Virginia Visit

     At the end of March my brother was riding his bicycle down a winding mountain road in Virginia, near his home, when his front wheel veered into a ditch and he was thrown over the handlebars, landed on his helmeted head, then lay over a log for half an hour, conscious but unable to move, until someone stopped to help.  (His was the fourth car to pass.)

    Fortunately, no bones were broken, but Lee was paralyzed from the neck down with traumatic spinal injury. I don't know the medical terminology, but the way I put it is that the impact severed the connection between brain and muscle. He was told that some amount of recovery was possible in the first eighteen months, but no one would predict how much. After that, further recovery would be unlikely. No one was talking 100% recovery in those eighteen months. 

    He couldn't even scratch his nose. When he was able to raise his arm, he couldn't aim a fork into his mouth. Brushing his teeth was impossible. Walking? Learn to stand, first. Then learn to shuffle one foot sideways and bring the next one to it. Slow, incremental progress.

    But Lee has a phenomenal support system in his wife and three daughters. He was in good physical shape before the accident and is athletic by inclination. And maybe most important, he has a fierce determination and a willingness to work hard for recovery. He loved his physical, occupational, and recreational therapists and gives them the part of the credit they deserve for his astonishingly rapid improvements.

    I wanted to visit him immediately after the accident, but he said to wait till he could interact with me better. My two sisters also wanted to visit, so we decided to have our "annual" siblings' reunion at Lee's house in Virginia the first week of June. (We missed a year because of COVID)

    By then Lee had been home for almost a month, having been released from ICU after three days ("unhead-of," said his doctors) and from the wonderful rehabilitation center he had been in after that, also sooner than expected. He had been walking for weeks and performing all normal activities. The doctors were now mumbling things about "97-98% recovery," given his rapid improvement in the first two months. 

    Lee himself picked us up at the airport. He was driving the Tesla he had bought before the accident. He looked great. He walked with a hitch in the right hip, but at pretty much a normal pace, and he picked up our bags and threw them in the trunk. He took us to his beautiful house near Charlottesville, and so began a wonderful time with him and his wife, Linda.

Left to right: Diana, Linda, Lee, Sharon, Laura

    We went to the Charlottesville food and crafts market, newly opened after COVID. We ate wonderful meals that Linda, amazing homemaker, had prepared. Lee walked with Sharon, Laura and me around his property: down the wooded hill to the large pasture, across the pasture to the river, along the river and back up to the house, where he demonstrated his hopping: a two-footed leap as far as he can hop. (The trick, with a spinal cord injury, is to land without falling over backwards.) We ate at some of Lee and Linda's favorite restaurants. We walked along the mall and talked about the Charlottesville demonstrations there while Trump was president. Lee hiked with us on an up-and-down, through-the-woods trail at the Ivy Creek Nature Center. Linda, Sharon, Laura, and I hiked twice in Walnut Creek Park, extending one hike longer than anticipated by getting slightly lost among the branching trails. I drove the Tesla. We had a siblings lunch at the beautiful Pippin Hill Winery with its grand vista of Appalachian Mountains.

One evening we sat around the table with Lee and Linda's neighbors, drinking margaritas and having a raucous discussion about books. (It takers a special kind of person to make a discussion about books raucous—or maybe just good margaritas.) It took several days, but Lee, Sharon, Laura, and I finished a jigsaw puzzle. We played anagrams, and the day before my sisters left, we had a very competitive game of canasta, which, I'm sorry to say, Lee and I lost, but barely. Lee could shuffle cards and pick up tiny puzzle pieces and bananagram tiles and put them in place.

The puzzle

    My sisters left on Monday; my plane flew out on Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday morning I asked Lee if he could take me to a beautiful place where I could strew some of Mike's ashes. He said he knew just the spot. We could get there in the Tesla.

    What a beautiful ride we had through the Virginia hills. A road closure because of a rockslide took us on smaller, winding, interesting roads. Grand homes sat atop green-spreading fields. Vineyards curved with the contours of the hills. Occasional tight nooks of hills reminded me of my year in Eastern Kentucky, true Appalachia. And then at the top of a hill, just before the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway, was the vista Lee had promised, across a wide valley with tiny buildings and farms and green fields and pastures, and then to the blue ridges of the Appalachians in the distance. I did my ashes ceremony there: reading a poem, saying a few words to Mike; Lee also said some farewell words, and, at a lull in the wind, I threw the ashes onto that scene: another beautiful place where Mike's ashes lie.

Spreading ashes

    After that Lee and I took a hike along the Rivanna River. People were floating down the river in inner tubes. Kids were swinging on a rope swing and dropping into the river while their mothers talked on the shore. The trail was level and hard-surfaced, and Lee was hiking strongly. We walked to a put-in place for rafts, then turned and walked back to the car, three miles in all. About half a mile before the end, Lee was tiring and beginning to waver as though he were off balance. But his balance, centered in the inner ear, is fine. He stumbles and wavers because his muscles in one leg aren't strong enough, yet, to catch him when he wavers. 

    Lee has made such an amazing recovery in so short a time it's easy to forget how much he still needs to regain, how hard he still is working, how important the therapy sessions are, how difficult it is to keep going. He admitted, while I was there, that being injured, not being able to do everything he used to do, all the difficulty walking, the tiredness during the day—it's getting old. He is ready for it to be over, for him to be recovered already. But he doesn't flag in his determination.

    During the hard days of the first stages of recovery, Lee was writing a blog. (His daughter Christine did the typing until he was able to do it himself.) The blog is called "I Can't Yet." It's that "yet" that drives him on. He is already talking about bicycling the Nachez Trace in another year or so. He can do a lot already, but there's still a lot he can't do—yet. Rewatching the videos on his blog, I am amazed to see what a struggle he had, a month ago, just to stand up, with an aide on each side of him, and then to think that I walked three miles with him two weeks ago. (You can access his blog on leecoogle.wixsite.com. It is beautifully written.)

    Much love to and admiration for my brother. He is made of good stuff.

Hiking Mule Creek Canyon

    After being lost among the large trees and ferns of Vashon Island at the end of May (see blog post on June 3) and among the thickly-leaved deciduous trees of the Virginia mountains three weeks later, it was distinctly uncanny to find myself lost last week in the dense vegetation—ashes, firs, maples—in a canyon of the Siskiyou Mountains. If in the first case I was alone and in the second case a follower, this time it was I who was taking a friend on a trail I thought I knew, where another friend had taken me years before, following Mule Creek to Baldy Peak. 

    The weather was perfect and the trail, though long unused, was clear enough. The Mule Creek canyon was lovely—thick with greenery along the creek, dense with undergrowth, and shaded by tall trees from which birds threw out their songs. 

We had to draw ourselves thin in places to get through overbearing poison oak, and, once, a large rattlesnake shook an angry warning as it scooted off the trail into the greens. In one clearing by the creek, where an enormous white Douglas fir log was criss-crossed by dark red trunks of more recently fallen madrone trees, butterflies flittered like prismacolor snowflakes—sisters, blues, tiger swallowtails. Salmon-colored colomia and purple mint bloomed at our feet, and osage orange and ocean spray bloomed white along the creek, which trickled and tinkled and twinkled among moss-covered rocks.

    It was all very good until the trail forked, and I couldn't remember which fork was the right one. A cut log on the uphill side indicated a deliberate trail, so we took that fork.

    Shortly we came upon a broken toilet seat under a makeshift latrine and, just beyond, a fire ring, a left-behind camp chair, and a strange structure with a pole roof and a bundle of stovepipe pieces tied together and attached to a supporting tree. All very strange. And how did the campers get there? The trail we were on continued through the camp, but another possible trail, on what looked like an old road, would take us uphill, though in what seemed like the wrong direction. We decided to stay on the trail we were on

    Soon that trail forked. Then that fork forked. By this time we were marking each turn with limbs on the ground, in case we had to find our way back When the trail we were on finally petered out, we gave up on getting to Baldy and turned to retrace our steps to the trailhead. 

    Immediately we were finding forks we hadn't noticed before. Trails were appearing by magic, animal trails, no doubt, but more distinctly trail-like than most deer trails I have been fooled into taking. Did we come from this trail or that one? Did we really come down this steep hill? We chose slightly wrongly in one place, but, thanks to the limbs we had placed trail junctions, we made our way back to the camp.

    If the campers (hunters, I assume) had not come into their camp this way, they must have come down the road-like trail we didn't follow the first time, so now we took that trail. (Curiosity? Or dogged determination?) We walked on it uphill into drier land and sunshine, a startlingly different ecosystem from the shaded, moist creekside canyon. Oregon sunshine flowered brightly in large clumps along the road, which, we saw now, could not have been the way the hunters came in because two good-sized manzanita trees were blocking access.                 

    But here, at last, we had a vista, and what we were looking at was Baldy Peak. 

Looking through binoculars at Baldy Peak

    Over there?! Couldn't be! Could it? But of course it was Baldy. I recognized the lone pine tree halfway to the top of the butte and the wide, steep slope across which was the Mule Mountain trail. So if that was Baldy, way over there, and we were way over here, we were definitely lost because I had no idea how to get there from where we were.

    From that point on, there was no more indecision, no more trying one trail and then another. We were just going back the way we had come, back through the poison oak, back through the butterfly clearing, back up the hill out of the canyon, back to the trailhead, five and a half hours after we started.

    We had not achieved our goal of hiking to Baldy Peak, but we had had a good time and a great adventure. Margaret held no grudge against me for getting us lost. She hugged me warmly as we parted and said, "We'll inquire about the right path and come back another day."

Hiking on Vashon, II

    Because I have a poor sense of direction, getting lost has always been a nagging fear when I'm in the wilderness. If I have a hiking partner, I'll rely on that person's directions, no matter how strongly my body is telling me to go the other way, because my body is wrong about 98 percent of the time. If I hike alone, I stay on the trails, and if I'm in a place where a multitude of trails cross, I have a map. Hiking partners are always amazed at how easily I get confused. My internal compass is broken. 

    Last week, while I was on Vashon Island, Washington, visiting my son, Ela, and family, Ela was meeting a friend for a mountain bike ride in Dockton Forest and suggested I do a hike while they do a ride. I would have time to do a more extensive hike than I had done before. (See last week's post.) He pulled up a map of the trail system on my phone and drew a red line on it with his finger, indicating my route. We would meet again at the car in two hours.

    I set out well enough, but soon I found it difficult to figure out where I was in relation to the map. Not all the trails were marked on it, and the red line was imprecise. At one unclear intersection after staring at my phone, wondering if the trail before me was this trail on the map or that one, I finally made what seemed like a good guess and headed uphill. Shortly Ela and his friend rode past me. Ela said I had taken the wrong turn at the questionable intersection, but it didn't matter because I would get to the gravel pit the way I was going. Then he and Scott rode off one way, and I walked on up the trail.

A view of Mt. Rainier and the Puget Sound
just before the gravel pit.

    When I got to the gravel pit, which is large and open to the sea, I headed down into it. It was awesome to be so far below the rim, to look up at the forest, and then to walk to the sea. I contemplated taking my boots off and wading in the water, but when I looked at the time, I saw that I only had half an hour to get back to the car, so from the water's edge, I hiked fast up the hill, following Ela's red line and steaming past three hikers and their two dogs.

    I was not returning the way I had come, but I was following the map. There were another couple of dubious turns, but I was pretty sure I was where I was supposed to be when Ela texted me for an ETA. "About ten minutes," I texted back confidently. I would be back at the car at just about the agreed time.

    And then, suddenly, I was lost. Nothing looked on the ground the way it was supposed to on the map. The forest contained a warren of trails. At every intersection, I tried to make my surroundings match my map, but nothing was making sense. My trail was going parallel to the road, but I didn't know how to get to where the car was in relation to where I thought I was. Fifteen minutes, twenty. Ela texted to know where I was, but I could hardly tell. He suggested I send him the GPS of the map with the dot of my position on it. I texted back, "How do I do that?" He texted me directions. I sent him the map. He texted back: "You're going the wrong direction." I turned around and went the other way.

        I was genuinely lost, in that I didn't know where I was or how to get where I wanted to be, but I knew I wasn't far from the road and that I would eventually wind my way out of the forest onto the road, where I would be able to tell Ela where I was. Frequent texting with Ela kept me cheerful.

    It took me another hour to get to the road, and even then I wasn't at the car. But at least I could text Ela that I was at such and such an intersection. He said, "Wait there," and in five minutes he drove up in the car.

    It was an hour past our agreed meeting time, and I had added probably four extra miles to my hike. I was sorry to have made Ela wait. But he said he didn't mind. He had just kept making loops with his bicycle, and he loves to ride his bike, especially on the Dockton Forest trails.

    I love those trails, too. Next time, I think, I'll be able to find my way around.