I set off late in the day, when I thought it might be cooler. I wanted to hike, surrounded by slim trees, knee-deep in the froth of ferns. I knew I would be back by dark when I put the leash on the dog, left a note in the cabin saying what trail I had taken and when I had left, but I got lost on the way to the trailhead. Ever directionally impaired and armed with only a campground map, I made one wrong turn after another.
It was at least half an hour later than when I wanted to start, but I felt strong when the dog bounded out of the backseat and lurched for the trail. The trail started with a sharp downward slope. Other hikers, headed back to their cars were huffing and kidding about not being able to hear one another because of the sweat filling their ears.
It was very hot. But I had water — one bottle for me — and one for the dog. I had had my share of experiences with heat stroke as a redheaded, freckled woman — I turn an unbecoming array of blotchy red patches, become light headed, short of breath and my vision narrows. Hence my late start to avoid the 90 degree heat earlier. It was a mere 87degrees at 6pm.
I kept going at a quick clip, wanting to reach the waterfall within 90 minutes, but the path was an unforgiving shamble of dusty, off-shaped rocks — the perfect kind for overturning an ankle, something I had done twice in the last 18 months. And so I strained against my pup who was feeling every single one of her young instincts to GO FASTER!
The trail kept descending steeply. I shook my head, knowing the uphill return would be a tiring one, but still, I had plenty of water and enough sunlight. I also thought the cooler evening would make the climb back up to the car more pleasant.
Over half the distance to the falls and the trail was still descending. Finally we hit an uphill section, only to descend sharply once more. I was hot. Really hot.
At the 90 minute mark, I hadn’t made it to the waterfall and knew I had to turn around to get back before darkness fell, always so much quicker in a dense wood.
After about a quarter mile or so, I knew I was in trouble. I was breathing too hard. A year with most of my walking being down the corridors of hospital wings as Dave, my spouse, couldn’t stay well enough at home for more than a week or so at a time, I was less prepared than I had thought for the return ascent. It was also still really hot and humid.
One of the hikes Dave and I took in the Colorado Rockies back before we were married, we ruefully called the death march. A barren and unattractive mountaintop at 12,000 feet overwhelmed us and the elusive mountain lake we were trekking up to no longer seemed worth it. I counted each step, promising myself I would walk 30 steps without stopping, and then 20, and finally, every 10 steps I had to stop and pant for 2 or 3 minutes before I could take another 10. It was pure torture. As rain clouds gathered over the tree-line far below us, we were grateful to turn around.
Halfway down the mountain, we stopped to filter some water from a mountain stream to refill our bottles which we had drained dry. I was picking up our backpacks to rearrange my gear, and when I picked up Dave’s to stow the filter, I realized his pack was almost half the weight of mine. When I told him, he picked it up and was just as puzzled as I was. We searched through the dark bag and couldn’t see any reason for this extra weight. He offered to carry it, but stubbornly, I heaved the pack back onto my shoulders and set off for the remaining miles to our car.
Later, at the cabin, I unpacked the bag, still puzzling over the weight. I touched something hard at the back of the bag, and realized I had lugged my 9 pound laptop, hidden inside the computer sleeve, up the mountain. We laughed at that for years.
Dave had been with me on my most recent experience with heat stroke. We were up on the Laurel Highlands Trail, part of the Appalachian Trail, through one of my favorite stretches of slender trees, trillium, and rhododendron bushes, when the heat and too little water got the better of me. My vision narrowed and I put my head between my legs as I finished our water and waited for the worst of it to pass. But I was more frustrated with myself than I was scared. I wasn’t alone. Dave was with me — always resourceful, rarely rattled, Dave.
But this night, I was on my own, with my dog still pulling, and me wondering why my pack was so heavy again. I told myself I knew I could do this. That I’d hiked out of woods in the dark before due to miscalculations of distance and sunlight, and I could do it again.
As the hill stretched ever onward above me, I started counting steps. I would find a marker, a boulder, a tree trunk ahead of me and promise myself I could make it to that marker, or boulder, or tree trunk and sit. Drink. Breathe. Get up, pick a new goal and do it again.
Finally, after checking the time, I composed a text to the people who owned the cabin where I was staying. I don’t know what they would do or think to receive a message from me, their tenant, alone in the woods with her dog in the dark, exhausted and unable to finish my climb, but they were the only people I knew of within a 3 hour drive, so they were my designated saviors.
I didn’t send it right away. I promised myself I would hike for another 15 more minutes before I sent it. I’d go as far as I possibly could before sending my desperate SOS to unsuspecting strangers.
But, 10 minutes later, the trail flattened slightly, and not a hundred yards beyond that I could see the red gate at the trailhead. I had made it.
I was so deliriously happy to get in the car — and so was the dog.
I immediately called Megan, Dave’s daughter. She and I have only known each other a half dozen years — and prior to her dad’s illness — I admired her, but we were peripheral to one another’s lives.
Megan and her fiance Matt and I had gone through Dave’s final days, clustered around his bedside, alternately panicking, and crying, and remembering, and laughing, and watching old videos of her with him as her adoring dad. Our little trio entered a space that no one had prepared us for, that none of us had experience traversing, and as I said, as friendly but peripheral people in one another’s lives.
All that blew apart when Dave died — and knit us together in an intimacy no one else can enter. It was ours. The three of us together — grateful and grasping for one another in this huge tragedy that was befalling us.
And so after my near scrape with heat stroke on the hike, I called Megan.
I didn’t call my best friends, my family, or my own children — I called Dave’s daughter.
She sounded slightly surprised to hear from me — but picked up after the first ring. I told her my story, laughing, as I would have if it had been Dave beside me in the car — sharing the relief and the story of another adventure in failing together and making it through somehow — together. She laughed with me — just as her dad would have done.
I have to be more careful now, more measured in my risks, more mindful of the limitations of wandering down unknown paths alone. I don’t have the partner who puzzles with me over the heavy burdens, or quietly sits as we recover our breath after a really difficult challenge.
He has given me gifts in his life with me — and now gifts, just as immense in his passing. I have the gift of Megan. The companionship of a dog I never wanted. The urging of his voice in my ear, “that’s my babe”, he would say, as he witnessed me doing one thing or another that brought him joy.
But I came to this cabin by myself because I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t feel him. I felt alone and adrift and so unable to make meaning from this loss.
Once, during a silent retreat at a convent in my late 20’s, I was sitting in the chapel with all the nuns as they observed some rite of their day. After struggling alone during the retreat in my little nun’s cell, I suddenly felt the presence I was seeking — the presence of a divine guide sitting beside me. It felt so real that I inclined my head to rest it upon their shoulder, only to find that the being had disappeared. I felt a sense of panic as I realized somehow I had lost this connection, but then, something stirred within me and I knew where this divine presence had gone. It was inside me.
And in these past few days, alone in the cabin in the green, green woods, I became reacquainted with a divine light within me. It sits like an exploding star within me, right where my ribs meet to protect my heart. It is made up of love and light and energy and it has all that I have loved and lost within it. Dave is in there. Finally, I know where he is in this new now. He lives in me.
