MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

88 a tight turn to prepare for landing, but any memories for about 60 seconds before he hit the ground are completely erased. “What happened after I turned? Did the canopy just collapse? Did I turn too low? I like to think it was a canopy collapse because then its not a reflection of anything I did, of me screwing up. I would love for it to just be a random accident, if that makes any sense… because from what I’ve been told, I drove it into the ground throttle wide open.” After four days in coma, he woke up in the Intensive Care Unit down one leg with doctors desperately trying to save the other. “They had a whiteboard in my hospital room where anyone with any information about my accident had written it down. They’d drawn out a diagram of the landing field, trying to figure out what happened. Even those first two or three months after the crash, my memory is foggy. I know the stories I have been told but everything is a weird, dreamlike feeling.” And of course, there was the pain. These days Turner beams positivity and downplays things a lot, but his was a voyage of incredible pain and suffering. “The pain was brutal but I could deal with it. I feel like in action sports we all deal with pain super well. If you’re going to be dumb you better be tough, and if you want to push it you better be able to take it. I was shot up with fentanyl, ketamine, the works—light it up—but nothing compares to the mental game. Before the accident I was on top of the world, living my best life. Suddenly that goes into being highly dependent on other people, not even capable of feeding myself. I spent a long time doubting, even accepting that it was real, that this was my new life. I didn’t just break a bone… this is my reality forever. Shit.” To add to the torment, as Turner spent the next year working through rehab and trying to get some semblance of his life back together, it became painfully clear that his remaining leg was going to have to go, despite how hard the doctors had worked to save it. That realization did not come easy. “We tried everything to save that leg,” Turner says, “but I was pretty sure it wasn’t gonna work. My prosthetic was amazing, highly functional, but I’d try rock climbing or surfing and it wouldn’t go well. I got a few cool pictures so everyone thought I was just crushing it, but really it was incredibly painful and frustrating. It took six people to get me up surfing and I didn’t like that. If that was what the rest of my life was going to be like, sure… okay, but I knew there was a possibility of more—more independence, like in the old days. But I couldn’t do that until my remaining leg was gone or healed. And it wasn’t gonna heal.” A full year after his accident, doctors agreed to amputate the remaining leg. Surprisingly, it was a hugely positive moment for Turner—he knew that with the proper prosthetics he could get his old life back. Six months later he went in for the surgery that would define the rest of his life. By that point however, he was also dealing with monsters that were deeper and more insidious than any physical injury. “I was not in a happy place that year, waiting for my other leg to be amputated. It was a really bad, really dark place. I’d come out of the hospital on a power prescription. I was crushing drugs—nothing illegal, all prescribed. But when you are that messed up, the doses are high, and they prescribe a lot of them. And I took them all. The drugs didn’t even mask the pain that well, honestly, but they became an escape. I would try to fight my way off them but it was a heavy spiral and it wasn’t good. Those opiates have talons, man, and they sink in deep.” Just over a month after his second operation and fed up with life on painkillers, Turner went cold turkey. “It was insane. Nine of the worst days of my life. It was just like every movie—and no I wasn’t shooting heroin— but God, I can’t imagine how much worse it could’ve been. I went crazy, didn’t sleep at all for nine days. I’d stay up all through the night and do laps around downtown Victoria in my wheelchair. And then, two or three weeks later, I started feeling better.” “If you’re going to be dumb you better be tough, and if you want to push it you better be able to take it. LEFT You know a guy with his climbing gear that well organized is capable of anything. KAYLEEN VANDERREE. RIGHT Back in the air. MIKE CYR