Giving caution the finger

If you ever find yourself saying, “My friends spent an hour on the beach looking for the rest of my finger, but they never found it,” there’s a decent chance that you haven’t had the best week.

Last Saturday, I learned of my buddy Rob’s dedigitation when he texted a gruesome photo to my cell phone.

“Good lord!” I said, wincing.

“What’s the matter?” my wife Kara asked.

“Rob just texted me a picture with the top of his right ring finger missing. Doesn’t he know that it costs me a dollar to receive photos to my phone?” I said.

Of course, a good friend losing a beloved body part is not really a proper occasion to complain about donating a dollar to Verizon, but if someone had asked me which of my friends would find a way to chop off the tip of their finger, Rob would have been pretty high up on a very competitive list.

On ski trips in high school, Rob would launch himself over dump-truck-sized jumps with an impressive disregard for his own well-being, sometimes pulling off stunning landings that would earn disbelieving praise from anyone witnessing his flight path, though sometimes he’d land on various non-load-bearing bones as he tumbled to an abrupt stop at the nearest tree trunk, scattering assorted skiing implements and winter outerwear across the hill behind him as twelve-year-olds shouted, “Yard sale!” from the chairlift.

On a ski trip after college, after watching Rob jump off of a twenty-foot cliff and land softly in the powder below, our friend Johnny turned to me and said, “Did you know that Rob doesn’t have health insurance?”

It’s too bad he couldn’t have borrowed mine, since the biggest risk I take while skiing is sipping the hot cocoa before it has a chance to cool down.

Rob lives a few blocks from the beach in LA now, and has taken up kitesurfing as a hobby. Kitesurfing is a sport in which mentally unbalanced people tie snowboards to their feet and let giant kites drag them around the ocean. Rob once let me fly his smaller practice kite in a parking lot, and when the wind caught the kite for the first time, it yanked me off my feet like I was holding on for dear life to a dragon’s leash.

Photos courtesy of Rob "Nine Fingers" Kalmbach

Last week, as Rob was in the process of landing his kite on the beach, he lost his balance for a split second and reached his hand out to steady himself just as the kite, according to Rob, “powered up.” As the kite shot into the sky, its line sliced through the air with enough speed to shear the top half-inch of Rob’s ring finger clean off, marking the first of several days in which Rob would find it “kind of tough to type.”

Part of me feels terrible for Rob, though he fortunately now has health insurance that helped to make his finger almost as good as new, if just a bit shorter. But the other part of me is a little jealous that not only has Rob earned himself a conversation starter for life, but he also managed to mangle himself in such a cool way. The coolest way I could ever hope to auto-amputate anything is through a freak bagel mishap, at best.

Incidentally, someone once told me authoritatively that bagel-slicing accidents are the number-one cause of emergency room visits. If that is true, perhaps subsidies for English muffins should have been included in the recent health care bill.

“It feels much better now,” Rob told me a couple of days ago. “And even if my friends had found my finger, the doctors wouldn’t have been able to put it back on.”

So while Rob recovers, at least he can take some solace in that, if even just for a few moments, he made a lucky seagull very happy.

You can give Mike Todd the finger at mikectodd@gmail.com.

P.S. If you're dying to see disgusting pics of Rob's finger, scroll down in this kitesurfing forum (Rob's name in the forum is Wavehucker.) If you clicked that link, I bet you're the kind of person who inhales really deeply when somebody goes, "Oh, man, that STINKS!"