SPORTS AND HEALTH – The renovated barn next to the family house was always one of Kevin Pearce’s favorite places. There is a skateboard ramp out back and a giant recreation room inside, with three loftlike bedrooms above.

But Pearce, 22, did not move into the barn until he was a teenager, and soon he was off to snowboarding schools and then on the worldwide circuit. Home, and his room in the barn, became just somewhere to get away for a day or two.

Now it is the ultimate destination.

More than four months after sustaining a traumatic brain injury during a training accident, after missing the Olympics and living in hospitals in Utah and Colorado, Pearce has returned, indefinitely.

“It’s the best thing ever,” Pearce said Monday, sitting on a living room sofa while holding hands with his mother, Pia. Handwritten “welcome home” posters, balloons and streamers hung about the house. “There’s nothing I could think of that’s any better than coming back home.”

And for a moment or two, it was easy to imagine that nothing extraordinary had happened to Kevin Pearce at all. He laughed with his family. He talked about snowboarding. He discussed the Olympics. He smiled, big as ever.

“Things feel very normal to me,” Pearce said.

The past few months, much of which Pearce does not remember, have been anything but normal. On Dec. 31, Pearce, a rising rival to Shaun White who was expected to make the United States Olympic halfpipe team and compete for a medal, fell and hit his head (he was wearing a helmet) while practicing a trick in Park City, Utah.

A helicopter flew Pearce, unconscious, to the University of Utah Hospital in nearby Salt Lake City. The front half of his shoulder-length hair was shaved so the recesses of his brain could be drained of fluid. His family was summoned immediately. Painful questions about whether he would live slowly gave way to uneasy ones about how his life would be.

This is how, for now. Pearce walks without assistance, a little gingerly but sturdily enough to navigate the stairs to the familiar bedroom in the barn. He looks a little different now, too. His hair, after being shaved to one length, has grown back to the top of his ears. He wears bold, dark-rimmed Oakley Frogskin frames with prismlike lenses. The vision in each eye is fine, but the eyes themselves are a bit out of sync, not quite tracking together.

“My eyes are a little sketchy,” he said. “But they’re better than they used to be. They used to be scary blurry.” Read more »