and I am not going to have energy for the drinking and socializing part, so I'm going to leave before that.” And it's entirely possible that I never had the energy for the drinking and socializing part. Like as an introvert, it's not exactly my deal. But now I have this really great excuse.
So the book launch comes and I do the reading part and then the drinking part and socializing part comes and I'm like, “Okay. Gotta go. You know, get the brain thing. See you later.”
And everyone's like, “Bye. Good for you taking care of yourself.”
And the next day I get up and I have energy and this is kind of a revelation. I realize that I don't have a choice as to how much energy I have every day but I have a choice as to what I spend it on.
So I start cutting things out left and right. I start saying no to work stuff. I start turning down projects. I even end some relationships that are just too draining. And I become this brain energy conservation fanatic.
I have also learned that part of conserving the brain energy is sitting with the silence and welcoming it. So this last summer, we bought a house in Maine. We couldn't go back to Vermont, for obvious reasons, but we liked nature and we wanted to still have some. And buying the house in Maine was kind of a way of putting a stake in the ground and saying this is the kind of life I want to live. I want to live a life that centers my health and my family and nature instead of work, work and work.
I'm not always great at the energy conservation. Sometimes I slip up and I do too much and then I pay the price the next day or the next week or sometimes even the next month. I'm still learning. But I have learned that part of conserving my brain energy means that when I say, “I just need to unplug,” I really have to listen to myself. I really have to do it.
What that looks like for me is doing zero to one things at a time and sitting in the silence and welcoming it. And I have come to a point where I relish it. I relish the silence because I know that it means I'll have energy to get up and do it all again tomorrow.