News and Features
Jim Byrnes's Last Stand
By Charles Campbell published Jul 1, 2009
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With a new CD and a new radio show, Jim Byrnes is finding lots to enjoy in a life that’s seen more than its share of challenges
In the Social Services Seminar Room at the G.F. Strong Rehabilitation Centre on Laurel Street, there are motorcyclists and cancer survivors, and a hale fellow with a white beard whose story this week is that he was gored in Pamplona at the running of the bulls, after he stopped to tie his shoelace. It's an amputee support group, and they're talking about their shared hatred of lingering snow and phantom pain. Do those who decide to amputate have less pain than those who lose their legs unexpectedly?
Jim Byrnes, the guest of the group, tells them that his "foot" sometimes feels like it's been set on fire and someone's come with a broken bottle to put it out. One woman says she hadn't realized Byrnes had lost his legs. "I suppose it's because, 37 years on, I'm still in denial," he says. "I'm still the same self-centred, venal sonofabitch I've always been. That can serve you well when you're an amputee."
He wasn't always so philosophical. On a February night in 1972, Byrnes and two friends were on a closing-time run to get more beer for their farmhouse party. Sheets of rain were whipping in the wind when they stopped just north of Parksville to push an old stalled Ford pickup off the road. A pal who thought the beer run was taking too long came looking for them, approaching from behind in the storm. "He found me," Byrnes says. "My legs were pretty much torn off at the scene."
Byrnes tells the others about the visit he got a few weeks later, as he lay in bed at Nanaimo Regional Hospital. Sir Douglas Bader, the British pilot who lost both legs doing low-level aerobatics in 1931, showed up at Byrnes's bedside, adorned with an ascot and a waxed mustache. Bader went on to become commander of the largely Canadian Squadron 242 of the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He twice escaped from German prison camps before his captors took away his artificial legs. He assured Byrnes there was nothing he could not do in life.
Byrnes was not convinced: "I thought it was over." Today, however, no one thinks of him first as a disabled person. He's a versatile singer and actor with an incidental cane, a beloved Vancouverite with an open heart beneath an occasionally crusty exterior. And nothing brings his crustiness out quite like people who become witless in the face of disability.
