It's easy to be fooled by Charlene Kirby's kindness and laughter, but the 75-year-old woman is full of remarkable grit.
Just look at her career as a first responder and emergency room nurse, or her work on a remote piece of land in McCoy, Colorado.
"I was born and raised right here," Kirby said about McCoy. "We're halfway between Vail and Steamboat Springs in the middle of nowhere."
One night in early June is perhaps most emblematic of the resilience found within Kirby.
The character qualities Kirby refined throughout her career prepared her for the night of June 7.
"I've always been really calm. Well, I should take that back. That was a lie," Kirby said with a laugh. "I had a terrible temper when I was younger, but most of the time I'm calm."
Kirby was pulling weeds and cleaning up tree limbs in preparation for her grandson's wedding, which will take place on her property. She decided to take the debris to a gully on her property.
"I hooked up the trailer to the side-by-side, and I went up to where I was going to dump this," Kirby recalled. "Well, when I got to the crest of that hill, the side-by-side wouldn't go over... When I let off the gas, it rolled backwards into the trailer, which jackknifed. So I got out, and I took out some stuff, thinking, 'Well, maybe it's too heavy.' Got back in, still couldn't quite make it over that crest."
When Kirby took her foot off the gas, the trailer jackknifed. She put on the emergency brake and tried to straighten the trailer.
"I was standing right behind the side-by-side, and I was pulling straight the trailer — to straighten it out. And the side-by-side started running backwards over me. So, I started running backwards, and then I turned to run, and that's when I fell," Kirby explained. "Miracle number one, the trailer jackknifed again, and the side-by-side did not run over the top of me, but when I fell, I knew I broke my femur. I could feel it."
Kirby screamed — so loudly she assumed people in McCoy would have heard her.
"After I got done screaming, I was laying on my backside, and I thought, 'Well, I can't lay here.' And you're really not supposed to move a [broken] femur, because you could sever your femoral artery," Kirby said, utilizing her medical knowledge. "I just started pulling myself. In my mind, I was going to get home, I was going to drag myself in my basement and call 911, because I have a phone down there."
She pulled herself, inch by inch, in the direction of her home. Night fell, and new fears entered Kirby's mind.
"My older son, Rick, had been getting onto me about walking my dog in the dark because we have a mountain lion that's back up here behind the house," Kirby said. "I was like, 'Lord, I need your help.' So I started saying the 23rd Psalm: 'Though I walk through the valley shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.' And then I said, 'Lord, please cover me with your angels. Please cover me and give me your protection. Give me my angels to help me get out of this.'"
It's difficult for Kirby to truly explain what happened next, but she said a strong sense of peace washed over her. Then, it started raining.
"I get really cold. I just really start shaking hard. And it was like, 'Am I in hypothermia? Am I going into shock? Because you can lose a lot of blood into that space. Or am I just in pain?' I'm like, 'Well, I'm probably all three,'" Kirby said. "I pulled my sweatshirt up over my head, and I started breathing into my sweatshirt, and it would warm me up."
She continued to crawl — more like an inchworm and less like an army crawl, in her own words.
"I kept saying, 'You can do one more inch. Nope, do one more inch,'" Kirby recalled.
The sun rose, and Kirby began praying that her son would arrive earlier than usual to irrigate and feed the steers. Her son arrived roughly an hour earlier than he normally would.
"When I heard him, I knew he would think I was dead because I couldn't move at all anymore. So he drove up, and he got out of the pickup, and he was like, 'Mom?' and I'm like, 'I'm alive,'" Kirby said.
Kirby was so close to home that her beloved dog, Sadie, was whimpering from within her invisible fence on the property.
Her son called for an ambulance, and many of the people who responded knew Kirby personally.
"I had dirt in my nose, in my ears, on my teeth, in my hair, all down the front of me. My oldest son said, 'Mom, when they turned you over to put you in the ambulance, your belly was full of dirt and gravel, and you had a big old rock right in your belly button.' That's a visual you're going to live with for a while," Kirby said, laughing. "I wish somebody had taken a picture, actually, because I have no idea how bad I looked."
Kirby had surgery on her hip and top of the femur on the evening of June 9. She received rehabilitation for her leg at Castle Peak in Eagle. After three weeks, she was able to return home on July 3, just in time for her grandson's wedding.
"The doctor said, 'Well, you'll be at the wedding. You just won't be dancing.' I was like, 'Watch me,'" Kirby said with a smile. "I don't know if there's a stronger word than grateful or blessed... Everybody's like, why? How in the world did you survive that night? And I'm like, there's no doubt in my mind, that's because God was with me the whole time."
While Kirby was at the rehabilitation center, a patient she treated back in 1982 came to visit.
"Very rarely does a patient say thank you," Kirby said. "You know, so very rarely do you ever get to see, especially in the ER, those patients again. So, that's always to me — I love that."
For Kirby, her story of surviving that awful night is indicative of the culture found in the McCoy community.
"I have a friend. She had a branch through her calf," Kirby remembered. "Said, I have a splinter in my leg, and the docs are going, 'You must be from McCoy...' Is it an easy life? No, it's not an easy life, but it's a rewarding life."
This story was originally published by Colette Bordelon with the Scripps News Group in Denver.
