As the heat stimulated more blood flow, the hand began to squeeze, gripping tight, getting blazing hot. In the fraction of a second it took me to sit up, I experienced the most intense pain of my life. It felt like my leg was about to explode. I peeled off the pad and hurled it across the room.
Waiting in the emergency room for the second time in three days, the magazines were all familiar. So I just stared at the wall until the nurse called my name.
This time, the doctor took an X-ray. This had to be more than ligament damage.
As I sat staring at the walls, waiting for the results, I noticed a group of doctors at the door. One of them pointed at me and then whispered to the others. They saw me staring at them and knew I wanted an explanation. Finally, one of them spoke up.
“Are you Slakey?”
“Yes.” I was wondering what could possibly make me a spectacle.
“So, you’re the guy who’s been walking around on a broken leg for the last three days?”
The X-ray couldn’t have been clearer. It was a corkscrew break, twisting up and around my fibula. Evidently, it wasn’t my imagination; there really had been a snapping sound when I had hit the ground. And as I twisted and rolled, my left foot hadn’t responded fast enough. It stayed in place a bit too long, and my pivoting body had literally twisted the bone, cleaving it into two pieces.
“We should have taken an X-ray the first time. But you said it didn’t hurt. Why not?” the doctor asked, genuinely curious.
“A break doesn’t hurt as much as you think it would.” If I were back there today, I would still rate it a four on a ten-point scale.
“You came back just in time.” The doctor explained that the bone was trying to heal itself. To do that, the edges of the two pieces of the fibula had softened into putty. The soft edges were trying to reconnect and harden into place to repair the bone. The problem was that I had interfered with the process by walking around on the leg for three days. As a result, the bone edges would soften, get displaced by my walking, soften some more, get displaced again, and so on.
“In another day,” he said, handing me the X-ray slide, “the two pieces of the bone would have slid right past each other. Your leg would have collapsed to half its length.” I would have been walking along and the leg would suddenly crumple, like a collapsible telescope.
I would find out years later that the doctor had been overly dramatic that day. My brother, an orthopedic surgeon, explained it to me.
“No, your leg wouldn’t crumple, but I know why he said it.”
I couldn’t imagine why.
“You were walking around on a broken leg. You weren’t going to listen to reason. It was the only way he could think of to make you take it seriously.”
The doctor’s words had their desired effect. I never solo climbed again. To fortify that decision, for years after the fall, I reminded myself of that corkscrew break by using the X-ray as my computer mouse pad.
“That sucks,” Pax says for the second time of the climb, his gear strewn out on the ground around him.
We just topped out on El Cap a few minutes ago and I’m lacing up my boots. “What happened?”
“My boots, they’re missing.”
That’s rough news because he needs them for the descent. Climbing shoes have a tight fit, like a ballerina’s toe shoes. When you’re climbing, the tightness is ideal because it maximizes the sensitivity your toes can have to the rock. But on descent, when you are working your way down steep rocky trails, if you wore those climbing shoes then your feet would take a bloody beating. Instead, you wear boots.
Pax’s boots aren’t actually missing; we both know exactly where they are. Since they aren’t in the pile around his feet, they must be three thousand feet below us, having gone airborne when the cot fell out from under us.
As I look back on that moment I see several ways we could have handled the next six hours. I could have gone down, picked up an extra pair of boots from a friend at camp, and hiked them back up the trail for Pax to use. I didn’t do that; I’m embarrassed now to admit that it didn’t even occur to me. I could barely even manage to give him much sympathy.
“You’re right, that does suck,” was all I said.
And so, without complaint, Pax hiked down in his climbing shoes, the sharp rocks on the trail pressing up and through the thin rubber. As expected, the six hours on the trail left his feet beaten and worn. When we got back to the car, he pulled his climbing shoes off and it looked as though his feet had been whipped with a bamboo cane.
That night, back in camp, with Pax’s feet airing out in the cool breeze, we considered the next dilemma: the cot was sitting on the top of a two-hundred-foot-tall redwood tree.
“Pax, I’d like to help, pal, but I gotta get back home to work.”
“I totally understand.”
Again, I look back on that moment, years later, with embarrassment. I didn’t offer to help. I didn’t even offer to pay for a new cot.
“No problem, Slake, I’ll scale the tree and get it myself.”
I called Pax a few weeks later to find out what happened. Tom Paxton had probably become the only climber in the history of Yosemite to ever scale a redwood tree.
The cot was mangled, but he broke it down into parts, stuffed them into a box, and sent them back to the manufacturer with a note explaining what happened, redwood tree and all.
With a boxful of parts, the manufacturer would have no way of knowing whether Pax’s story of our climb was true. There was plenty of reason to reject his request for a refund. The likelihood of a cot breaking the way it did is infinitesimally small—one in a million. But they took him at his word.
1 in 1,000,000.
That astronomically small likelihood would govern a journey that would take more than a decade of my life to finish.
The journey would completely unravel me, then bind me back together into someone who could feel and care. I look back now and I don’t even recognize the callous nail-driving mallet that I was. By crisscrossing a world of mountains and oceans, I would eventually discover my humanity.
Chapter 2
BE STRONG
My journey began with a simple plan to climb the highest mountain on every continent and surf every ocean. Other climbers had already summited the mountains, someone may even have surfed all the oceans, but no one had done the combination.
I was thirty-seven years old, with no permanent ties. I had taken my career as a physicist in a direction that gave me enough flexibility to travel for weeks at a time. Being a scientist, I would work through the list of mountains and oceans with perfect efficiency, carefully assessing each challenge, evaluating risks, and completing tasks.
I wasn’t trying to bring meaning or purpose to my life or anyone else’s. I wouldn’t add one dime to a charity. No one would be any better for my journey, and that was just fine with me.
I had been living with that indifference to the world, that detachment, for decades. My separation from others began when I was eleven years old, during a short walk down a stark hallway.
I can’t remember the last time I was in this room. For months, the door has been shut, sealed tight, a tomb. Occasionally, when I walked down the hall, I stopped at the door to check for any sounds. There was no hushed conversation, not even the soothing tones of a radio. I imagined that if I pressed my eleven-year-old ears hard to the door I might at least be able to hear my mom breathing. I never heard a sound.
The door was open as I walked by this time and I stood in the doorframe and looked in. The bedroom was empty. My father must have taken Mom to the living room; she must be feeling better today.
Across the room I could see two bulges of Styrofoam on the dresser. Draped over the top of one of them was a familiar spread of dark hair. I recognized the trim front, the straight sides, the curl at the bottom. I walked to the dresser, reached over, and tugged the wig off the featureless head.
I couldn’t remember ever running my fingers through my mother’
s hair. Now, I was curious to feel its softness. My fingertips pressed into the strands. The hair was dry and stiff. I flattened the curl in my palm, but it resisted, retreating back to its manufactured shape the moment I let go.
I don’t recall if I placed the wig back on the foam, but I remember walking out of the room and then back down the hallway toward the living room.
By then my mother had all she could take of the day; my father was now bringing her back to the bedroom. She was spread across his chest, her back resting gently over his left arm, knees suspended by his right arm, her legs hanging down toward the floor. As we approached each other, my father turned sideways, his back to the wall, my mother’s body now just a few inches from my right shoulder.
No glance was exchanged; no words said. We passed in silence.
I’m sure that she ached to reach out and touch my hand. But, true to her character, she wanted no pity; she did not want to provoke tears.
A few moments later, as I continued down the hall, I heard the click of the bedroom door pulling shut behind me.
No words were exchanged when I passed my mother, but I heard her nevertheless. Over the years that followed, I would recall that moment and I could still hear her voice. And even though her head was turned, tucked deep into my father’s chest, I could see her eyes as she spoke to me. With the strongest of hearts, and clearest purpose, she told me this: be strong.
And so I followed her advice. My skin thickened.
It would take me another thirty years and a journey of tens of thousands of miles, deep into the heart of the world, before I realized that I totally misunderstood my mother that day.
I suppose that there was a chance, a few years after my mother’s death, to reverse my growing detachment. I had formed a solid friendship with an adventurous kid my age.
Greg Stevens and I are standing on a mountaintop overlooking a valley near Logan, Utah. I was spending my summer break from high school here and had made friends with Greg. Energetic, lively, full of curiosity, he was immediately likable.
We drove up here, along with a busful of other kids and a couple of parents, and we were now looking out over the mountain, puzzling over whether we could ditch the group and take our own route down.
“Let’s climb down.”
I was cautious. There was no path down; we would have to find our own way. Sure, things looked straightforward enough from here, but we couldn’t see down the entire side of the mountain. It could get dicey.
“If things get hard, then we’ll just climb back up,” Greg encouraged.
Neither of us were climbers and we didn’t have any gear. We could get ourselves into a situation we couldn’t get out of.
“I’m not going; let’s just take the bus down,” I said.
“Well, I’m going. Go ahead and take the bus.” Greg walked to the edge and flipped his feet over the rock and started to descend.
I got the news later that afternoon. One of the parents asked around when Greg didn’t show up at the bus and found out that he was climbing down the mountain. When he didn’t return that afternoon, they contacted the police, who dispatched a helicopter to search the canyon.
Greg had fallen. Unable to move, the helicopter medevaced him to the hospital. The word from the pilots was that he would be okay.
I met Greg’s sister in town and we hurried to the hospital. I remember strolling down a hallway and casually asking a passing nurse where a medevaced patient might be: emergency room? waiting room? Maybe Greg was already out of surgery and would be sitting up in his bed, smiling when we walked in the room.
“Who are you looking for?”
“Greg Stevens,” his sister answered.
“Oh, he died.”
For a moment, there was silence. I remember not understanding the meaning of those three words, the impossibility of them. And then his sister screamed—not in words, just tones, piercing desperate tones that didn’t come from the lungs but from the anguish of a crushed heart. Her scream continued on, filling the hallway, sliding under the cracks of doors, pressing against the windowpanes.
I don’t recall if I put my arm across her shoulder; if I did, it offered no comfort.
I simply looked ahead, into the nurse’s eyes. I could see that she was grappling with the depths of her error. How could she have said those words? Perhaps she was new or inattentive or tired or something that could explain the heartlessness of her response.
I had only one thought at that moment: Greg is gone. Forever.
Two people had been torn out of my life. The lesson I drew then, as a teenager, seemed so obvious, so unmistakably clear: don’t form attachments; avoid more loss.
With my growing indifference, it wasn’t long before I began running into trouble.
The first snag occurred shortly after I broke my hand in a game of street hockey. It was so badly shattered that the doctor isolated it with pins and wrapped my entire forearm in a cast. “Try to keep it elevated; that will make it heal faster,” he advised.
I regarded that advice as an excellent excuse for skipping school, so for the next four weeks I stayed at home without any concern for classes and schedules.
When I did eventually go back to school, I had to confront my tenth-grade history teacher. It wouldn’t go well.
I’m standing in front of her, with a test in my left hand, waiting for her rant to end. After months of my battling with her, she is thoroughly enjoying this moment.
She points at the splint on my right hand.
“You were out of school the last four weeks because of that?”
It did look meager. It was just a four-inch-long piece of curled aluminum that rested in my palm and ran up to the tip of my pinkie finger, held firmly in place with a few strips of medical tape. The doctor put that modest brace on after cutting off the cast a day earlier.
“Yesterday I was in a cast that ran from my elbow and closed off my entire hand. I had to keep it elevated, I couldn’t write.”
She sneered. She disliked me and the feeling was mutual. And she had every reason to doubt me.
Before I broke my hand she and I would have words nearly every class. She routinely ridiculed students. She would pick on just a couple of kids who would quietly suffer under her assaults. It was unfair and I had asked her to back off the harassment and get on with teaching.
As far as she was concerned, this was payback time.
“I’ve decided to take three points off your grade for every day that you were absent.”
My grade just sank to a D.
“Now, let me see that test,” she demanded.
I hand her the sheets. This wasn’t going well, and I could see where it was heading.
“This test is blank.”
“Right,” I replied. “I didn’t know that there would be a test today and so I wasn’t ready to take it. I was hoping to take it in a couple days, after I’ve caught up.”
“You could have studied all those days you were gone. You could have asked a fellow student to bring you the homework so you could keep up.”
She was right. “Okay. But can I just take a retest next class? I’ll catch up tonight.”
“No, you can’t. I am giving you a zero on the test.”
With that test score and the points she just took off for my absences, there was no way I could recover my grade. No amount of extra credit could revive it, not that she would even consider giving me the opportunity.
I just failed high school history.
The next day, my father took this up with the principal. There were a number of ways the principal could have handled the situation in his siding with the teacher. He could have said that he must allow teachers a certain amount of authority and he was deferring to her. I suppose I could have accepted that. Instead, he explained to my father that I needed to learn a lesson.
Being a teacher himself, my father thought this was the wrong way to teach a lesson—grades weren’t effective disciplinary weapons. I was probably overly assertiv
e in class, my father conceded. And yes, I had been impolite and there were certainly better ways of addressing my complaints about the teacher. But there were also better ways to handle this, my father explained.
The principal didn’t care. The F would stand, he threatened. And if I persisted in my behavior, which he fully expected would happen, more Fs would follow.
With little possibility of improving my situation at that school, my dad made a decision: he punched the reset button.
I left that school in Virginia and we moved to my grandmother’s house in Sacramento. My father thought some grandmotherly hovering would help put some discipline in the life of his youngest teenager. It didn’t work. While my father spent nights writing in his study, I would be outdoors, feral, gathering in a pack of friends or strangers to pursue aimless misdemeanors.
Late one night, we break into a gym to play basketball.
When cops arrive, we sprint out the door and scatter. As I’m cutting through yards, I see up ahead a brick wall, low enough to throw my hands over. When I pull up to have a look, I can’t believe my luck. Here is something I’ve been looking for the last two weeks. It’s been more than a hundred degrees for days, and I’ve been looking for a place to cool off. As I drop down off the wall into the apartment complex, there in the patio in front of me and encased in textured, bumpy concrete, is the glimmering water of a swimming pool.
A few days later I’m soaking in the water. The pool is shallower than I thought. I’m standing in the deepest part, my elbows resting on the pool sides, and the water is a few inches below my shoulders. It’s also narrower than I thought, about twenty feet wide, and it’s squeezed between two four-story apartment buildings. With only about ten feet between the sides of the pool and the buildings, it’s shady, but it feels cramped.
The pool is shallow and narrow; there’s no diving board and no point in swimming laps since it only takes a few strokes to go from one end to the other. All I can do is wade in the water, brainlessly. I lean my head back wondering how long I can handle being idle, and then, just before I close my eyes, I notice something.
To the Last Breath Page 3
