Bursting Our Bubble

By Matthew Hammond, Year 7

I live way out on the peninsula, so far out in fact that me, my dad and my mum are off the grid meaning we make our own electricity and gather our own water. Being out here means we are miles from anywhere... literally the closest house is 3km up the road. The best thing about being so remote is that we are safe from Covid plus we have no noisy neighbours and we don't have to worry about being quiet ourselves. But it doesn't come free... it means that there are no teddy bear hunts, no chalk messages on the pavement, no talking to neighbours over the fence, no other human life in sight so it gets really lonely and boring. So to keep sane I have to keep myself busy and part of that is helping dad outside which was all going great until…

….the day it all went wrong.

On a lovely warm autumn day last week my dad and I were constructing a frame for a new bank of solar panels. As we struggled to secure a heavy beam in place, we couldn't quite hold it in just the right place and drill 10 inch bolts into it at the same time, so used some large nails to rest it on. But, the beam was too heavy for one of the nails, bending it down so I lent in with my hammer to straighten it from underneath.

Completely forgetting Mr Arnold’s safety advice, I peered in really close and hit it SERIOUSLY hard... once, twice, three times, then one more time for luck…..but it turned out to be BAD luck. I missed the nail and smashed the hammer full force into my face and went flying down the hill clutching my mouth.

“##*##!!^&*%$#@”, I screamed, blood spraying from my mouth as I lay there on the ground slowly feeling my tongue around my mouth to make sure nothing had broken. My tongue got to my left hand front tooth, it felt strangely different. Then my dad was running over to me and my dog…..

“Wait! I don't have a dog” , I remembered, as the dog got close to me and dissipated into nothing.

“Oh No, this is not good ,Matthew pull yourself together, you're hallucinating” I thought.

“Give me a look,” my dad was saying, “let me see”. So I reluctantly opened my mouth to show him. He stood up to yell to my mom who was running over to me

“He has broken his front tooth and has a wicked black eye”

“WHAT!!!!!!!” she yelled in disbelief.

Next minute, panic stations with frantic phone calls to mum’s friend who is a dentist, then bursting our bubble to rush into town for her to glue my tooth back together.

Later, once the pain wore off, we were laughing about the situation, particularly when I was reading my science book and found the following:

“Motion is energy - Things that move have energy, it’s called Kinetic Energy. You can’t see kinetic energy while an object is moving but when an object stops the energy has to go somewhere. The energy can go into another object. For example when you hammer a nail into wood the hammer has kinetic energy. As it moves towards the nail, the hammer stops when it hits the nail and the energy is transferred into the nail.”

Guess what...the same principle applies to hammers hitting teeth!!!! My mum always said I am an experiential learner, this is one lesson I won’t forget in a hurry.