Labor Day Weekend, 1994
It was the start of my sophomore year at Iowa State.
Earlier that day, my new roommates and I had gone rappelling with Steve — an ex–Army Ranger we'd met freshman year. He coached us through knots, anchors, and controlled descents, the mechanics drilled until they felt procedural. By the time we got back to Ames, we were still wired.
That night blurred the way college nights often did — house parties, music bleeding onto porches, a red Solo cup sweating in my hand long after the beer went warm. Nothing memorable. Just motion.
Around midnight, Ken and I headed out. We'd moved into a new apartment a few blocks off campus earlier that week. Ken wasn't ready to slow down. He grabbed his bike and grinned.
"Let's tear around campus," he said. "Jump some stairs. Maybe dodge security."
I jogged alongside him until we spotted a bike rack outside an apartment building.
"Go see if one's unlocked," he said.
It was.
A beat-up mountain bike. The kind no one expected to be taken. I borrowed it and for the next hour we cut across campus — hopping curbs, weaving through the quad, flying down stairwells, the night empty and forgiving.
Eventually, I peeled off. I told Ken I'd return the bike and meet him back home for a beer.
It was 3:30 a.m. The streets were quiet. My body was still buzzing from the rappel, the ride, the night.
I dropped the bike where I'd found it and cut through backyards on the walk home.
A shortcut.
The fence came up fast — a six-foot privacy fence, the same kind Jon and I used to vault back in Waterloo. I didn't slow down. I planted a foot halfway up and launched.
Then nothing.
Blackout.
Whatever happened in those missing seconds left me awkwardly stuck on the other side. When awareness snapped back, I felt warmth running down my thigh. For a moment, I thought I'd pissed myself.
Then I saw the blood.
A steel T-post — the kind used for tomato plants or barbed wire — had torn into my inner thigh, stopping just short of the artery.
I don't remember pulling myself free. I only remember moving — blood pouring down my leg, each step harder than the last, my breathing shallow and urgent in a way that bypassed thought.
It was four in the morning.
Just make it home.
A porch light flicked on ahead. A small group was still outside, drinks in hand. I made it up their steps and collapsed.
"Help me," I said.
Hands pressed towels to my leg. Someone yelled that an ambulance was on the way. Sirens followed.
Blackout again.
The next moments arrived in fragments — EMTs shouting, fluorescent lights, the sound of scissors cutting away my shorts.
Don't let them see my junk.
It didn't last.
A doctor leaned over me. "Craig, can you feel all ten toes?"
I've got ten toes now?
Then nothing.
When I woke up in the pediatric unit at Mary Greely Hospital, tubes ran into my nose and IVs into both arms. A doctor told me I'd lost six pints of blood. My inner thigh muscle had been stitched back together. Twenty-four metal staples sealed the wound like a zipper.
They called my parents in Waterloo. They arrived that afternoon.
The hospital room smelled like antiseptic and bad decisions. I lay propped in a stiff bed, the adrenaline gone, pain settling into its place. Machines hummed steadily, indifferent.
My dad stood at the foot of the bed. My mom stayed quiet beside him, worry written across her face.
"You know how much this is gonna cost me?" he said. "You came here to study or screw around?"
He wasn't wrong — my freshman grades had already answered that question.
Getting around campus on crutches was miserable. I stopped going to class. By the end of the semester, I wasn't in college anymore.
For a while, I treated the scar like a party trick. I'd pull down my pants at keggers and show the staples, laughing like it was proof of something instead of a warning.