Samantha Dunn describes getting her leg bone smashed to bits as “not a good day.” She’s more loquacious in her book, “Not by Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life” (Henry Holt, 2002),” a tale of a horse, a woman and her rebirth. Dunn writes about how a gruesome Malibu creek-bed collision with her 2,000-pound steed transformed her approach to life, although on the fifth anniversary of the crushing trauma, she seems ambivalent about how completely she has healed herself.
On Sept. 15, 1997, Dunn was riding her thoroughbred, Harley, through Escondido Canyon, near her home. She dismounted after he balked at crossing a seemingly innocuous stream and in the split-second confusion, horse and rider stumbled over each other. A moment later Dunn lay crumpled and bleeding in the muddy water. The hoof of the one-ton horse had landed on her left leg, splintering the bones and nearly slicing off the calf muscle. As spurting blood drained away Dunn’s life, a fellow canyon resident heard her cries and rushed to help. Actor Edward Albert Jr. found Dunn at the bottom of the ravine and pinched shut her severed artery with his fingers.
“I was in my garden,” Albert recalls, “and my daughter, Thais, said someone was yelling for help. I was just in shorts, no shoes or anything, but I took off down the hill. I jumped over some brush where a rattlesnake was and found Sam with her horse standing next to her, and she was bleeding pretty good; there was nothing but fractured bone and a lot of tissue.”
A med-evac helicopter later airlifted Dunn from the canyon’s brutal depths.
During a painful recovery, Dunn made introspective discoveries about her lifelong accident proneness. Over the years she had suffered a series of mishaps, including a cracked tooth, concussions and broken bones. The crushed leg spurred her to change that pattern. She decided to shake off the belief that her “string of bad luck” was unstoppable; she no longer desired her life to seem “mysterious and tortured.” She explored the underlying causes of her continual misadventures; her spiritual side flowered with the help of kundalini yoga, which in turn led her to embrace acupuncture, chiropracticry, meditation and vegetarianism. These newfound practices eventually resulted in Dunn regaining enough strength to continue her recovery through the medium she knows best, writing.
The red-haired scribe with the pink face and tight lips crosses her arms as she discusses the concept of artists wanting to remain emotionally unhealthy in order to better pursue their craft. Dunn asks rhetorically, “I’m going to purge all my dysfunction and then what will I have to write about?”
She realizes the counter-productiveness of this remark and admits to worrying about becoming “too healthy,” but believes that “to have a true career you have to do the hard work of living an awakened life. Your dramas don’t ever end, but impulse toward health is only beneficial to your work.”
From a “tiny guesthouse painted white, at the end of a road about five miles up a canyon in Malibu,” she stoutheartedly trudges onward with her lifetime of healing; the mending of her relationship with her horse defines her self-renewal.
Of her resignation to ride Harley across the same spot that was the source of her painful accident, Dunn says, “I just started going down the same trail, but not over the same creek.”
Returning to good health is something that Dunn is proud of, as evidenced by her eagerness during our interview to show off the tremendous scar on her lower left calf.
“Do you want to see it?” she asks. “I shaved, just in case.” With matching red toenail polish and lipstick, the natty, casually dressed Dunn is showing off more than her scar, though; she’s also showing off her ability to recover from one of those dramas that “don’t ever end.”
Bartt Warburton can be reached via e-mail at: BigBadBartt@aol.com