By Ronald D. Mallett —
I took a job as a railroad brakemen assigned to the dinky town of Greybull, Wyoming, near the eastern border of Yellowstone National Park. I was assigned to a crew that went out at least three times a week to bring 50 or 60 oil tankers to the mainline of the Burlington Railroad for shipment to Casper and other points south and east.
I was very young, still in my teens, and a high school dropout. There were no singles my age to date, and the town had only one source of public food… a local, very-scruffy bar that offered only hamburgers or eggs and bacon, All together, this made for a very miserable life for this young railroader.
My best buddy, Eddie, and I had taken a room at a boarding house with one other tenant. We got one room and no meals. One evening, after eating what passed for the bar’s dinner, some of the older railroad men insisted I share some whiskey shots with them, chased by a glass of beer.
Being reared a solid Southern Baptist, I never had a shot of whiskey, but they insisted I was missing out on one of life’s great pleasures. They didn’t show any sense of restraint, but neither did I… and I apparently passed out after just two or three drinks, maybe more. I’ll never know.
I woke up inside a rose trellis with no way out!
Let me explain: the boarding house in which Eddie and I shared a tiny room was two stories high. Each of the upstairs rooms had a porch with a short flight of stairs leading up to a second story landing. The owner, an elderly lady, had built wooden trellises up to each landing with rose bushes climbing along the fully enclosed trellises.
She was tired of tenants walking on and trashing her rose beds. So… to protect them, she closed them in with strong boxed trellises affixed to the second-story landings.
Now, getting back to the bar… I was unaware (of course) that I had passed out. The next thing I knew… I found myself trapped in one of those rose trellises and had no idea how I got there. I also couldn’t get out. It was a pitch-black night and bitter cold. In my drunken state, I had lost a shoe and my jacket.
I started yelling for help and my roommate Eddie heard me. The trellises had me soundly imprisoned; there was no possible entry or exit point from the sides or the top, because the top was covered by the porch landing.
Eddie ran to his car to get tools from the trunk. Using a hammer and pry bar he made a hole in the trellis prison large enough for me to crawl out of.
As noted earlier, I don’t know how many shots of whisky I swallowed. It could have killed me, and the railroad jokesters wouldn’t have cared less. I feel I was saved from death by the imprisonment in the trellises. Who knows where I could have headed in my drunken state as a first-time guzzler.
Greybull is located amidst barren sage brush and thistles country, pockmarked with sink holes and deep gullies occupied by snakes and many other undesirable critters. The town is surrounded by thousands of acres of open waste lands.
The entrapment can only be explained as a work of guardian angels keeping me from wandering into the wilderness that began at the edge of town. Angels are not physical and can pass through obstacles, but humans can’t. Even angels couldn’t have pushed my body through the trellis walls. I feel there is no immediate answer to the mystery of my imprisonment.
Dematerialized supernaturally?
If someone put me into the trellis cage, the noise of doing so would have awakened Eddie or the other tenant. They would have had to pry open several of the wooden slats, splintering them in the process. The section in which I was entrapped was near the window to our room. (The window did not allow access to the trellis.) The tearing and follow-up hammering would have awakened Eddie or the other tenant.
Also, though he was temporarily working as a railroad brakeman, Eddie was a professional carpenter and would have been able to know if the trellises had been ripped open and then somehow hammered back into place without splintering the fragile strands. We unavoidably damaged some and had to make repairs. There was no evidence for any such damage from the previous night.
Eddie could never understand how it happened.
I gave up trying to understand it as well! I knew angels had done the work of putting me in a safe place. But how did they get my physical body into a fully enclosed prison of wood? They also could have put my unresponsive body directly back into the boarding room. But then that would not have resulted in passing on a valuable bit of godly wonder and knowledge that caught the attention of both us young wanderers from our youthful faith in God. (Eddie’s mother had made me promise to make him go to church every Sunday. But he generally ignored my pleas.)
Eddie and I were raised in Christian homes, and the night of the rose trellises offered an undeniable wake-up call, steering me ultimately back onto the right tracks. Praise God, our ever-faithful Father of Love! I lost track of Eddie over time, but I at least benefitted from the Miracle of the Rose Trellises and eventually returned home to the Lord!
And that’s my story, available now for others to speculate upon and wonder about. If you come up with any solutions, let me know. Truthfully, Ronald D. Mallett, 87
