Pat Rodden rode his bicycle all the way to the Arctic Circle, but the longest journey of his life is turning out to be 14 feet.

Rodden, 48, an individualist entrepreneur and adventurer, sustained severe brain injuries nearly six months ago when he fell from a ladder while working at his home. He landed on his head.

“It was like falling off a roof, except that he was inside,” said his wife, Kris.

Today Rodden lies, almost entirely immobile, in a rehabilitation facility in Everett, fighting to regain a semblance of his former self.

He can mumble a word here and there, and occasionally moves a finger, but it’s difficult to know exactly what he comprehends, his wife said. There are times, however, especially when his daughters visit, that he seems to understand what’s going on.

“We know he’s in there,” Kris Rodden said. “Sometimes it just blows me away.”

Rodden has stabilized in the past month, and his rehab has begun. He needs to relearn to swallow, eat, communicate and use his arms and legs.

“He’ll be years getting back,” his wife said. “He’s just at the beginning of this path.”

Friends, neighbors and members of the community have been helpful from the start, she said, pitching in with childcare, meals, transportation and any number of other day-to-day tasks while she spent hours at a time with her husband.

People also have been raising money to offset hundreds of thousands of dollars in past and anticipated medical and rehabilitation expenses, and have planned a series of fundraisers that will kick off next month.

“We’re all about community and helping people,” Kris Rodden said, “but everything we’ve ever done for anybody has come back 10,000-times-plus to us.”

Rodden was home alone on April 8. His wife and two daughters, Jaime, 13, and Sarah, 9, were in California attending to a family emergency.

He was on a long ladder, listening to music and applying stain to some boards in the vaulted living room ceiling of the custom home he designed and built.

It was nothing he hadn’t done before; he and his wife had completely restored an old house in Snohomish.

Then he fell. No one knows when it happened, or why.

He was found by his mother, Shari Rodden, who lives nearby. She was to have prepared his dinner that night, and when he didn’t answer the phone, she went to the house.

Entering a side door, she was alerted by the frantic barking of the family dog, Sachi, a 4-year-old Japanese terrier, who led her to where her son lay.

She called 911. Eight Island County Fire District 3 paramedics arrived and prepared Rodden for helicopter transport from South Whidbey High School’s football field to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

He spent 11 weeks at Harborview, where several surgeries were performed and a feeding tube was inserted. For a time, he was in a coma. During one of the surgeries, he suffered a pulmonary embolism caused by blood clots that formed from lying in bed.

Rodden has been at the rehab facility at Everett Providence Pacific Regional Medical Center since the end of July. From time to time, his family pushes him around the building in a wheelchair, or takes him outside for some air.

He faces a long road, but it won’t be the first one.

An extreme cycling enthusiast and environmentalist, Rodden has been on several long-distance cycling trips.

“He loved being in nature on his bicycle,” Kris Rodden said.

In summer 2006, he rode alone from his Clinton home near Possession Sound to the Arctic Circle, a round-trip distance of more than 2,300 miles that took a month.

Rodden and his wife grew up in Arcata, in northern California. They came to the Pacific Northwest in 1984.

Rodden, a mechanical engineer, and his partners started a successful product-design business, subcontracting with major corporations during the 1990s.

When the dot-com bubble burst, the business environment changed. Rodden’s firm couldn’t compete for product-design work that was being outsourced to Asia.

In 2001, the family moved to Whidbey Island, where Rodden was at work on a prototype electric cycle and searching for investors, with the idea of setting up a local industry, when his ladder accident occurred.

Being between ventures, the family had only out-of-pocket catastrophic medical insurance with high deductibles and maximum cutoffs.

“That’s normal when you’re self-employed,” Kris Rodden said.

To help cover expenses, the family is selling many of its possessions, including the house, she said. They expect to rent another home once theirs is sold.

“We want to stay on Whidbey,” she said. “We’re all about community, and this one is amazing.”

She said her life has been “pretty crazy” since the accident.

“I plunged into single-parent mode,” she said. “I met Pat when

I was 18, and have been devoted to him since. I’ve never been a single adult. It’s been a big change for me.”

She said their daughters are coping pretty well.

Both are students at Whidbey Island Waldorf School in Clinton, and continue to do the things that young girls do.

“Sometimes they feel like they’ve lost their dad,” she said. “It’s hard for them to see him as he is. They really miss him.”

“We try to have a normal life, not just dealing with crisis,” she added. “Attitude is big with whatever is going on. In the really hard moments, we try to find joy, too.”

As for her daughters: “They keep me going,” she said.

In his blog about his Arctic Circle trip (www.crazyguyonabike.com), produced long before his ladder accident, Pat Rodden wrote this reflection on life:

“From far across the hospital room one might mistake the signal on the monitor as a flat line. Come closer. There is still life there ….

“Resuscitation. For me this trip was just that.

“Cycling day in and day out amongst the best the world has to offer is a gift I’ll always treasure.

“From a distance, one might easily mistake this simple act as foolhardy. It was not. It was pure unadulterated living.”

There are a variety of efforts under way to help the Rodden family, all listed on the Web site www.caringbridge.org/visit/rodden. Money donations can be made through the site, or at any US Bank.

Upcoming events include a big garage sale Labor Day weekend, and a silent auction on Saturday, Sept. 26, at which some of the family’s possessions will be sold, including tools, computer equipment and furniture.

“Tour de Pat” fundraising rides, in which riders design a bike tour or day ride, are being planned, and there will be a “Tour de Pat” contingent riding the Tour de Whidbey fundraiser on Sept. 26.

For information, visit http://thetourdepat.blogspot.com. Tour de Pat T-shirts also are being sold.

Kris Rodden can be reached at 579-4145. For more information, contact Karen Benson at 579-1413.