THE NINE LIVES OF MIKE LECUYER

Stories of Ottawa's luckiest man Words by Bruce Deachman, Images by Rob Cross

Mike Lecuyer has plummeted 20 metres to the ground and been nearly crushed by a police car. He’s been thrown partway through a windshield and come close to drowning in the Rideau River. On one memorable, admittedly foolhardy, occasion, he tried to polish the hubcaps of a car he was riding in as it sped along the highway at 100 kilometres an hour.

To this day, he loves his cars, but it’s really cosmic horseshoes he’s collected over the years, as bad luck and questionable decisions have conspired time and again to open the doors to whatever afterlife might exist. On each occasion, though, Lecuyer has managed to avoid stepping through, surely over the long haul defying actuarial oddsmakers. He may be the luckiest person in Ottawa. At the very least, he is the city’s version of the cat that came back the very next day.

Lecuyer sat down with the Citizen last summer, at a picnic table in Vincent Massey Park, to describe a remarkable experience he’d had 50 years earlier.

On Aug. 10, 1966, he was 18 years old and finishing his second day on the job at the Heron Road Bridge construction site. He was atop the south span, shoveling wet cement alongside a Portuguese worker who spoke no English, when the bridge collapsed. Nine men died in the tragedy, but Lecuyer, who fell 20 metres, was miraculously not among them. Numerous steel reinforcing rods saw to that, slowing his descent enough as they cut through his head and right leg and tore his clothes to shreds. His left foot became so tangled in rebars that when he hit the ground, his leg remained suspended above him, ultimately aiding in his extrication.

“The cement was just pounding down on me,” he remembered, “and I didn’t know how long that was going to last. Have you ever played football, when the people pile on you? It felt just like that, but it was the cement dripping down.

“I fell 60 feet, but you didn’t notice it,” he added. “There was cement in my hair and my face and my nose and my mouth and my eyes, and I couldn’t see. All I could hear was this ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa …’ It was the reinforcing rods whipping back and forth, and every once in a while you would hear a ‘whack!’ And you knew what that was: It was hitting someone. It was like hitting a watermelon. It was a sickening sound.”

He escaped the cement, only to be nearly crushed by a police car when the officer driving it put the cruiser in drive instead of reverse. At the hospital, Lecuyer noticed the Portuguese worker with whom he’d been shovelling only an hour or so earlier. They waved, and Lecuyer saw that most of the left side of the man’s face was gone. “It makes you wonder,” he said. “Half an inch either way …” His voice trailed off.

Did he return to the bridge when construction resumed? He laughed at the question. “No. I got a job in the Water and Sewers department, with the city. That was high enough for me.”

And then he paused a moment, as if the fog and cobwebs of time were still clearing from his recollections. “Wait,” he exclaimed. “I did work on one other construction job,” and then he recounted another fall, this one from ( just) a second storey, following an incident that, in retrospect, bore all the hallmarks of a bit of Laurel and Hardy slapstick, except that, at the time, it wasn’t funny in the least.

That story led to a third, then a fourth — both occurring on the same day — as the follies of youth seemingly gave him every opportunity to be driven to the morgue rather than the hospital. And yet.

Lecuyer simply shrugged at his luck as he recounted his stories. His listener that day did, too — mostly. The 50th anniversary of the bridge collapse was two weeks away; the other incidents he had described were extraneous to that story. Besides, who wanted to read about muscle cars fuelled by beer and bad judgment, or the perils of speeding ambulances?

Well, everyone, at least judging by the reactions of friends and colleagues to whom Lecuyer’s exploits were recounted over the next several days. And so an additional meeting was arranged, three weeks later at his home near Chesterville, to further discuss the brushes with mortality that followed the bridge collapse.

By then, though, other memories of (let’s call it) misplaced derring-do had emerged from deep within the layers of his cerebral cortex: the near-drowning, the late-night impromptu demolition derby, the car jack. That these events should all happen to one person seemed almost comically impossible. That he survived them all verged on the unimaginable. And yet the cat came back the very next day. The cat came back, we thought he was a goner, but the cat came back, he just couldn’t stay away.

Every once in a while you would hear a ‘whack!’ And you knew what that was: It was hitting someone. It was like hitting a watermelon. It was a sickening sound.