I’ve alluded to this before, but I’m obsessed with Sam Baker now. Flat-out obsessed. Here’s the tip of the iceberg:
Sam Baker did die, almost, while traveling in Peru in 1986. He had just boarded a four-car train to Machu Picchu and began chatting with a family of German tourists when the passenger car exploded as it sat in the Cuzco station. A terrorist had placed a bomb, in a red backpack, above Baker’s head in the storage compartment.
The explosion ripped a hole in the roof of the passenger car. There was blood, smoke, shrapnel. Seven people died — including the German family and their blue-eyed teenage boy sitting directly beside him. Baker was thrown upside down by the blast. The bomb blew off the top of his shoulder, maimed his arms and hands, bruised his brain, severed the femoral artery in his left leg. After Peruvian doctors sutured his contaminated wounds, Baker developed gangrene and was sent to a hospital in Lima.
“Really, I should have died in Peru. I should have died in the train. I should have died on the operating table,” says Baker, his voice soft, reflective. “I would lie there in that hospital in Lima and really smell myself dying. The infection was giant. And it stunk. It smelled like rotted chicken.”
Eventually, Baker and a second injured passenger from the Cuzco blast — a little girl named Monica — were flown out of Peru on an emergency U.S. military airlift. Baker remembers Monica fell into a coma and “coded out” shortly after they took off. He remembers a feeling of stress and urgency and exhaustion all around him. And yet …
“It wasn’t stressful to me because I was dying anyway. I wasn’t in pain, really. I was in this gauzy place. The infection at that time was so wild, I was past the point where stress matters. If someone killed me I was mostly there anyway.”
Baker spent the next several weeks in San Antonio and Houston, undergoing painful debridement procedures in which doctors cut away the dead tissue around shrapnel. After the wounds healed, he spent the next three years in recovery — learning how to use his body again, learning how to use his brain again.
“When I got hit in South America, I was a white-water boatman and a carpenter. I was certainly not a hedonist, but more ‘of this world.’ There were rivers. There were mountains. There were things to build. And they were right there before me. The wind blew and I blew with it,” says Baker, a native Texan, raised in Itasca. “After that, those doors were closed, those windows shut, and I couldn’t walk for a long time. I couldn’t hear. And there for a long time I couldn’t remember words. I’d had a subdural hematoma. So I couldn’t remember the words for ‘fork,’ or ‘knife.’ I would have to say, ‘That thing you eat with.’
“I think this started an inward journey for me. My body seemed so unfamiliar. Once my hands were blown up and my leg was all blown up, I guess I didn’t know myself. And that is such an internal thing, to re-learn who I was: what my hands were made for, what my legs could do.”
Baker’s inward journey led him deeper into reflection, deeper into art. He wrote as a form of therapy, found familiar comfort in music. He took up photography. Art allowed his spirit to wander when his body couldn’t tolerate trips of the physical kind. Yet when he moved to Austin in the early 1990s, Baker didn’t come to work the clubs. He went to work in a bank.
For the longest time, Baker couldn’t see music as a vocation. His singing voice lacked range, he knew that. The bomb blast had left him deaf in his left ear and with chronic tinnitus in his right ear. Baker’s left hand was so badly shattered that he had to re-string his guitars and teach himself how to fret with his right hand.
But in 2002, at age 47, he played his first open-mike night at the Cactus Cafe — and he began to accept, at last, that the authenticity of the song was more important than the range of his voice.
And here’s a song he wrote about getting blown up:
