Vancouver, WA — A remarkable family is in dire need of reliable transportation to maintain a quality of life that most of us take for granted. Please consider donating to this worthy cause and sharing this story with friends, family, and business contacts.

Simonn Marsh was fishing with friends July 22, 2006, in the North Fork of the Lewis River, when the top section of a falling 75- to 100-foot spruce struck him, paralyzing him from about the chest down.

The part of the tree that hit him was about 10 inches in diameter, and it left him with a head injury, a collapsed lung, multiple fractures to his ribs, shoulder, neck and thighs, and other injuries.

He now gets around with a power chair, and an auto shop-like crane and pulley system in his bedroom helps him get in and out of bed. Simonn, about 6-foot-2, weighed about 300 pounds the day of the accident, but weighs about 190 now.

“To be honest, I cannot feel much of anything,” Simonn said. “I feel everything from my chest up, so what I can feel feels great.”

Simon does daily arm exercises, and Tresa, 35, said a caretaker comes by every weekday and makes short visits on weekends. Most mornings, “I go for a walk in the morning, then in the afternoon I will lay down and take a nap,” Simonn said.

“My life is kinda boring, but that’s OK,” he said.

Tresa said Simonn can’t remember about a year of what happened around the time of the accident. Caleb was an infant when it happened, and Simonn doesn’t remember Tresa being pregnant.

Caleb (Simonn’s son) doesn’t remember a time when his father walked.

Initially, how affected Simonn’s other faculties would be was unclear, Tresa said.

After the accident, Simonn couldn’t speak for some time. Although it’s a somewhat slow and deliberate-sounding monotone now, it’s improved substantially, Tresa said.

After the accident, the School for the Blind provided Simonn with a reader device, which projects and zooms a printed page onto a screen for easier reading. When he first got it, Simonn had to zoom in so far the lower-case letters were about an inch tall on the screen. Now they’re about half that size.

“He always reads the fishing report, like, faithfully,” Tresa said.

Simonn was a passionate outdoorsman, but his reduced hand-eye coordination and the logistics involved in getting him around have put a damper on that, one of his brothers, Solomonn Marsh, said. www.gofundme.com