Never Alone, page 5
As she fell, her leg slipped through the rungs. The ladder, the angle of the fall, and her own body weight created so much torque as she went down that her own femur had pulverized the tops of her two lower leg bones. She’d had to drag herself around to the sliding door of the van and scream for her friends, parked farther away, to come help her. Thank god they hadn’t finished loading up and were still there. Between several of them, they laid her out in the back of her van and drove her straight to the er.
I couldn’t believe her composure as she related the story.
“Well, I’ve had a good run of things so far,” she said. “I knew something would slow me down someday. I guess now it’s this.” Her stoic resignation made something inside of me burst. I was the one sobbing out of control, gasping for breath, and she was perfectly calm, telling me it would all be okay. Of course, her veins were coursing with morphine, but still.
I’m an only child. Since my parents split when I was five, it was always just the two of us in our household. She had been my everything—the sole representative of my nuclear family unit. I’d lived with her and spent every other weekend with my dad.
Both parents were huge influences on me. Their love of the natural world and adventure made me who I am, but my mother was my rock. I was seven years old, and we’d been on our own for just two years, when she was diagnosed with cancer. Though she’d lived through it and been in remission for decades, that terrible time had seeded me with the knowledge that I would someday lose her. Having her taken from me prematurely has been one of my biggest fears ever since.
I was no longer that terrified child, and as I clung to the phone I tried to keep this accident in perspective. I mean, I knew she wasn’t dying, but I couldn’t shut off the tears or see it as anything other than apocalyptic.
The surgery wasn’t scheduled until the next day. I knew it wasn’t the nurse’s fault, but I wanted to shake someone. Another day? My mother was lying there in agony with her bones crushed and they were going to let her go untreated for another twenty-four hours?
There was no arguing it—there was no solid bone left there. It wasn’t a job for the surgeon on call. It needed a specialist, and he wouldn’t be in until tomorrow.
The nurse nudged me off the phone. “She needs her rest. You can talk again later.”
“Honey,” she said before letting the phone go, “this is absolutely not going to interfere with you going on Alone. I’ll talk to you soon.”
I let the phone fall into my lap.
Right.
Competing desires dragged me this way and that. I wanted to rush to her. I wanted to lie down on the ground and pound it with my fists. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to get back to my damn sweater and a world where none of this had happened.
Questions raced through my mind: Would she walk again? Would she be able to do the things she loved? To camp and snowshoe and kayak? She was seventy-six. Would she go from active and young for her years to senile overnight?
I looked around at my piles of materials and thought of my ambitious preparation plans.
What did this accident mean for me? For my summer? For Alone? Could I really go away, for who knows how long, with my mother in a wheelchair?
Those questions would be answered later. All I could do right now was think about the next couple of days. As much as I wanted to hop in the car and drive to the hospital that minute, it didn’t make sense. When I got to her place, I was probably going to be there for a while, getting a ramp put in and otherwise getting her house wheelchair accessible. This wasn’t going to be resolved quickly, and I wouldn’t let go of Alone until I knew for sure that I had to.
10
You Want to Do What?
I packed up all the supplies I thought I’d need for what would probably be a stay of several weeks at my mom’s, or as many as I could fit in my station wagon: my bow and a quiver of arrows, yarn, buckskin, wool cloth, a bin full of dyes, and books on trapping and fishing.
Was I letting go of a single project in anticipation of this wrench in the plans?
Nope, not a one.
This kind of drive to accomplish feats at the furthest edge of what was humanly possible was a longtime habit of mine. What I’d heaped onto my plate that summer before leaving for the adventure, though, went well beyond what could be considered simply “overly ambitious.” Maybe it was desperation to disprove my diagnosis. Maybe it was just plain denial of the limits of time and space. Whatever it was, deciding that my priority on Alone was to go in the kind of homemade gear that really represents who I am and what I value, I clung to my plans with a tightfisted hold that bordered on maniacal.
Had someone proposed such projects to me earlier that spring, I would probably have told them it was a lineup that would take a skilled person a good year to complete. I had two and a half months, and I’d just become a full-time caretaker for my closest family member on top of it. What could possibly go wrong?
As luck would have it, my first session with the personal trainer was scheduled for the day I was heading out to my mother’s, so before hitting the road, I shrugged into a sports bra and workout shorts and headed to the gym. I felt a little guilty for keeping the appointment during such an emergency, but I knew this emergency would be a long haul and that today might be my last chance to focus on my own needs for a while.
I worried I’d be doing exactly what the chiropractor suggested I avoid, but compared to my mother’s concerns, mine seemed nominal. A genetic collagen disorder was rough, but hey, at least all my bones still existed, right?
The trainer wasn’t what I expected. She was ripped, but not weightlifter-ripped. She had short, spiky, bleached blonde hair and was glamorous but in a punky, “don’t look too hard at me or I’ll slug you” kind of way. I wasn’t sure if I admired her or was a little afraid of her.
I felt certain she was going to think I was crazy. Due to the contracts I’d signed, I could give her the relevant details but nothing about the actual television show. I scrunched up my toes in nervousness, glanced around the room to make sure no one was in earshot, and explained I was headed out on a solo wilderness adventure—maybe for weeks, maybe for months—and I would be taking, at most, two pounds of food with me. My goal was to be as strong as possible—strong enough to continue shooting a forty-five-pound bow, no small task for a person my size—even as I lost muscle mass due to starvation.
I also wanted to work on balance and strengthen my joints and ligaments to do all I could to make myself less injury prone. And I wanted to do all this while also putting on ten to twenty pounds of pure fat, so if she could advise me on that too, great.
Her black-lined eyes got a little wider with every statement. You want to do what? I could almost hear her thinking.
“Oh, and one more thing,” I added nonchalantly. “There’s also a good chance I might have a debilitating genetic disorder that makes small injuries or overworking potentially crippling for me.”
I think it’s a pretty safe bet that this was the most unusual training program that had ever been proposed to her, but she took it all in stride and didn’t ask too many awkward questions.
She stared intently, one beautifully plucked eyebrow raised as I grunted my way through the “battle ropes,” bosu squats, and weight machines.
Afterward, my thighs quivered and my shoulders burned as I wiped my sweat off the equipment with a gym rag.
“No,” she told me decisively, “you are not hypermobile. You would have already dislocated several joints in your lifetime if that was the case. You’d know it by now.” A heaviness lifted from me, and I stood a little straighter.
“I see what he was talking about: you have a couple weak spots here and there we should address, but I don’t think there’s any way you have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.”
Hot damn!
I knew she wasn’t a qualified medical professional, so it wasn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card, but with one vote for and one vote against, at least it evened the score. I hit the highway feeling far brighter and considerably more optimistic.
11
My Bionic Mother
The hospital staff assured me that the surgery had gone very well. I felt a little queasy looking at the X-rays of the substantial steel plate and countless long, evil looking screws. But hey, my mother was becoming bionic!
Visiting her in the rehab facility was worse. I tried to be courageous, but I couldn’t hide the look of horror on my face when I saw her leg. The incision was long and deep, so rather than stitch it, they had used enormous staples. The force they exerted raised the flesh up, so now she had a big purple ridge running from well above her knee to halfway down her shin.
By the time they were ready to release her, I’d had a wheelchair ramp up to her front door installed, rearranged her furniture to make wide wheelchair aisles, added a toilet chair and handicap rails to her bathroom, and procured a bunch of other handicap-accessible accoutrements I hadn’t previously known existed.
It was my job to keep Mom’s wound clean, check for infection between the home nurse’s visits, and refresh the ice in her water-circulating cast a couple of times a day.
We developed a routine. Mornings I helped my mom with her daily needs and did exercises to build my core strength, flexibility, and bow-pulling muscles. Nothing too strenuous—nothing that might risk pulling a joint out of place or, you know, spontaneous organ explosion.
Afternoons I shot my bow, researched potential gear for my ten items, and knit for an hour or two while studying books and YouTube videos about trapping. Now done with my ketogenic eating regimen, I switched to a steady regimen of stuffing my face before, after, and sometimes in the middle of my other activities.
My bow and the stacked hay bales out back were my solace—my only “me” time. You can’t shoot and have your mind or heart elsewhere. You have to be fully present: the bow an extension of your body, the arrow an extension of your will. It’s a meditation—literally—which is why Zen Buddhists are some of the world’s best archers. Those moments of focus and the thunk of the arrow into the target kept me sane.
Days ticked by and still no word from the show. Am I going to be selected? Is all this craziness in vain? I had no choice but to keep my head down and keep plowing forward, regardless.
Over those first two weeks, sweater number one grew while my pants shrunk—or seemed to—as they struggled to contain my growing girth. While my hips and waist got bigger, my gear list narrowed. I had my sleeping bag picked out, an assortment of ferro rods to choose from, several cooking pots on order, a Leatherman tool I was happy with—the Surge model—and a friend who promised to help me customize it, a new recurve bow, and a high-quality saw and axe. The list of homemade clothing was trickier. I could dye wool and sew and knit at my mom’s, but Mom didn’t think the neighbors in her small trailer park would be thrilled about my hide tanning. Without more hides, my fur and buckskin projects would have to wait.
Forced to push many of my crucial projects off, I set to dreaming about sweater number two. The first one was already incredibly thick and warm. I’d spun the yarn out of sheep’s wool and alpaca carded together. It was a luscious chocolate brown, cable knit with an intricate Celtic knot pattern to make it even thicker and warmer. I wanted sweater number two to be eye-catching—stripes of oranges, reds, and gray. The warm colors of flames and the sun to buoy my spirits and help me feel their warmth, the gray of bedrock and charcoal. The color choice was also strategic—unraveling the edges of the sleeves and hem would give me bright, highly visible colors useful for tying flies, making lures, and marking trails, as well as muted grays that would blend in with natural landscapes.
I did some quick calculations and ordered enough yarn for a warm, thick, oversized sweater. Boxes of yarn began showing up on the doorstep, creamy whites for the dye pot and deep heathered grays.
My mother had a lot of visitors in the weeks after her accident. Everything about the potential adventure was top secret, but many of them looked curious about my project choices. I was all sweet innocence. “Nothing to see here,” I’d say, tucking the armloads of yarn out of sight. “I’m just whiling away the hot California summer by planning and working on a northern winter wardrobe.” You know, the usual.
My mother did all she could to help me. I’d wheel her out into the living room, and she’d sit next to me, her broken leg out at an awkward angle, as she wound the yarn into large, looped skeins to prepare it for dyeing. We watched old Alone episodes and YouTube videos with the volume up high enough to drown out the sound of the circulating water that kept the swelling in her leg down.
“Did you make note of that, honey?” she’d ask, and I’d scribble some trapping tip down in my notebook and hand her another armload of wool.
Being marooned in my hometown also meant I was able to make an appointment with my primary care doctor. That visit was the brightest spot in those challenging weeks.
The paper on the exam table crinkled beneath me as I jiggled my leg in nervousness, waiting to be seen. If the chiropractor had been right, I’d have some serious reconsideration to do. But when he stepped into the room, the doctor was warm and welcoming and put me at ease. He listened to me and actually took my experience of my own body and health into consideration.
He gave me a thorough examination as I explained just what I was up to and what my concerns were. I breathed in and out under the cold stethoscope, kicked reflexively at the knee hammer, and read the eye chart on the wall.
My fingers gripped the cushion a little too hard and my chest seized slightly while he scribbled on his notepad, but when he looked up at me with a big smile, I felt the air rushing back into the exam room and I sighed.
“I see no evidence of hypermobility or any predispositions to injury or genetic disorders. As far as I can see you’re healthier than average and just work your body harder than most.”
I fairly skipped out to the parking lot. I had done it. I had trusted my own body and my intuition, and I’d been right to do so. How many times had I let others convince me they knew what I was capable of or what was going on inside me better than I did? I couldn’t begin to count them all. I was done with that old pattern. My life was my own again, and I was damn well going to make the most of it.
Now if I would just hear back from the show about whether or not this adventure was actually happening, I’d be in business.
12
The ARCTIC?
After two weeks, my aunt came to relieve me for a few days so I could make the four-hour trip back home, gather more supplies, and do some projects I couldn’t manage at my mom’s.
I was only half an hour down the road when my phone rang. I broke into a cold sweat the second I saw Quinn’s name on my screen. This is it! The call I’ve been waiting for!
“Give me a minute,” I texted back, and found a forested spot to pull off the highway. I needed my feet on the soil to stop my heart from racing and to gracefully accept whatever was coming.
I needn’t have been quite so nervous about my acceptance—I’d been selected for the show, and it sounded like it hadn’t even been a question. What I hadn’t even thought to be nervous about, however, was the location.
My mouth went dry with her next sentence. “I’m sorry, where?” Had she just said the Arctic?
We’d been told it would be cold, but the region of Great Slave Lake was just below the Arctic Circle in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It was infinitely colder than what I’d been preparing for and certainly not “something between the Vancouver Island seasons and the Mongolia season,” as we’d been told to expect.
I had a few days to get back to Quinn about my acceptance of the challenge, and a lot of time on my drive to think about it. Could I do this? I was nervous, sure. I had exactly zero experience with arctic survival, but with the exception of Jordan Jonas, who had spent several winters living off his trapping in Siberia, I didn’t think anyone else I had met at boot camp did either. And after all my hemming and hawing about making my own versus bringing modern clothes, the Arctic had one major advantage—it was the perfect climate for furs and buckskin. While some parts of me cringed a little at the location, other parts celebrated. With renewed trust in my body, hadn’t I felt I was ready for anything? Arctic survival for a girl from California was a pretty big helping of “anything.”
After a couple hours of driving with my mind whirring, I was ready to process it all with someone else, so I called my friend Kristi.
“Hey, Honey Bun,” she said as she picked up—god I love Kristi.
The tension drained out of my shoulders. She’d recently moved to the East Coast, so we hadn’t spoken for a while. It was incredibly grounding to drop into the ease of relating with her. Sharing out loud all that was stirring in me helped me to better understand it myself.
“I can’t say much, as I’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement,” I told her, “but I’m gearing up for a very extreme wilderness trip. By myself.” She may have had a pretty good guess, but she kept her cool and didn’t let on.
“For starters, it’s in an extreme northern location, which is definitely intimidating. I’m thrilled about the opportunity, though. It’s the kind of thing I’ve dreamed about all my life. The part I really feel weird about is that it’s a competition with a big cash prize. I feel like that taints it. I don’t want it to be about the money or have it seem to others that it’s that and not the experience itself that matters most.”
She totally got it. She always does.
