Funny How Life Evolves...

My name is Christopher Frederick Mansky, and I have been the curator for the Blue Beach Fossil Museum in Nova Scotia for seventeen years. But I am not here to tell you my story, for that would not be half as good as what I’ve been keeping under my hat. My wife and what she’s got going on is a far more fascinating case in point, if you ask me (or if you ask Hana Gartner, former host of CBC’s Fifth Estate).

Her name is Sonja Elizabeth Wood, and it’s not just her mercurial life history, or her amazing talent as a musical performer; it’s not even her moral-fiber that quite explains the way she makes you see the world. After a while you come to realize it’s all that plus her ambition under fire you’ve come to like so much, and nowadays respect like that is hard to find in a world gone mad.

Most people who know about Sonja Wood realize they are dealing with a miracle. She shouldn’t actually be alive today. In 1985, just when she was emerging as a young East Coast singer-songwriter, fate dealt her a cruel hand, and she was nearly torn in half by a violent head-on collision on the highway. She had been a passenger in the back seat of a Ford Pinto, and late at night, black ice had coated the road. The driver of the other car lost control and helplessly plowed into the little Ford Pinto she was in. It struck them with such force, it threw the smaller car back into the guard rail, pinning it there.

Three other people were in the crash, but they all walked away. Sonja’s seat belt, in those days the sort which only went across your waist, failed to hold her in place. She travelled forwards at about 80 km/hr, until the belt ran out of slack. It tightened with a jerk and her body, by this time in the front seat with her fellow musicians, jackknifed around the thin strap, was finally stopped.

It nearly cut her in half, and would have surely done so were it not for a fluffy wool sweater all bulked-up under a serious ‘biker jacket’ (a jacket she somehow wrangled the week previously off a local chapter member). The only thing holding her upper body and everything south of her waist together was the skin; inside was nothing but lacerated tissue and crushed bone. Amazingly, all the major organs had been shoved up out of the way by the sweater when the belt did its worst, and nothing else was damaged.

Sonja remained conscious and trapped inside the wreck, in a snowstorm, while the ambulance took nearly two hours to find the accident site; then to extricate her using their jaws-of-life. If it were me I know I’d have bled to death, and there’s something called the ‘golden hour’, which first-responders say is how fast a trauma victim needs to get to a hospital. After that, one’s chances go downhill very quickly. Sonja can elaborate and tell you all about her emergency surgery, and describe how the doctors and nurses got up to some pretty fancy mucking around inside her abdomen, and how her intestines were draped all around the room (on the other hand, it might best if the remaining details were left unsaid).

Incidentally, Sonja got the jacket which saved her life for thirty bucks ($30.00). Her father was Chester Wood, and he liked to do his share of horse-trading, and I think a lot of Chester rubbed off on his girl. He would have approved of the jacket deal, and worried about who she bought it from, and have to admit she was still one smart girl. She had already paid ten dollars down-payment and took the coat before the accident changed her life. Afterwards, in the hospital and recovering, she got a visit from her biker friend; she insisted he take the twenty-bucks she still owed for that jacket. Meanwhile, he was probably thinking one thing: he’s so glad you’re alive and isn’t there for his twenty bucks ! That’s the Wood’s for you.

The Wood family adopted Sonja and her sister when she was three; Tammy was just a baby. Sonja then grew up in Mt. Thom, Nova Scotia, where the Wood family made up about half the population. They always liked to kid their father that he was “the mayor of Mt. Thom, (population nine).”

Their father Chester was an honest man, religious and hard-working. He had Mi’ kmaw running through his veins, and couldn’t stand to see someone picking on another who was weaker. That’s kind of ironic because what he didn’t always realize was that his little girl endured years of torment at school at the hands of the cruel ‘cool kids’.

Sonja Wood describes her’ younger self as a skinny little tom-boy, who worked in the barn, smelt of barn residue, and struggled with learning. She was just too precocious and A-D-D to focus and relax. When she was tasked to any sort of ‘paperwork challenge’, she froze!

She had a natural way of communicating with animals though, and aspired to become a vet one day. Her teachers failed her there, a recurring theme that says “Sonja, you have to count on yourself; you can’t be banking on others”, and told her she “was never gong to be smart enough for veterinary school.” They could be partly right, but are mostly wrong about that. Sonja is too smart for normal assessment: she’s smart enough to do anything she wants, but on her own terms. She is not destined to become a vet, so however she got herself through grade ten Math or English is not important.

In one of her now ‘classic’ songs there’s a line that goes “…she makes something good come from everything…” After the accident that left her parapelegic, she leant her voice to the legendary Ralph Nader, lobbyist crusading against the automobile industry and seeking to improve safety standards for motorists. She was one more important testimony to be heard for improving seat belts; today we all take this for granted. But this was not enough. Then she took herself back to the Highway 101, to the scene of her accident, in her wheelchair, and held a vigil in plain sight of the daily travelers. She hung banners, waived signs of protest; she challenged government’s back-pedaling; they were to twin this dangerous highway as promised! Sonja then summarily filed civil suit against the Provincial Minister of Transportation, then wound up in Ottawa negotiating a deal to see our highway twinned. She may not be available to give your cat or dog its annual checkup, bit she saved lives here in the Valley, and that’s because she made something good happen.

That’s why I think it’s funny how life evolves. There aren’t a lot of things you can imagine that really prove to be impossible. So for more twists and dips than a good roller-coaster, watch my blog for part two of the saga of my wife; Nova Scotia’s best-known activist, Sonja Wood.

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