THE FRONT ROW WITH JASON ELLIOTT: Oct. 11, 2014

It started out as a fun afternoon in the mountains.

Friends getting together to ride motorcycles and ATVs to remember the loss of a man whose love for his community was unmatched.

But with one wrong turn, everything changed.

ON THE afternoon of Sept. 13, a group of friends met on Canfield Mountain for the first Scott Shawver Memorial Ride.

Shawver drowned in Lake Coeur d'Alene on Aug. 2, leaving behind his legendary Post Falls block parties and his recently opened Scotty's Auto Body and RV.

The group departed an area by the water tower at 9 a.m.

At 9:40, everything changed for Hayden Lake resident T.J. Quiring, the lead metal technician at the auto body and RV shop.

"Everyone was up there sharing stories about Scotty," Quiring said. "Everyone said just don't go to the turnoff because there could be three different ways to go."

It was a familiar area for Quiring, 40, to ride in, but then something went wrong.

"There was a little jump there and another area where I used to play around (on my motorcycle) and I took a little jump and came down a little further than I thought," Quiring said. "I thought it was an 8-foot embankment and was hitting my brakes and hitting my brakes, but couldn't stop. There was some shale rock and I realized it was a cliff and tried to land on my tires."

He didn't.

"I just spun out and went straight down on my head," Quiring said. "I was laying there, quadriplegic. I didn't know what it was, but I couldn't move. My legs were just floating. I couldn't talk at that time. I knew what was going on, but just couldn't talk."

Once the rest of the group reached T.J., getting help was the top priority.

"Kevin (Emmerson) said, 'dude, we need to call 911 now," Quiring said. "He got on his GPS and gave them our coordinates and police, fire trucks and ambulances arrived."

He was taken via MedStar to Kootenai Health an hour after paramedics arrived on scene.

"As soon as I knew it, they were cutting all my gear off," Quiring said. "And I wasn't very happy about that. It was top-of-the-line stuff."

"Usually a person is having something traumatizing or painful happening that you'd expect motion," Emmerson said. "Two things went through my mind - one was he just got knocked out and that's what (T.J.'s brother) Brian and I thought. Another was that he just broke his neck and he can't move. There was so many unknowns - does he have broken ribs, internal injuries? You just want him to go from there to the hospital like, 'click your heels and he's there.'"

ONCE ARRIVING at the hospital, the news was that Quiring, the father of two sons, had a broken neck.

"They told me I was 95 percent chance of not walking when I got there," Quiring said. "When they started rubbing pins on my feet, I couldn't feel it and had no feeling whatsoever. I figured I'd be in a wheelchair with a straw for the rest of my life. Everyone took super good care of me, held my hand, head, whatever. The doctors were working just fast, fast, fast and everyone was around me."

Quiring didn't have another scratch on his body.

After a night in the hospital, everything changed.

"I saw this guy coming into my room and I'm thinking, 'oh great, it's a dude coming in,'" Quiring said. "But he said, 'You want to walk?' and I said, 'Seriously?' He said, 'I think you can,' and I said 'Let's go.' So he put this belt on me and off we went with this walker. I wasn't very good at it, but he put that charge in me because he'd been through that before. That nurse Ryan made me walk that morning."

Almost a month later, Quiring has started to walk and move around again.

"I just don't have feeling in my hands," Quiring said. "I can't flip a page on a menu," Quiring said, "but everything's coming back - just not fast enough."

EVEN WEEKS after his passing, Quiring believes Shawver was looking out for him.

"I was riding his motorcycle that day, and I honestly believe he was on that bike with me," Quiring said. "I know, I wrecked his bike, but I know he was with me. I wasn't paralyzed because he was looking out for me."

As for that $1,200 in riding equipment - boots, jacket, pants, gloves, helmet - the folks at Kilm and Motion Sports in Coeur d'Alene have stepped up and replaced all of those items damaged in the accident.

"That was really driven by Motion Sports," Emmerson said. "There's a lot of people in this community that really care about each other."

"My employer has been behind me so much and helped out with medical expenses and bills," Quiring said. "We've been through so much over the past few months. We're a huge family and they've helped me so much. I'm fighting, because that's what Scotty would. That's the kind of man he was. He was such a solid guy and I try to live my life like him. I'm just trying to be like Scotty and power through it."

Jason Elliott is a sports writer for the Coeur d'Alene Press. He can be reached by telephone at 664-8176, Ext. 2020 or via email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at JEPressSports.