Distinctly Montana Magazine

21 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m Sliding, he picked up speed. Snow that had frozen, melted, and refroz- en into shards tore at his skin while rocks, jutting out of the snow like land mines, struck his head and body, leaving large gashes but failing to slow his descent. The rational part of his mind may have resigned itself to death, but not the screaming animal part. His hand fumbled toward his holster. For a hopeful moment he aimed to try to pull out his pistol and lodge it, somehow, in rocks as he fell, but he couldn't get it out. "The holster's too tight," Hank remembers bitterly in Living Proof. "What a joke." Badly lacerated and stunned, Williams was still aware enough to realize he was nearing the bottom of his fall—and that the worst lay ahead. He was speeding toward some boulders that, if he struck them, might be enough to finish him off. Gathering together what was left of his sanity, he drew up his legs and pressed off of the slope just before hitting the boulder. For a moment, he was airborne, flying like a ragged, bat- tered bird toward the sun, toward the lake, toward safety. Then he struck more rocks, hard, tumbling over un- til, as he vividly describes it, "I am a bobsled." He was, once again, sliding downhill, but faster now. And headfirst. Bloodied and bleary, his face and limbs broken, he was still able to see that there was another large rock coming toward him. "It's gray and ridged, sort of like a big tomahawk. I'm lined up for it, as if someone started at the top of the mountain and aimed me at that gray boulder. The ridge is aimed at my nose, and I'm sliding and there's nothing I can do," he wrote. Hank Williams Jr. hit that rock going fast. He said that he'll never forget the sound it made, hearing his own head crack open. "And I am two beings," he wrote of that horrible moment. "ONE IS AN ANIMAL, INSANE WITH PRIMEVAL FEAR, CLAWING AT THE AIR, GULPING GREAT DRAUGHTS OF AIR, LOOKING FRANTICALLY FOR ESCAPE. THE OTHER IS VERY, VERY RATIONAL, A WARMTH THAT FIGHTS THE INSANE FEAR. Be calm, because there's no escape. You're going to die here. You're already dead." When Dick and his son Walt reached his body, they couldn't believe he was still alive.

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