Lexington, KY - I'm sitting in Walter Johnson's office talking about what we've been doing in the years since we last met. But really I have come to ask Walt to tell again, maybe painfully, a story I first heard 30-some years ago. It happened in 1975.
Walt was news editor of the Middlesboro Daily News in southeastern Kentucky. One day as he was getting ready to go fishing, his daughter rushed into their house in nearby Cumberland Gap, Tenn., saying the town was burning. Walt grabbed his camera and went for the story. It was a long time before he came home.
During maintenance work, two above ground gasoline tanks had caught fire and the blaze had spilled its flames into Gap Creek. Walt shot a number of pictures and then, with a friend, walked along the creek to within 100 yards of the burning tanks. He believed the tanks had already exploded. When he realized they had not, Walt yelled a warning and his friend made it to the shelter of a railroad trestle.
When the fire reached the sediment in the bottom of the tanks it became something like napalm and exploded with a huge fireball. If it had gone in the opposite direction, Walt said, it would have wiped out Cumberland Gap. But it came Walt's way. He ran but "it seemed only seconds until a monstrous concussion shook the earth and I was engulfed in white heat. Everywhere there was white heat. The mountain scenery was gone, the road was gone, Gap Creek was gone. It was all white, burning heat."
Walt made a dive for the creek but "came up short, floundering in foot-high grass. I tried to pull myself into the cold mountain stream, but couldn't find it. Then it occurred to me that I was burning to death," he said.
He prayed, and "in the road which bent to my left was a tall gray figure standing calmly, and whose head was bent as if looking toward me. As suddenly as he had appeared, I felt a shock of peace, no burning, no pain. Without saying a word the figure communicated a feeling that I had an option to remain at peace in a restful death or to live."
There were no words and it all happened instantaneously. Walt thought, "I want to live and see my kids grow up."
At once, he remembers, he was on his feet and walking out of the fire, his clothes ablaze. His friend, who was less severely burned, wet his shirt in the creek and put out Walt's fire. They crossed the creek and went over a couple of fences until they reached a road where the Middlesboro fire chief found them and took Walt to the hospital.
Walt's blood pressure was 60 over 20. He credits Mildred Page, a nurse, with saving his life. She took over, wetting his wounds and cooling him down while waiting for transport to the University of Tennessee Hospital in Knoxville.
Nothing helped the pain. Even with medication he could sleep only about 15 minutes before waking up. Prayer got him through the days, and at last prayer got him through the nights. His body was losing fluid so fast that the medical team was losing hope. At one point a doctor asked him if he knew where his will and insurance papers were. But Walt lived.
For six months he didn't remember the fire, and when the memory came one night he woke up hyperventilating.
After his release from the hospital he went to his father's house in the North Carolina mountains. Despite physical therapy he had little strength. He had to stretch the scars on his body so he could move, and had to learn to walk again. "When I could walk to the end of the driveway it was huge," he said.
The experience "has tempered my life since." Walt doesn't fear death. Though he misses people when they die, "I don't feel sadness for the departed. I know they're in a better place."