Sully
Page 15
LORRIE IS an exceptionally strong woman, and as I have watched her grapple with various issues in her life, and the challenges in our own family, I’ve learned a great deal about the power of optimism and acceptance, and about the responsibilities all of us have to carve a path to our own happiness.
She and I are a bit different. I’m a believer in “realistic optimism,” which I consider a leader’s most effective tool. That’s short-term realism combined with long-term optimism. Lorrie understands the value in that, to be sure, but she also sees how embracing full-on optimism about life’s possibilities is good for your health, your relationships, and your sanity.
Lorrie speaks frankly and from the heart, and she’s able to take her life and pull from it moments and experiences that resonate deeply with other women, literally changing their lives. That’s what she does in her career as an outdoors fitness instructor, heading a one-woman operation she calls “Fit and Fabulous . . . Outdoors!” She takes groups of women on long hikes. They’ll go up one side of a mountain, and by the time Lorrie brings them back down the other side, they aren’t the same women anymore. They’ve seen the world and themselves in a new way. Sometimes I’ll drive the women to the trailhead or back home from it. I’ve waited for Lorrie at the bottom of a mountain when she and the women in her groups have returned. It’s remarkable to watch.
Granted, I’m Lorrie’s husband and I love her, so this may sound overstated. But those who’ve walked up a mountain with her know just what I’m talking about.
One of Lorrie’s friends, Helen Ott, who has joined her on numerous fitness hikes, puts it this way: “Lorrie is like a bright light.” Helen talks about all the fun she has on these walks, because Lorrie is such a good storyteller and is so supportive of other women. “She makes people feel confident in their abilities,” Helen says, “and she makes them feel good about themselves.”
Lorrie’s embrace of exercise—and the idea that it is best done with others, and in the great outdoors—was actually a journey that began very uneasily for her. She speaks openly with women about how she was “the quintessential chubby girl” for most of her childhood. She has worked to understand the impact her dad’s alcoholism had on her eating habits and on her sense of herself growing up. Hers was not a painless childhood, but she isn’t one to make excuses.
Lorrie was overweight as an adult, too, and that was exacerbated by the fertility drugs she took trying to get pregnant. The drugs left her thirty-five pounds heavier, and feeling deeply wounded. Unable to conceive a child, she felt that her body had betrayed her. Even after we adopted Kate and Kelly, and even though we felt our family was complete and perfect, her feelings remained raw.
“I fell madly in love with the girls the moment we brought them home in our arms,” Lorrie has explained to her clients. “Sully and I felt as if we had won the baby lottery. But those feelings of betrayal, they didn’t magically go away. When the infertility ordeal was over, I had two incredibly beautiful daughters that I loved with every fiber of my being, but I was angry at my body.”
A decade ago, just before Lorrie turned forty, she decided that she would try to let go of the anger and make peace with her body. First, she joined a gym. But walking on a treadmill and going nowhere seemed unsatisfying. She was still having what she called “negative conversations” with her body parts. She told me she felt “awkward” at the gym. “The more I focused on my butt, the bigger it seemed to get,” she’d say. Like a lot of people, she was trying to lose weight by beating her body into submission.
The mind-body connection is powerful, of course, and the fact that she didn’t like the body carrying her through life was a big issue. Then she took a class at a local gym with a woman named Denise Hatch, who put things in perspective: “Be grateful for what your body can do, rather than focusing on what it can’t do. You can’t have children. That’s hard on you, I know. But your arms and legs work. You’re healthy. You have two daughters who need to see you modeling healthy behavior. So all of this negative body image talk and thoughts have to stop right now.”
Lorrie learned that it was vital to find a way of exercising that she liked. “If you’re not a runner, then be a walker, a hiker, a dancer,” she tells women now. “Just be brave. Find your thing and do it. As with everything in life, if you like doing something, you will do it more often.”
In Lorrie’s case, hiking liberated her. Walking outdoors and seeing a red-tailed hawk gliding overhead or looking out over the carpetlike hills of California or feeling the softness in the summer wind—she realized she was having spiritual experiences she’d never find on a treadmill. And her enthusiasm was contagious. She wanted to hike every day, and to take me and the girls with her.
“I think I’m in love,” she told me one day, “. . . with exercise.”
Lorrie would go on to be a fitness expert on the San Francisco ABC-TV affiliate, hosting regular segments about how women can incorporate the outdoors in their quest for better health. And she takes groups of women on regular hikes, listening to the stories of their lives as they walk, and sharing her own.
“The body that betrayed me for so long responded to the outdoors,” she explains to them. “Exercise gave me the confidence that had eluded me. It made me a better mother, wife, and friend. And I hiked off those thirty-five extra pounds.”
Lorrie is frank. “As women, we have to become comfortable with our bodies. That’s crucial. A woman who isn’t comfortable will turn off the lights at night and say to her husband, ‘Please don’t touch me.’ When a woman is happy in her own skin, she’s more willing to let her partner be close.”
For years now, Lorrie has included me as a character in her repertoire of inspirational stories. I’m not sure I want to know everything discussed high in those mountains about our private lives. But I’m happy with Lorrie’s basic message: “Hiking,” she says, “has reinvigorated my marriage.”
IT WAS Lorrie’s idea. She wanted us to hike together to the top of California’s Mount Whitney, which is in the Sierra Nevada range, southeast of where we are in Northern California. At 14,505 feet, it’s the highest peak in the contiguous United States.
This was fairly early in Lorrie’s discovery of hiking, and she arranged for eight couples to go together. She got the necessary U.S. Forest Service hiking permit, but one by one, for scheduling reasons or because they hadn’t trained well enough, each of the other couples dropped out. The sixteen-person hike became a two-person hike—me and Lorrie—but we decided, what the heck, we’d still do it.
We trained for the adventure faithfully. Whenever I was home from a trip, we’d put on our running shoes and run over to a shopping center a mile from our house, where there is a series of stairs leading up a hill to a parking lot. We’d run up and down the stairs fifteen or twenty times, and then we’d jog home.
We kept going to the gym to lift weights, and we went on practice hikes locally, carrying weights in our backpacks. We also did a lot of biking up Mount Diablo, just northeast of Danville.
Lorrie believes that to meet your goals in life, it’s important to write them down. But that’s not enough. You also need to take what she and others call “authentic action” every day to achieve them. That means you have to knock on a door, or make a phone call, or do something concrete to get you closer to your goal. When training to hike the tallest mountain in the continental United States, you have to get out every day and prepare. She made sure we did that. In the middle of our training, I hit a patch of gravel while riding a mountain bike on Mount Diablo, breaking my pelvis. I was out of work for six weeks, and it made getting back to preparations for Mount Whitney that much more challenging.
Lorrie felt that, not unlike our adoption journey, training for the hike would be good for us as a couple. We needed each other for emotional support. When one of us was tired, the other would offer encouragement. And these moments of rallying for each other would be good practice for the support we’d have to give each other on the actual hike.
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Our ascent of Mount Whitney was set for September 2, 1999. We got a babysitter for the girls, and rather than driving the seven hours southeast from our house to the mountain, we decided to rent a Cessna Turbo 182RG (a four-seat, single-engine plane) and fly there. It was pretty romantic, just the two of us, heading off to test ourselves in the wilderness.
We planned to complete the hike in one day, but that meant we’d have to start very early. We stayed in a motel near the mountain, woke up at 3 A.M., and were on the trail at four-fifteen, wearing our headlamps and backpacks, ready to go. The trailhead starts at 8,300 feet, and if we could make it to the top and back, it would be twenty-one miles round-trip.
In our backpacks we had rain gear, hats, gloves, spare batteries, matches, power bars, water, peanut-butter sandwiches, and other essentials. I also had brought along a gallon-size plastic bag with my mother’s ashes. She had died the January before, and I thought the mountain might be an appropriate place to spread her ashes.
My dad had passed away four years earlier, and after living a pretty traditional life with him, my mom had really come into her own in her final years. My father had been more of a homebody, and my mom had loyally stayed on the home front with him. But once he was gone, she did a great deal of traveling with friends. It was as if she was making up for lost time. She embraced every part of living she could, and it was wonderful to see that. Lorrie and I thought it would be fitting to bring her ashes to this tallest peak so we could set her free in the wind, to continue her travels.
We started our hike well before sunrise, but the moon was half full, and straight up in the sky. There was so much light from the moon that our bobbing headlamps were almost unnecessary.
The predawn darkness was magnificent. Astronomers would say “the seeing was good.” The air was stable, and so the stars were bright and clear, without much twinkling. It was almost as if we could reach out and touch them.
At first, we were walking in the shadows of tall trees, wearing just light jackets. Once the sun started rising and warmed the mountain, we were able to put the jackets into our backpacks.
The sunrise was spectacular. We were hiking on the eastern side of the mountain, facing west, and one peak behind us was perfectly aligned with the sun, forming a triangularly shaped shadow on the expanse of Whitney ahead of us. As the sun got higher, the black triangle moved down the face of the mountain. It was an amazing sight.
We were also fascinated by how the mountain changed as we climbed. With each change in elevation, we traversed different zones with varying terrain and plants. We encountered marshy areas and some lakes and streams, but as we got higher, the vegetation became more sparse. Portions of the trail were rugged and rocky, and at one point we had to scramble over large boulders. Then the altitude began taking its toll on us. We knew this would happen—we had read the books—but that made it only a little easier to handle. Lorrie had a raging headache, and both of us got sluggish and very tired.
We kept reassuring each other with an old line that marathon runners use: “It’s not twenty-six miles. It’s one mile, twenty-six times.”
We had another mantra: “Anyone can hike Mount Whitney. You just point your feet in an uphill direction, and put one foot in front of the other.” We kept repeating that.
We lost our appetite, which is also common. We knew we had to force ourselves to eat, because we’d need our energy. The guidebooks had told us to bring our favorite foods, even junk food, because we’d be more apt to eat something we liked. It was remarkable to see what happened every time we pulled something to eat from our backpacks. Blue jays would try to land on our shoulders or backpacks to take the food away. Large ground squirrels called marmots would come out of the rocks, almost out of nowhere, and would also try to grab their share. They were all obviously very used to humans and knew that where there were people, there was food.
At thirteen thousand feet, the narrow trail crossed over the top of the mountain and there was a sheer drop-off. We were well above the tree line at this point, and it looked as barren as the surface of the moon. Lorrie got teary, in part from exhaustion and also, she admitted, out of fear. It was pretty intimidating looking down. She wondered if we really needed to reach the exact summit to release my mother’s ashes.
“Why don’t we just let your mother out here?” she asked. “Your mom would understand. I know she would.”
I wanted to keep going. “We can do it,” I told her. She smiled weakly at me, and we pressed on.
By one-fifteen, we were within sight of the summit—maybe an hour from reaching it. But hours earlier, when we began the hike, we had established a turnaround time of one P.M. We knew we needed enough energy and daylight to make our descent, and we didn’t want to take any risks that would hamper our ability to return safely. Part of us wanted to continue on. But we deferred to good judgment. We resisted temptation and made a smart decision: We had come far enough.
I was understandably emotional as I reached into my backpack and took out my mom’s ashes. I opened the bag, and it was a powerful moment when I let go of her ashes, and watched them take off so easily into the wind. It was a clear blue day, not a cloud in the sky, and the ashes fluttered into the breeze and just kept going.
“I hope she enjoys her travels,” Lorrie said, and I wasn’t able to say much in response. I just watched.
Once that simple ceremony was over, Lorrie and I allowed ourselves to appreciate the majesty of the view. “Our worries seem pretty small in comparison to all of this, don’t they?” Lorrie said to me. “It puts life in perspective.”
We rested for a bit, taking it all in. But we couldn’t stay there too long. Our hike was only half over at that point.
Descending the mountain was almost harder than the hike up, because we were so drained emotionally and physically. By the end of a hike like this, every part of your body that could possibly chafe against another part of your body has done so.
When we reached the bottom of the trail at 8:15 P.M., again in darkness, we felt absolutely exhilarated despite our exhaustion. We were immensely proud of ourselves. Lorrie, who had spent years believing her body had let her down, recognized that in so many ways, her body had come through for her.
Flying home the next day in the rented plane, I circled over the mountain a few times, and we looked down at it with awe. We both joked that it was a good thing we hadn’t flown over it on the way there, because from the air it looked too formidable and steep.
“Wow,” Lorrie said to me. “Can you believe we did it?”
On the plane, as we headed over the mountain and then northwestward toward home, Lorrie, inspired, took out a pen and wrote a “gratitude letter.”
She wrote of how the mountain helped bring clarity to her life: “I realized how small our daily ‘stuff’ is. The mountain was here long before we were, and will be here long after we are gone. The fabric on my family room chairs really seemed insignificant by comparison. But what seemed supremely important during the hike was the giggling and laughter of Katie and Kelly, even when we want it quiet, and the love of our family—those living and those who have left us.”
Lorrie is well on her way to having led “a well-lived life.” She makes her way with passion and purpose, and by doing so reminds others of what is possible. I’m grateful to have shared the trail for so much of it.
LORRIE IS always on the lookout for inspiration, and a couple of years ago, she heard Maria Shriver speak at her annual California Governor and First Lady’s Conference on Women. At one point, Maria recited a Hopi Indian poem that had touched Lorrie deeply. It reads, in part:
There is a river flowing now very fast,
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid,
They will try to hold onto the shore.
They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of
the river,
Keep our eyes open, and our heads above water.
Lorrie said this poem moved her to tears. She recognizes that all of us have to find the courage to leave the shore. That means leaving the crutch of our lifelong complaints and resentments, or our unhappiness over our upbringing or our bodies or whatever. It means no longer focusing negative energy on things beyond our control. It means looking beyond the safety of the familiar.
Lorrie loves the image of letting go of the shore, finding the middle of the river, and letting the river take us. It’s a reminder that our lives are a combination of what we can control, what we can’t, and the results of the choices we make.
The river analogy works in our marriage and it helps us cope with matters such as our financial difficulties. “As long as we can keep our heads above the water,” Lorrie says, “we can make it.” It’s a beautiful way of looking at life.
Lorrie and I don’t always succeed in staying optimistic, but we have tried our best to live our lives in the middle of the river. Or else we’re on our favorite hilltop, looking at the world below, reminding ourselves that anything is possible.
11
MANAGING THE SITUATION
AL HAYNES.
Pilots mention his name with reverence.
On July 19, 1989, he was the captain of United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10 traveling from Denver to Chicago. There were 296 passengers and crew on board.
When I was a facilitator of the crew resource management (CRM) course, the story of that flight served as one of our most useful teaching tools. And personally, Flight 232 has taught me a great deal about flying—and about life.
After taking off from Denver, Flight 232 flew uneventfully for about eighty-five minutes. Then, soon after crossing into the airspace above Iowa, with the plane at thirty-seven thousand feet and the first officer, William Records, at the controls, an explosion was heard coming from the rear of the plane. The cause was soon apparent: The center engine had failed. Captain Haynes, who was approaching thirty thousand hours of flying experience, asked Dudley Dvorak, the second officer (flight engineer), to go through the engine failure checklist. As this was under way, the cockpit crew realized that all three hydraulic systems were losing pressure. Hydraulics are necessary to control this type of airplane. The first officer was having trouble controlling the aircraft.