15 years after a near-death experience, Reeva Wortel is searching for an explanation

The date was Sept. 5, 1996, and 18-year-old Reeva Wortel of Estacada was driving home from a day at the river in her Volkswagen van.

Then, life turned on a dime.

While driving back towards town on Highway 224, Wortel was approaching Fall Creek Road when a car headed in the opposite direction made a left turn, directly into her path.

For Wortel, the few weeks following the crash remain unclear, but if her next artistic endeavor is anywhere near successful, she’s hoping that won’t be the case much longer.

Making a new life

With a crushed larynx and broken bones throughout her face, Wortel was subjected to every teenage girl’s worst nightmare.

“When you’re 18 and a young girl, all you want is to be pretty and for boys to like you,” she said. “I didn’t have that.”

For six weeks following the accident, Wortel lived at Oregon Health & Science University, including a month in the intensive care unit. During that time, doctors grafted bone from her skull onto her face in an effort to re-building her face.

“They tried sculpting a face based on what I used to look like,” she said. “They said that they didn’t know what it was going to look like. The bizarre thing about reconstructive surgeries is that they don’t know what to tell families since it’s so experimental. They couldn’t say whether it would work.”

But in Wortel’s case, the results were nothing short of miraculous.

After just one surgery, Wortel’s face was correctly reconstructed, but that didn’t mean the growing pains were easy.

For six months, Wortel’s face was swollen and misshapen. For two months her jaw was wired shut and for one month her eyes were sewed closed.

“I couldn’t see, swallow or talk,” she said. “So I didn’t even have the ability to talk about what had happened or to mentally process it.”

Fortunately for Wortel, with no brain damage, life was eventually able to return to normal, and as years passed, she slowly distanced herself from what had happened.

Having graduated from Estacada High School a year early in 1995, Wortel bounced around schools like Clackamas Community College, Mt. Hood Community College and Portland State before finally finishing her degree at Naropa College in Colorado.

With a degree in visual arts and theatre, Wortel eventually made her way into the world of docudrama work.

“It’s all about going into communities and creating art from real events,” she explained. “It’s putting a storyline behind what has happened.”

As an example of what this kind of work looks like, she talked about The Laramie Project, a theatre production turned HBO movie, about reactions to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepherd. Shepherd was a gay student at the University of Wyoming and the murder was classified as a hate crime.

One of the primary people involved with that project was Leigh Fondakowski, who is following up The Laramie Project with SPILL, which centers upon the BP oil spill.

Looking to add a new element to her storytelling, Fondakowski reached out to Wortel after seeing her art collection on homelessness in Portland. In the project, Wortel went around interviewing homeless people in Portland and then painted portraits of each interviewee.

By the time the project reached a gallery, Wortel had created a monologue from interview clips about each interviewee that could be listened to while viewing the painting.

In the new project, SPILL, Wortel’s role will be similar as she paints Louisiana residents who were interviewed.

“Through the interview and talking to people about this incredible event we find out how it impacted them,” she said. “Even just considering the idea that this event was the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.”

Once the interviews are completed, the team will compile all of the stories and interviews into a play, which will run alongside Wortel’s portraits this fall.

Coming full circle

While her work on SPILL has taken her to Louisiana and then to New York, Wortel is on the verge of returning home to Portland in search of perhaps her biggest project yet: her own story.

“I was thinking about my life and I have an event that happened to me when I was in this horrible accident,” she said. “I realized I could apply the same method we’re using into discovering what happened to me that day and how it affected the people around me. In particular, what does it mean for an 18 year old girl to not have a face for that long?

“I realized I had something in m own life that was staring me down and I want to know what happened and how it affected people, in particular this small town because everybody knew about it.”

For Wortel, this next project begins all the way at the beginning.

At the moment, all she really knows is what people have told her over the years.

She knows she was coming back from a kayaking trip when the accident happened, that a logger nearby called 9-1-1, saving her life, and a few pieces of information about her time at OHSU. Even the few weeks after the accident are hazy at best, mostly because she has post-traumatic stress disorder amnesia.

“I have a collection of ideas from what people have told me, but I don’t know personally what happened,” she said. “I wasn’t there to witness what happened because I was going through it.”

After the accident broken most of the bones in her face and crushed her larynx, a logger, whose identity is still unknown, called 9-1-1.

After EMTs eventually arrived, LifeFlight was called and she was taken to OHSU.

One of the top priorities for Wortel in her new project, however, is this mysterious logger, whom she credits with saving her life.

“The reason it feels important is because apparently he had a cell phone, but in 1996, who had a cell phone?” she said. “If he hadn’t called when he did, it was a matter of minutes before I would have suffocated.”

So now, 15 years after nearly dying, Wortel is plunging back into that fateful day in hopes of learning just how her own life and the lives of people throughout Estacada were sent in varying directions.

“I was trying to pretend that life was normal, but my life wasn’t normal,” she said. “I ran away from the whole thing and so coming back now, I feel old enough and strong enough to look back and see what happened.

“For the first time I’m reckoning with not remembering, because all of a sudden I had this new life and was a totally different person.”

While not totally clear about what that reckoning will look like, Wortel has set aside the next six months in hopes of giving it shape. Through interviews and stories, Wortel wants to know not just how her own life was affected, but how everyone who was touched by the accident was impacted.

“I feel like it’s a story to tell so that people know how often I think about how grateful I am because I don’t think they know,” she said. “It’s traumatic because people don’t talk about it, it’s not like, ‘Oh, Reeva, we’re so glad you survived!’ ”

For those with any recollection of what happened that day or in the weeks and months following, Wortel asks that you reach out to her by calling her at 503-816-1724. In particular, she is searching for anyone with information about the logger who called 9-1-1 and saved her life.