Yukon artist holds life in her hand

Wednesday August 4, 2010

By Genesee Keevil

The first thing Jeanine Baker remembers is the sunrise glowing off the ceiling of the medevac plane.

In was late August, 2009, and the Yukon artist had just fractured seven vertebrae, two in her back and five in her neck, and had two dislocations in her spine.

She’d also ruptured a ligament at the base of her skull, torn the outer sheath of her carotid artery and broken three ribs.

And her scalp had been torn open from the back of her skull to her forehead.

“The last thing I remember is opening the door to toss some stuff out,” said Baker, standing on the porch of her Crag Lake home on Tuesday.

It’d been raining, and she had on some slippery Australian shoes. “Maybe Nell was in the way and I stepped over her,” she said, pointing to her stout black mutt, Penelope.

“She did look guilty the next time I saw her.”

Somehow, Baker slipped, hit her head on a stair, knocking herself out and then fell 10 feet and landed on her head. It was the perfect “pile driver,” she said.

Massey, her 16-year-old son, heard her yell.

“The first responders are who saved me,” said Baker. “That’s what the doctor in Vancouver said.”

Massey, who’d taken first aid in school through Wood Street School’s ACES program, ran to his mom and made sure she didn’t move.

“She wanted to sit up and hold her knee,” he said.

“And she’s kinda stubborn.”

But Massey was more stubborn, said Baker.

He propped his mom in position with pillows so she couldn’t move.

Massey’s friend called the ambulance and ran to meet it at the road, while Massey tried to hold his mom’s scalp in place to stop the bleeding.

Almost a year later, Baker is back with Back, a show that revolves around her fall and its fallout.

The show, which opens Friday, will mark the grand opening of Yukon Artists at Work’s new space in Marwell.

Baker was going to have her show in March, but had to return to Vancouver to have two of the steel rods taken out of her back.

While she was down there, she went skiing and biked around Stanley Park with her family before going in for surgery.

“We had to take advantage of the free flights,” she said with a grin.

Baker still has a steel plate in her throat, which makes swimming tough. However, she’s largely back to normal. “And I’m hoping to get out in the kayak soon,” she said.

But it’s tough to tell what normal is for Baker. Less than two months after the accident, she was back in Whitehorse at a silversmithing workshop she didn’t want to miss.

“I had lots of painkillers and a key to the studio next door where there was a couch I could lie down on,” she said. “I even stayed in the trailer one evening and it snowed six inches and I was putting on the neck brace to go to the outhouse.”

The neck brace was on for months, and got Baker special treatment at potlucks.

It’s going to make an appearance in the show, with a horned, wooden demon mask perched on top. “I’m going to call it ‘Pure Hell,’” she said.

But the neck brace wasn’t the worst of it.

Baker spent a long time staring at hospital ceiling tiles. After looking at them long enough, “they’re not white anymore,” she said. “They have depth and there’s stars and constellations and you start making patterns out of the dots.” She’s planning to recreate some of the tiles for the upcoming exhibit.

In her studio, Baker is able to bend over her worktable again without pain, but a piece of stained glass hanging in her living room won’t let her forget what she went through.

“That’s Pain,” she said, pointing at the abstract stained glass comprised of jagged shards and contrasting colours.

The blues and purples are the nerve pain that was with her all the time. “It just lingers,” she said. “And the spikes, well we all know those,” she said.

Beside Pain hangs a lovely stained-glass still life of fruit piling out of a basket.

It’s also part of the show, said Baker.

The perfect fruit basket arrived at the Vancouver hospital courtesy of the Carcross school board. “There were strawberries, peaches and mangoes and not a blemished piece in there,” she said. “I don’t know how they managed to send me 20 pounds of absolutely perfect fruit.”

Baker started working on the show in November, but didn’t really delve into her story until she wrote it down just a few days ago. (To read Baker’s story in her own words, see pages 18 and 19.)

The more her life returns to normal, the more the accident fades.

“It’s almost gone now, which is why I thought I better write the story before I forgot it,” she said.

And now, with Back, Baker plans to let it all go.

“You can end up having something like that with you everyday,” she said.

“But once the show is over, I am calling it the end.

“You’ve got to forget about it.”

However, next week, Massey is heading to Whistler to bike with friends, and that’s when forgetting about it gets tougher.

While she was in the spinal ward in Vancouver, a young man was brought in after a bike injury.

He’d been riding the same Whistler runs Massey and his friends were on just weeks before Baker’s accident, and the youth was paralyzed from the chest down.

Now, Massey is heading back to bike these same trails and Baker is struggling.

“It worries my parents more than it does me,” said Massey.

His mom’s accident changed how he sees things “a little,” he said.

“But not as much as they’d like.”

Downstairs, Baker holds up a curved piece of glass with a skeletal image of her spine bent across it.

The piece was inspired by one of her MRIs, while her cards are framed images from the X-rays and CAT scans.

She points at one gaping hole in what used to be a prefect spine. It’s where her fifth vertebrae exploded on impact.

“This is why I’m not paralyzed,” she said.

“It exploded and relieved all the pressure.”

Outside, Baker picked up a glass cast of her hand holding a bird.

“We all hold our lives in our hands,” she said.

“And you can do whatever you want with that.

“You can hold a beer.

“Or you can hold a baby.

“Whatever you want.”

Back opens Friday in conjunction with Lara Melnik’s Collections of the Artist at the new Yukon Artists at Work space at 120 Industrial Road, next to Better Bodies.

There will be food, drinks and entertainment by Ivan Zenovitch from 6 to 9 p.m.

Contact Genesee Keevil at

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