Lamar Laird was trapped beneath his lawnmower and trying not to lose hope. But after several hours pinned to the ground in a drainage ditch, hope was getting harder and harder to come by. And the constant torrential rain of last Tuesday afternoon didn’t help matters much.
“It rained for a long time and I was beginning to think nobody’s going to find me down here,” said Laird from his hospital bed last Friday. “It wasn’t a good prognosis if I couldn’t get out of there.”
But Laird did have a stick and a prayer.
And he knew that the one person capable of spotting him was going to pass by sometime after 3 p.m.
That would be Clay Wimpy, the driver of Lumpkin County School Bus 22-08.
He just needed to be as visible as possible when it happened.
“I found a stick under the lawnmower and I wrestled it out of there,” said Laird. “I told myself if I could hear the school bus when it went by he could be high enough to see in that ditch.”
In the meantime, there was nothing to do but remain underneath the 300 to 400 pound mower, and wait.
THE BUS STOP
The trouble began earlier that day when the local senior citizen was mowing his lawn with his trusty Snapper on his Jack Walker Road property. It’s something he’s done many times without a problem. But this time, he cut too close to the edge of the roadway. And suddenly he was falling.
“The back right wheel dropped into a 12-foot embankment,” he recalled. “My lawnmower flipped and rolled down the hill and wound up on top of me.”
Laird was injured. But he was conscious. And the mower came to a rest upright on top of him as the engine ran for a minute before kicking off.
Then Laird was left in relative silence.
He listened for hours as car after car passed by. Since the embankment was so steep, he wasn’t visible to any passersby. And that included an actual ambulance that rolled by at one point.
“I tell you the strangest thing was when the EMS rode down that road earlier that day to go help somebody up the road,” he said.
He also listened to the ominous gurgling of water swirling around him.
“You sit there listening and you could hear that drainage ditch picking up water and picking up water,” he said.
All the while, his wife Denise was unsure of her husband’s whereabouts. But she said she wouldn’t have thought to check the dense brush on the edge of their land.
“I’m telling you I would not have found him,” she said. “… He was covered up with bushes and trees and that type of thing.”
But that brush came in handy.
Lamar reasoned that if he could wave the three-to-four foot long stick, it would attract the attention of the bus driver. So when he finally heard Bus 22-08 rolling by, Lamar held the stick with his one free arm and began to wave as frantically as possible.
‘DIVINE INTERVENTION’
It wasn’t the stick, but a flash of color that first caught Wimpy’s attention.
“I just happened to get a glimpse of something red in there and I thought ‘That aint right,’” he said. “So I stopped to get a closer look.”
That closer look was all Wimpy needed as he immediately shouted for two of the remaining older students to assist with the rescue.
“I hollered for Jake and Luke to hurry up and help me help this man,” he said.
Sophomore Luke Ball wasn’t expecting to end his school day as part of an impromptu rescue squad. But he was happy to help.
“I’m just glad that I was in the right place at the right time,” said the 15-year-old. “And I’m just glad that the bus driver happened to be looking down there and saw him.”
Ball joined Wimpy and eighth grader Jake Hendrix as they ran down the steep slick slope to assist Lamar.
Judging from the scene, Wimpy was expecting that Lamar would be in much worse shape than they actually found him.
“Luckily for some reason, I don’t know how, divine intervention I guess, that mower shut off,” he said. “And I don’t reckon he had a cut on him.”
Wimpy and Hendricks were able to lift the mower while Ball pulled Lamar to safety.
“It was a lot of adrenaline,” said Ball. “I didn’t really think a lot. I just kind of grabbed him out from underneath the lawnmower and held him away from it.”
TEAM EFFORT
Neighbor Sherri Wells was passing by when she saw a crowd gathering at the end of the road. At first she thought the bus had a flat tire. Then she realized her neighbor was at the bottom of the hill.
“We were yelling at him from up top to ‘Hang in there Lamar the ambulance is on the way,’” she said. “Who knows how long he would have laid there if the bus driver hadn’t spotted him?”
Wells then documented a true team effort at the end of Jack Walker Road.
“An ambulance was called and the boys stayed in the ravine with Mr. Laird to keep him alert, with friends and neighbors gathering around to offer prayers and support,” she stated. “Morgan Caldwell donated an umbrella and towel. Then Amicalola EMC linemen were involved in the rescue. They had rope and helped pull Mr. Laird out of the gulley.”
Soon EMS showed up at the scene and rushed Lamar to Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville.
“They were ready for him when he got here. And they kind of nicknamed him The Lawn Mower Man,” said Denise with a laugh, adding that the dose of levity was much appreciated.
Ultimately Lamar suffered a fractured hip and broken ribs.
He said he’s sore, but on the mend. And he wanted to make sure everybody involved gets the credit they deserve for their help on that rainy day.
“I tell you, it was amazing,” he said. “And I think God sent them right there.”
Meanwhile, Wimpy downplayed his response as a natural reaction to the situation.
“We didn’t do anything that anybody else wouldn’t have done,” he said. “But I’m just glad we saw him.”
However, Denise has another way to describe the hope-bringing actions of the Bus 22-08 crew.
“In my mind, we see miracles and we just let them go, we don’t acknowledge it,” she said. “And this was a miracle.”