Erin Nelson of Baker City is eager to ride her motorcycle for the first time since sustaining life-threatening injuries in a crash caused by a racing driver on Interstate 84 near Caldwell, Idaho, on Sept. 10, 2024.

BAKER CITY — Erin Nelson’s brain has erased any memory of the terrible damage inflicted on it.

Erin does not remember her Jeep careening off Interstate 84, rolling three times, flipping end over end twice and, in a maneuver seen most often at monster truck shows, clearing a 10-foot cyclone fence.

Her 15-year-old son, Josiah Torres, who was sitting in the passenger seat, joked later that the Jeep deployed “airplane mode,” an option not installed at the factory.

Erin doesn’t remember coming to a stop, her ravaged legs dangling from the Jeep’s driver’s side window.

She doesn’t remember the blood and the glass and the twigs that matted her long hair into what she calls a “dreadlock.”

She doesn’t remember the helicopter that brought her to Saint Alphonsus Hospital in Boise, a chunk of her skull blocking a vital vein.

The last thing Erin recalls about that day, Sept. 10, was having lunch with Josiah.

Both had medical appointments in the Boise area. They were driving home to Baker City early in the evening.

Erin was driving the 2020 four-door Jeep Wrangler she and her husband, Garrett Nelson, had bought in May.

She was driving west on I-84 near Caldwell, Idaho, about 20 miles from the Oregon border.

Josiah, who does remember the event, later told Erin that she had moved into the left lane to pass a slower vehicle.

Suddenly another car, a black BMW, pulled alongside the Jeep. But the BMW wasn’t on the freeway. The vehicle, which was going an estimated 110 mph and according to witnesses was racing with a second car, was on the left shoulder.

The BMW collided with the Jeep.

The BMW, driven by Riley Joseph Lundy, 19, who lives in the Boise area, continued west on the freeway.

Erin’s Jeep crossed both westbound lanes and began its bone-fracturing path through the grass and over the fence.

Erin and Garrett believe that the collision with the BMW triggered the air bag in the Jeep’s steering wheel, and that the air bag impact knocked Erin unconscious.

Another driver, a woman with medical training, climbed the fence, sustaining cuts from the barbed wire atop the structure, Garrett said.

Erin was unresponsive.

When paramedics arrived, Erin was not breathing.

They revived her.

They later told Erin and Garrett that they didn’t believe she would survive.

A week later, on Sept. 17, a surgeon who was preparing to remove the piece of skull lodged in Erin’s superior sagittal sinus vein said there was about a 50% chance that she wouldn’t survive the surgery.

Four days later Erin awakened from a dream about her motorcycle.

It was the middle of the night, maybe 3 a.m.

Erin was mad.

She immediately confronted Garrett, who had spent most of his time since the crash in Erin’s hospital room and was at that moment sleeping in a bed next to his wife.

Erin demanded to know why her beloved 2022 Harley-Davidson Road King, which she had only recently bought and had barely ridden, was painted gray when Garrett knew it was supposed to be white.

“I was lying in bed and all of the sudden she’s yelling at me,” Garrett said.

Laughter eases a painful recovery

The Nelsons, sitting in the front room of their Baker City home on the morning of Nov. 20, laugh together about that awkward moment in the hospital room.

They laugh frequently.

And usually in unison.

That’s one thing the crash didn’t change.

Humor has been a fixture during their five years of marriage.

“We like to joke and laugh,” Erin said.

Erin remembers a nurse asking the couple, “Are you guys always like this?”

As with certain adventurous comedians, there are few if any limits to the topics the couple finds amusing.

Bedpans, for instance.

This accessory has been necessary both during Erin’s hospital stay, which ended Oct. 25, and since she returned to Baker City.

She has a walker but mainly gets around in a wheelchair as the ligaments in her left knee, which were all but shredded in the crash, heal.

“I became an expert about bedpans,” Garrett said with a smile that Erin matches, neither one showing the least discomfort talking about the rather delicate subject.

“I didn’t know this, but there about a dozen ways to use a bedpan, and I saw the nurses use them all,” Garrett said. “I could give a class.”

Laughter, however beneficial, was not sufficient medicine, though, given the extent of Erin’s injuries.

The fractured skull was the most serious initially, to be sure.

But she also sustained multiple fractures — four ribs, one collarbone, one wrist.

Both lungs and her stomach were bruised.

The impact damaged both of Erin’s knees.

The left knee was worse. She needed surgery to repair the torn ligaments. Surgeons replaced the ligaments with intact ones from a cadaver.

One ligament in her right knee was torn.

Today Erin wears a brace on her left knee and another on her right wrist.

The force of the crash stretched a tendon in that wrist so severely that it snapped the ulna, one of the two bones between the elbow and hand.

She will undergo surgery on that wrist.

Erin started physical therapy soon after returning to Baker City.

She took her first steps the second week of November.

Erin said her therapist expected her to make it a few steps.

But she went 45 feet, pivoting at the end of the course and going the other way, even though it’s painful to walk because the crash stretched the ligaments in both her ankles.

“It was pretty awesome,” Erin said of that first short stroll.

She smiled.

“I’m an overachiever.”

“When she was released from the hospital it was like she was released from prison,” Garrett said. “She wanted to go everywhere.”

Although the pain was at times acute and constant, particularly after surgery on her knee, Erin said she has been getting by with Tylenol recently rather than the powerful opioids doctors had prescribed.

She also takes a medication to control the constant tingling in both legs.

Ready to ride

It’s not surprising that Erin’s first memory after the crash was that dream about the motorcycle on Sept. 21.

Erin and Garrett both love their Harley-Davidsons.

Garrett concedes that Erin’s Road King — the subject of her post-dream anger about the bike’s color — is “faster off the line” than his.

Motorcycles are a fixture in their blended family, which includes Garrett’s four children from a previous marriage, and Erin’s three.

They all ride.

“I’m dying to ride my motorcycle again,” Erin said.

(The bike, which was painted yellow when they bought it, will indeed get a new coat — white, not gray.)

Gliding along Baker County’s sinuous highways isn’t the only thing the Nelsons are eager to resume.

The couple, who own A Cut Above tree service, spend much of their time together.

“Erin and I work hard together, we play hard together,” Garrett said. “When she got in a crash, my world crumbled.”

He turned 50 on Sept. 20.

The big party Erin was planning didn’t happen, of course.

Erin celebrated her 42nd birthday, in her hospital room, on Oct. 13.

Her sister, Jessica, who lives in Middleton, Idaho, brought Erin’s favorite dessert, tiramisu from Olive Garden.

“It was a fun day,” Erin said.

Although Garrett was in Boise more than he was in Baker City while Erin was in the hospital, he did return home occasionally.

One morning, close to his birthday, he went to breakfast at a local restaurant, another of his and Erin’s favorite things to do together.

Garrett said several people, having heard about the crash, came to his table to ask him how Erin was doing.

Although he appreciated their concern, he said the grief was so fresh and so powerful, with Erin still early in her recovery just a few days after brain surgery, that he couldn’t have a conversation about his wife.

“I just couldn’t talk,” he said. “I locked myself in the bathroom for 10 minutes. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster.”

A special Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has been an important holiday for the Nelsons since their marriage.

“I have been doing epic Thanksgiving meals for a long time,” Erin said.

Preparing a dozen or more dishes is a daunting challenge when you’re in a wheelchair, obviously.

Erin figured that out soon after returning to her home.

With her right wrist still encased in a brace, she can’t chop vegetables with a knife.

There was an issue one day in the kitchen when she tried to reach for a bowl while Garrett was in the basement.

“I left her alone,” he said with a laugh.

When he stepped into the kitchen and saw what Erin, poised in a precarious pose, his reaction was immediate.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Fortunately there is the pair of tongs.

Erin uses those to reach items that would otherwise be inaccessible.

“I love my tongs,” she said.

She also loves making cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving. She and Garrett bought cranberries at Costco on Nov. 19. With her limited mobility, she’s planning to prepare parts of the holiday meal in advance.

All the couple’s children plan to attend, along with other relatives.

There will be plenty of help.

“We’ll have like 15 people here for Thanksgiving,” Erin said. “It’ll be interesting.”

Although she survived injuries that could have been fatal — Erin said her surgeon was mystified by how quickly, and well, she recovered from brain surgery — Erin said she would probably feel much differently, on the one holiday when people are supposed to ponder what they’re most thankful for, if she actually remembered the crash or the next 10 days or so after.

“I think it’ll feel pretty much normal, even being in a wheelchair,” she said.

Garrett has a different perspective.

He remembers, with the peculiar clarity of events both wonderful and horrible, those few hours on Sept. 10 when he thought he would never see Erin again.

When he learned about the crash, Garrett, who was in Baker City, initially knew only that Erin was not responsive when paramedics arrived and that she had been taken by Life Flight.

But when he checked with the hospital, he learned that Erin Nelson had not been admitted.

Garrett didn’t know that emergency responders hadn’t immediately identified Erin, so she was admitted as a Jane Doe.

But his assumption — hardly an implausible one under the circumstances — was that Erin had not been admitted because she hadn’t survived.

He will never forget the terrible thoughts that swirled in his mind as he drove through the late summer night to Boise.

“That was a rough, rough time,” Garrett said, his voice briefly halting. “I’m thankful to have my wife still.”

“That was a rough, rough time. I’m thankful to have my wife still.”

— Garrett Nelson

Riley Joseph Lundy, the 19-year-old Idaho resident who was driving the car that collided with Erin Nelson’s Jeep on Sept. 10, is scheduled to go to trial on Jan. 6, 2025, in Canyon County, Idaho.

Lundy pleaded not guilty on Nov. 6 to two counts of aggravated reckless driving, and two counts of leaving the scene of an accident resulting in an injury or death. Both charges are felonies.

Idaho State Police Trooper Jeffrey Baxter described his investigation of the Sept. 10 crash in a probable cause affidavit.

Baxter wrote that “multiple eyewitnesses stated a black car, and a blue car, were weaving through traffic at a high rate of speed.”

Baxter wrote that during the investigation he learned that the two cars racing were a black BMW and a blue Volkswagen. He had a possible license plate for the BMW, and the car is registered to Lundy. Baxter went to Lundy’s address and saw a BLM with “heavy passenger side damage consistent with the damage on the Jeep” (driven by Erin Nelson).

Baxter wrote that he also found at the crash site a piece of plastic labeled with part numbers from a BMW.

Baxter wrote that Idaho State Police had a call from a friend of Lundy’s, who told police that Lundy had talked with the friend about the crash on Sept. 10.

Baxter interviewed Lundy on Sept. 12. Baxter wrote that during the interview Lundy admitted driving at 110 mph. Lundy told the trooper that he “misjudged the gap between the two vehicles and collided with the Jeep.”

Lundy told the trooper that he saw the Jeep crash, but he “kept going because he was scared.”