Nolan Barnes woke on the morning of May 8, 2010 to the sounds of birds chirping.
Nolan Barnes woke on the morning of May 8, 2010 to the sounds of birds chirping.
The sun was up, the breeze was blowing through his hair and it seemed like the start of any morning.
Then he heard the screaming. And the crying.
Then he realized he was on his stomach in a ditch.
Then he realized he couldn’t stand up.
It’s a story that flows easily, almost rhythmically, for Barnes now.
It should, given how many times he has told it to people — mostly students — across the province.
Speaking at SADD or MADD conferences or through the P.A.R.T.Y. (Prevent Alcohol and Risk-related Trauma in Youth) program, Barnes goes into great detail about his life before and after the day he and a group of friends rolled their vehicle following a night of drinking and drugs.
He talks about his rehab. He talks about the nitty gritty (read: bodily functions) of his life as a paraplegic and everything that comes with being confined to a wheelchair.
He talks about the choices he made leading up to the crash and the choices he still has to make trying to live the typical life of a 25-year-old.
And mostly he talks about the choices the students listening to him need to make growing up in a province where impaired driving is all too common.
It’s not a message of “Never touch alcohol.” Barnes himself will still have a beer or two once in a while. But he also knows better now to plan ahead, a choice he didn’t make seven years ago.
Barnes started off his high school years in Yorkton like many teenagers. He partied; sometimes driving home after drinking.
But in his Grade 12 year, he “took the partying to the next step.” Marijuana use turned to ecstasy use. Ecstasy use turned to cocaine use.
“That consumed my life for the better part of my Grade 12. It caused me to do things like leave my job. Any sports I was playing, I quit doing that. Farming was a big passion but I didn’t do a whole lot of that because I was always partying. Family life at home also got pretty rocky,” he says.
He told his parents — Sharon and Gordon — he was using. They confronted him about it too, trying to walk the line between making sure he knew the potential consequences of his actions and not being so hard on him that he would disappear from their home and into the life even further.
“We wanted him to come to the conclusion himself that this wasn’t the path he should be going on,” says Sharon.
Six-and-a-half years younger than the youngest of his three sisters, Barnes was still considered an old soul growing up, wanting nothing more than to be to lineman with SaskPower like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him.
But by his Grade 12 year he was hooked on drugs and was making occasional trips to Saskatoon for raves. On May 7, 2010 he and a group of friends planned on going to one such party in the Bridge City. Other friends suggested he not go, one having had a bad feeling about that night.
But Barnes decided he would, telling himself it would be one last night out before cleaning up his act.
He and eight or nine others piled into the vehicle of choice for rave runs, a Suburban owned by friend Jason Haas.
“(Haas) always put his family first which was something I admired,” says Barnes. “We didn’t leave to go to that rave until like nine o’clock at night because he was helping his dad. That was what came first.”
Just before reaching Saskatoon, Barnes popped some pills to make sure he was high by the time he got to the city. Much of the rest of the night is a blur.
They hit a rave and then a house party. Early the next morning the crew had to decide whether to flop with someone in Saskatoon or head home to Yorkton. Like they had many times before, they opted to get back on the highway and drive home.
The last thing Barnes remembers is undoing his seatbelt and saying goodnight to Haas.
Which brings us back to the ditch. Two miles east of Foam Lake the Suburban rolled. It was shortly after 8 a.m., not exactly the time of day one worries about impaired drivers on the road.
After waking up, Barnes remembers being comforted by a trucker who came upon the scene. He remembers being strapped to a spine board and giving the paramedics his parents’ phone number. He can recall pieces of the ambulance trip to Saskatoon.
“I don’t remember the pain thankfully, but I remember saying how much pain I was in,” he says.
It wasn’t until later he learned that Haas, 19, had been killed.
For Sharon and Gordon, memories of that morning are a lot more vivid. They were renovating a farmhouse and were on their way there with a load of drywall when an RCMP officer called to say Nolan had been hurt in the crash.
“No. He’s in Melville,” Sharon thought.
Sharon acted as his little conscience, sending her son texts when she knew he was out partying (things like “Time for bed”). He was good about letting her know where he was most of the time. Sometimes, like that night, he was lying.
The Barneses hit the road themselves, following the same highway Nolan and his friends had taken the night before. They ended up behind an ambulance (not the one carrying Nolan) and went right through the crash site; they saw the blanket covering Haas’ body.
Seeing Nolan in the ER and ICU was the hardest part for the family.
“It’s like looking at your broken son,” says Sharon.
It’s something that families in Saskatchewan go through all too often. The rate of impaired driving (drugs and alcohol) is by far the highest in the country.
A Mainstreet Research poll conducted in August showed more than one in five Saskatchewan residents think it’s OK to drive drunk if only going a short distance on quiet roads.
According to the most-recent statistics available, Saskatchewan’s rate of drug-impaired driving charges was 14.2 per 100,000 people in 2015, which ranked fourth among provinces. When it comes to alcohol use before driving, Saskatchewan’s numbers dwarf that of the rest of the provinces: 561 charges per 100,000, nearly triple the national average of 193. Alberta ranks second among the provinces at 303 per 100,000.
Over the years, while the number of collisions has fluctuated, the problem doesn’t seem to have started to go away at all.
The number of alcohol-fuelled crashes that resulted only in property damage was 766 in 1996. In 2015, it was 770.
Since 1996 in Saskatchewan, 1,144 people have been killed in alcohol-related collisions, an average of more than 57 per year. In 1996 that number was 47. In 2015 it was 54, down five from the year before.
Julie Gerwing has been in the business of trying to get those numbers to change. Though she’s on a two-year term in another job in the Saskatoon Health Region, she’s typically the education prevention co-ordinator with the acquired brain injury outreach program and headed the P.A.R.T.Y. program, which takes teenagers through the experiences of someone suffering a trauma. The process involves police officers, rehab therapists, funeral homes and people like Barnes.
It was in that capacity she met Nolan.
He had spent two weeks in an induced coma after having rods inserted in his broken back, his collarbone pinned together. From there followed little victory after little victory.
He spent a month in University Hospital as he went from a completely independent teenager to completely dependent on others.
“Privates become publics,” he says with a laugh.
It was four months after the crash and he was in the rehab unit in Saskatoon’s City Hospital. The crash left him paralyzed from the chest down. He was going through injury rehab and learning how to get around in a wheelchair. His physiotherapist knew P.A.R.T.Y. was looking for new speakers.
His meeting with Gerwing was one that would change Barnes’ life. He agreed to speak at a rehab presentation, basically just demonstrating and talking about the exercises he did.
From there, Barnes was set on a new path. Since that first engagement he has gone from speaking to 50 kids to 100 to more than a 1,000 at a time as he travels the province speaking at schools, hospitals and wherever else his message of positive choices needs to be spread.
“Nolan doesn’t sugar coat anything,” says Gerwing. “He’s very real so you can tell the kids relate to him and really listen to him. I’ve heard his story over and over again and I think I take something new away each time because there’s so much he can teach others.”
It didn’t come easy at the start. He remembers being sick to his stomach with nerves as his sister drove him to an early presentation in Rosetown.
“I came out of there and felt like I won the Super Bowl. It felt great to get that off my chest and knowing there’s probably one kid – even if it’s one out of 100 – that’s going to take my message to heart and make that life-changing decision that hopefully they won’t even know is a life-changing decision because it’ll just be another day they got home.”
He credits his speaking as one of the three focal points in his life that have helped his recovery along with his fitness and water-skiing.
Yes, the water-skiing. While he’d done it a bit as a kid when he still had the use of his legs, he has taken his skiing to a new level as a member of the Canadian disabled water-skiing team. He started just a year after the crash and has gone on to win gold medals at national championships.
His time with the team has allowed him to travel all across North America and to Italy and will take him to Australia this year for the world championships.
Early on, Saskatoon trainer Donnie Munro had seen Barnes hanging around the water-ski club and could tell he had been through a few things in his life. He brought Barnes under his training wing.
“It grew me physically and mentally because he’s such a good life coach,” says Barnes.
Munro had been through a series of ankle injuries during a hockey career and found himself depressed after coming through them. He saw a lot of himself when he met Barnes. And now he sees a person paying it forward across Saskatchewan.
“He cares,” says Munro. “He’s been there. He’s not perfect. He’s not scared to tell the truth. He’s not a book version of something that he learned from a book. He learned it from hurting. He learned what bad choices get you. He’s very aware for a young man. He sees people hurting and he tries to help.”
The battle to change attitudes toward impaired driving so far has been an uphill one for many in Saskatchewan, and Barnes still sees too many young people pushing the envelope.
And he’d like to see more people recognize how much safety is compromised when they drive drunk rather than simply thinking, “I hope I don’t get caught.”
“It’s going to be a shift over a generation that it’s gonna take,” he says. “Because as long as you’ve got to the 45-year-old guy, 50-, 60-year-old guy who’s been doing it all his life … probably not going to deter him as much as it is the young drivers. It’s up to us (younger people) to set that example, too.”
He’s happy to see changes to impaired driving laws but also wants to see more availability of affordable means of public transportation (late-night buses, designated driver services, Uber) so it’s an easier choice not to drive drunk or high, particularly for young people.
But he also understands the differences between life in the city and life in rural areas where residents have to do a lot more planning ahead to make sure they don’t get behind the wheel impaired.
In addition to a few dozen speaking gigs around the province each year and an international profile on the water, Barnes has also found what he hopes is his calling as a financial coach for Primerica.
“I’m working to be a better person day by day,” he says. “I went to SIAST to become a parts manager because I’d thought, ‘If I don’t try something I’m never going to get anywhere.’ And that was good and it led to Primerica actually.
“And I’ve never been happier.”
It’s a similar place for his parents.
“I’m exceptionally proud,” says Gordon. “You always want people to follow in your footsteps and he would have been the fourth-generation lineman.
“But you look at the role model he has become and the 180 he did in his life, just not giving up and being positive … that means more to me than him being a lineman.”
“I think you always have worries about your children no matter how good they’re doing — that’s just parents,” says Sharon. “But we’ve moved on with our lives (from the crash). He’s moving on with his and yet we talk all the time. We’re very in awe and feel very blessed for this to be the outcome of everything we’ve gone through.”