by Thomas Day
Fifty years ago, I left my family. I left them in good shape. We were renting a small house in a small town in eastern Nebraska. They had money and money coming in. I had worked out a deal with the Unemployment Insurance people where I would send out resumes and they would give me money for the next six months, unless I found employment before then. Ms Day only had to send in a card every week to receive one hundred and sixty dollars a week. I had made up the cards. I had filled out the resumes. Ms Day only had to open an envelope from Unemployment every week and check a block and add the names of the companies I had written resumes to and put the resumes in the mail along with the Unemployment envelope. Easy. My plan was to be back in Nebraska in about a month and everything would return to “normal” while I got serious about looking for work.
I left my family in this condition and I would board a Greyhound bus for the west coast. With a stop in the Grand Canyon on the way. Ms Day and I were not enjoying each other's company and this seemed like the obvious way to solve that conflict. I would leave and she would stay. When my unemployment ran out, in 26 weeks, we'd reconsider our lives together. I'd come back, if that is what we decided I should do. I’d be on my own, if that was our decision.
So I left. I loaded up a backpack with food, camping stuff, a few books, and a note pad. I boarded the Greyhound bus and went west as a young man, temporarily, with no obligations. I rode and wrote for a thousand miles until I got to Flagstaff. I wrote about how my life had not worked out to much of anything I would have chosen, I had not actively made any choices. Mostly I had spend the past six years reacting to what came. But now, I was heading west and I had intentionally picked that direction and that action.
At Flagstaff, I left the bus depot and hiked and hitchhiked the 80 miles to the Canyon. I’d left Nebraska a few days after Xmas and it was solidly winter in northern Arizona. I was used to the cold, my gear was good, and I was young and motivated to see this American wonderland. At the Canyon, I hiked down to the bottom at the Bright Angel Campground with two three day passes and enough reading material to stay busy for five days, easy.
At the bottom, I set up camp, bought some candy bars from the park's canteen near the campground. I met my neighbors: a pair of English campers, a pair of Texas campers, a pair of traveling friends from California and New York, and guy from Michigan who didn't have a decent sleeping bag or any kind of tent. This was January and, although the Canyon is mostly desert on the bottom, it still gets cold and, sometimes, wet. That night it snowed a few inches and I ended up sharing my tent with the guy from Michigan who was wet, cold, and very tense. The next morning he bagged up his stuff and headed for the top of the Canyon, where a tour bus would take him to a motel room.
I had my tent back to myself and I picked out a book and started to read. A ranger appeared at my tent flap, a few hours after sundown on the second night. He handed me a message from my wife. It said, "Call home. Emergency." I put my boots and pants on, dug out my flashlight, and started out for the telephone at the canteen.
I could get to the canteen one of two ways. I could walk back toward the river and cross a small stream over a footbridge or I could cross the stream near the canteen on a rock bridge that fishermen had built by throwing rocks into the stream at irregular intervals. Because it was an "emergency" I decided to go the short, but risky route, the rock bridge.
I have the balance of a tipsy debutante. It's true. If I had to wear high heels, I'd spend my life crawling. I once did an Outward bound class where I had to cross streams on log bridges and I crossed most of those bridges on my hands and knees. It got a lot of laughs from my other class members, but I stayed dry. Everyone else did too, but they weren't me and they just walked across those logs. They, also, didn't have trouble standing still at a bus stop because their sense of balance allowed them to stand still and stay upright. Sort of like a shark and his defective gill mechanism, I move to stay upright. If I stand still for long, I fall over.
Anyway, I decided to take the hard, but fast route, to the telephone: across the rock bridge. When I call this a bridge, you must understand that I mean it was a pile of loose rocks, strewn across a fifteen foot wide, two foot deep stream. All kinds of people used that bridge to get across the stream through the day. I saw them. I watched with envy. I knew it was possible, but probably not for me. But now, in an "emergency," I knew I had to do it, to cross the rock bridge. I stood at the foot of the bridge and shined my flashlight across the rocks. I tested my balance. My hiking shoes were loose because I had only pulled them on. I hadn't laced them up tight because I was in a hurry, answering an "emergency." They wobbled when I walked and they shifted, side to side, when I tested my balance on the edge of the stream. I left them loose.
I stepped out on the first rock. It was not solid in the stream. It was big, but it rocked a bit. I swung my left foot toward the second rock in the bridge “structure.” It was less solid and smaller. I shifted my weight from the first rock and pivoted slightly to my left to go for the third rock. I didn't make it. The second rock rocked a little. I panicked and tried to go back to the first rock and ended up sitting in the middle of the stream with water running over the middle of my back. Very cold water. I tried to jump up and get my butt out of the coldest sitts-bath known to humanity and slipped again. This time I felt something tear in my groin. Not cloth, but something like a tendon. My groin and tendon were very cold, though, and it didn't hurt. It just felt a lot less strong than it had the moment before. The only pain I felt was the pain of being very cold. I crawled out of the stream and pulled myself up the opposite bank. When I stood, the groin muscle hurt quite a bit. I was still very cold and I still had an "emergency" to deal with. I walked, hobbled, to the telephone. Being wet and exposed to a thirty degree environment increased my misery.
I dialed my home number and my wife answered, "Tom, I didn't expect you to call until next week. The lady at the ranger station said you had just gone into the canyon and wouldn't be back for five more days. So what's up? How is the trip going?"
"I got a note that says you had an emergency. For me to call home. The ranger gave it to me at my tent tonight."
"Oh, I'm sorry. There's no emergency. I just asked the lady ranger to have you call home when you got out of the canyon. I said it was no emergency" (my italics, I've been putting italics on that word for fifty years, every time I tell this story).
I was calm, contained, reasonable. I said, "I just fell into a freezing stream, broke my leg, and crawled a hundred yards to call you about an emergency and it was no emergency? How the fuck am I going to get out of this place now? I'm crippled! Now there is an emergency, Me!"
I continued in a calm, contained, reasonable manner like that for a few more seconds describing my injury and how it happened and what was going to happen to me after I ran out of food in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, crippled by a broken leg and pneumonia, before she interrupted me. "Tom, I'm sorry. I did say it was no emergency. The ranger said she would post a note on the bulletin board for you to call home; when you got back out of the canyon. I don't know why they decided to make it an emergency, but you should go back to your tent and take care of your leg. Don't go back the same way you came. Hear me? Go back to the real bridge." In my calm, contained, and reasonable manner I had told her about the good and bad bridges and why, in my incredible sacrifice for my family and their "emergency," I had decided to cross the bad bridge.
We said goodbye. I made it sound like, now, I was the "emergency" and like I might need a helicopter to get me out of this mess. I went back to my tent. The same way I came. I was limping badly and hurting with every step. The extra two hundred yards to get to and cross the real bridge was more pain than I was ready for. I was already wet and hurt, so what more could the rocks do to me? It turned out that they could do noting to me. I walked over that bridge like it was the Golden Gate, pissing and moaning and thinking about how miserable I was going to be with a broken leg, in a tent, in wet clothes, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the early January, stuck until I starved. I struggled into my tent, pulled off my filled-with-water-boots after a great struggle mostly with my bum groin hurting like hell every time I tried to get to my right boot. I know, today, that I had strained, or torn, my right groin ligament or tendon. It also still hurt to remember what it felt like back then for at least 20 more years. Back in the tent, I thought I had castrated myself and broken my leg. It took me nearly an hour to get the wet clothes off and some dry ones on. I was a Picasso shade of gray-blue by the time I pulled my damp sleeping bag over my head and shivered myself to sleep.
The next morning, the sky was clear and the sun was melting the first snow that my local ranger had ever seen on the bottom of the Canyon, in his ten years as a ranger. I couldn't get out of my sleeping bag. My right leg was so stiff that it wouldn't bend even enough for me to get to the bottom half of the bag's zipper. I knew starvation was my fate. After a few moments of reflection, I pulled some dehydrated soup from my pack and made breakfast on my gas stove.
I found some liniment and rubbed it all over my thigh. It was a big tube and I was sure to die of starvation before I ran out of liniment, so I was liberal with the medication. Soon, my tent stunk like a little school high school locker room after a big school football team had massacred the little school. And my leg was on fire. And I felt little if no pain. If all that stuff does is distract you from the real source of your problems, that is enough. That bit of distraction allowed me to fall back to sleep for most of the morning. When I came back to life, the leg would move a little without causing me to scream or bite my tongue off not screaming. So I ate some more. And read some of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and some of Twain’s Roughing It and, when it got dark, I went back to sleep.
On my fourth day in the Canyon, I decided to see some of the place so I could say I had done more than just sleep, eat, and read there. I fought my way dressed and struggled out of the tent, which was so liniment infested that my nearest camping neighbor was as far from my tent as they could be and still be in the legal campground. You could almost see the fumes rising from the tent's ventilation. I wasn't worried. I still a had half-tube of the stuff for the last two days of camping and hiking.
I found a stick to use for a cane and set off to explore the Canyon rim that I hadn't come in on. I made it about a quarter mile before I ran into a section of the trail that had been landslid into oblivion. I tried to navigate that pile of rocks and reinjured my groin. Not bad, but enough to make me turn back and admit defeat. I was not going to do much spectating at the bottom of the Canyon. I went back to the Stream of Injury and contemplated my past and future for the rest of the day.
That night I finished off the tube of liniment. I spread it all over my inner thigh. Some very sensitive tissue lives on the inside of your thigh and once again I was on fire. And it still felt much better than the sprung stuff inside the thigh did before I applied the liniment. I went to sleep with my leg happily smoking inside the sleeping bag.
The next morning, the leg felt a little better than the previous morning and I was out of time in the Canyon. I pulled my stuff out of the tent, tore my home down, and stuffed everything I had in the world into my backpack. As usual, the things I had taken out of the bag didn't seem to fit back into it. Even after I had consumed a fair quantity of food that took up some of the space I, now, couldn't find. I found the space after a lot of rearranging and hauled the pack up to my back. I carefully tested my leg for strength and pain and it seemed to work.
At 6:00 a.m. I was heading up the seven mile trek to the rim of the Canyon. By 9:00 a.m. I was in trouble. The climb to the top of the Canyon is a steep and steady grade and my leg was trashed within three hours of careful and intermittent walking. I had tried to take it easy and rest regularly, but it didn't help. To make life more complex, my left leg was going away from compensating for the right one. I was getting the same kind of injury in my good leg. By 10:00 a.m. I was resorting to eyeballing the next close resting spot and forcing my two bum legs to carry me to that spot, usually within fifty to one hundred feet. At this rate of progress, seven miles would take a few days to hobble-hike.
I kept at it all day. Hiking a few yards and resting with the weight off of the legs. The right leg was still much worse than the left so I had some energy and locomotion left, but the sun was going down and so was I by mid-afternoon. The two guys from New York and California had left the campground after me and passed me a bit earlier, but they were taking a break and I caught up with them. They were about to take off again when I came hobbling up to their coffee break.
"You look beat. You OK?" The guy from New York asked.
"You're kidding? Me tired? I never felt better, except when I broke my ribs and ripped out most of the stuff that holds ribs in the places where they are supposed to be," I said, with all the friendliness and community spirit that Charles Manson brought to his midnight surprise parties.
The east and west coasters looked at each other and started to pack up their gear so that I could be miserable in peace. And I would have been, miserable, if they hadn't noticed that I was walking at an angle different than the lie of the land. "You're hurt? What did you do?", the guy from California asked.
"You wouldn't believe it if I told you. I don't believe it," this time his sympathy mellowed my out to the Committee to Reelect Richard Nixon level of belligerence. No, I was still nicer than that. I was down to feeling sorry for myself instead of pissed at the universe that had caused me to be born with no coordination and no sense of balance. "I think I tore something in my right leg and this hill is tearing up the same thing in the other leg."
"You want help?", said the New York guy.
"I don't know what you could do. I'm to fat to carry and you already have plenty on your backs with your own packs. Thanks for asking."
The New York guy grabbed my pack by the frame and lifted, "You have a lot more weight in your bag than I'm carrying. We could switch bags. You could wear mine."
I was losing more that a quarter century's indoctrination in one afternoon. I didn't know what to say. Had I been lied to by my Midwestern education? By television? By Hollywood? Could someone from New York even know how to help someone? Maybe he thought that since my bag was bigger than his, it was worth more than his and he would take off with it, leaving me to his stuff. That didn't make sense. Why not toss me off the cliff we were standing on and take the good stuff, if that was what he wanted? I was left with the New York Good Samaritan theory and while he was hefting my life's possessions on to his back and loading his pack on my back, my view of human relations as determined by place of birth was as mangled as my groin.
His pack was a lot lighter than mine. I suppose he hadn't carried six month's worth of reading material into a two mile deep canyon. I had. He probably didn't have a month of clothes in his pack either. I did. Or the things he might need to set up an apartment and a new life. I had some of that, too.
We walked, talked, and rested for the last two miles of the canyon rim trail. They could have made it to the top in an hour without me, but it took five more hours with me. It started snowing soon after we started walking together and the temperature dropped almost ten degrees each hour that we walked.
The last half mile was the worst for me. Neither leg worked. I was dragging my right leg with my seized up left leg. The guy from California carried the guy from New York's pack in his arms while I struggled to carry myself. We rarely walked more than a few feet between me saying, "Go on without me. You're going to freeze here. It's dark. My legs don't work. Go on. I'll set my tent up here and sleep this off. Go on."
They patiently listened to me. Waited for me to get up and go on a few more feet. I managed to walk the last one hundred yards without stopping. If you can call the pace I was moving, walking. I could see the end. I was so disgusted with myself for being so fallible and for keeping these incredible examples of humanity out in the cold for so many hours that they didn't deserve. I forced my legs to keep moving until we got to the New York guy's car.
I sat in his car while the two friends said goodbye. It turned out that they had met at the top of the Canyon five days earlier and decided to walk down together. The California guy was going back home. It was too cold for him to even consider staying in a motel in Flagstaff, even if I was paying for it. He wanted to get back to some natural heat, fast. The New York guy was a lot more wore out from having to carry his own gear and the other guy's gear for the last mile of the trail. He accepted my offer of a night in a motel in Flagstaff in exchange for a ride back down the mountain to Flagstaff.
We drove to Flagstaff. I stopped at a convenience store and bought more liniment. When we found a motel, I paid for the room and we found it. He took a hot shower and crashed. I filled the tub with scalding water, smeared most of the tube of liniment on my legs, and went to sleep in the tub. I woke up a few times to reheat the water and spent the night submersed. The next morning he asked me, through the door, if I was OK. I told him not to worry about me, I was mutating into a frog with two sauteed frog legs. He left for New York and I stayed in the tub until check out time.
I was probably in some kind of shock when we finally made it to the top of the Canyon. I can't remember the names of either of my fellow hikers, or, more accurately, my rescuers. I wouldn't even recognize them if I saw them in my own home. I might recognize them if I saw them carrying my eighty pound pack or two thirty pound packs, one in arms and one in the usual position.
I did revise my opinions of people from the coasts and, when I continued my trip to San Francisco to locate my wife's missing brother, I was well served by my new opinion of California people. A police clerk helped me locate his home through his car registrations. A guy with a diamond in the middle of one front tooth offered me a job while I sat next to him on the bus. Another guy introduced me to Hatha yoga in Golden Gate Park.
I had my sabbatical and went back home to my wife and kids. A few months later, I got my old job back when they rehired the first group of people they had laid off. I went on with my life. This all happened almost fifty years ago, but I still feel a need to get even. I'm still way behind the east and west coasts in debt. Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard said something about not being a "borrower or lender" and I have spend a lot of my life avoiding those categories. But I am still waiting for an opportunity to pay back a guy from New York and a guy from California for helping me get to the top of the Grand Canyon. Poor Richard also said that "Creditors have better memories than debtors," but, in this case, I doubt it. I'd guess that the California guy and the New York guy have completely forgotten about me, but I will never forget them.
The End
