Waiting Room to Adventure

It was 2007, and at 46, I still felt young. Mark was five years younger. He had a book coming out in a couple of months, and both of us had young children. We were just getting started.

We were lucky, in that our families were also very close, making friendship easy, even convenient. It was a rare weekend when we didn’t see each other for dinner, or some other social event, usually planned by our wives. Mark and I had also gotten in the habit of doing frequent hikes in the Southern California backcountry.

I loved planning, while Mark was a bit of a daredevil, always ready to bushwhack new routes or scramble up boulders. He had done some rock climbing when he was younger and I have dozens of photos of him on the wrong side of dangerous terrain signs and atop rocks, antennas or public art. However, one afternoon while we were scrambling around on Castle Rock, near Big Bear, he shared that having kids had given him second thoughts about risk and responsibility. Part of being a dad was being around for your kids.

 We had spent most of our time in San Diego County, with brief forays into the San Bernardino’s and San Jacinto area. However, on a magical day in 2006, we hiked Mt. Baldy via the Ski Hut Trail. A brief stop at the hut itself convinced us that we needed to come back soon with our wives. Just before the summit, the clouds opened up for a moment, to give magnificent views of all the San Gabriel landmarks, reminding me of the vast treasures that were still left for us to explore. We returned over the Devil’s Backbone, past a contemplative bighorn, which appeared out of the fog, watching us from a few feet off the path. Low clouds made the trail look like an earthen suspension bridge, connecting enchanted islands in the mist. Nothing was visible below us on either side. It was hard to believe that such a cool place existed this close to Los Angeles.

We followed that up with an overnight trip up San Gorgonio, trying out Mark’s new tent. As we camped at Dry Lake (which wasn’t) before a cold and windy summit day, we talked about the Sierras and Colorado. Early the next year our families decided to coordinate a spring trip to Monterey and Carmel, which gave us plenty of time to hatch plans for some more extensive backpacking and hiking.

Today, though, Mark had come over to have lunch with me in the gazebo just outside my office. In the midst of our meal, a call came in from his doctor. He hung up the phone, and in a tone that didn’t match his content, said “I was just told that I have a tumor the size of a baseball in my brain.”

There was a stunned silence, after which we both laughed at the utter absurdity of the news. I don’t think there was any way either of us could have imagined the horror of what lay ahead.

A couple of decades earlier, I had experienced my own health scares, including an ambiguous prognosis, several months in the hospital, and open-heart surgery, so my first thought was “I know this. I have scouted the path ahead. This will be a hard few months – maybe a year - but our families will pull together and we’ll get through it. Some of our hikes will probably need to be put on hold.”

Mark was scheduled for surgery within a week, and at first things seemed to go well. He was soon home, recovering and I spent an afternoon with him as he recounted his brush with mortality and what it had taught him. He was a bit manic, as if there wasn’t time to get it all out, but he was lucid. I have always wished I had listened better.

The next day, a headache was the harbinger of a dramatic turn for the worse, with a sudden buildup of pressure on his brain. After emergency surgery and a couple of very tense days, he stabilized, but things weren’t the same.

When I went to visit him in rehab, I was told he had lost most of his memory. The nurses were also having trouble keeping track of him. On his own, he had taken the wheelchair out to the garden, and for a while was missing. Now the chair had a tall pole on it, designed to keep it from passing through doors. A ragged hole in the plaster above his door frame showed he was still testing boundaries and looking for dangerous terrain.

I had brought some books with me. Photographs of the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains and one of John Robinson’s histories of the mountains. Maybe there would be something there on which to rebuild a memory and hang some hope for the future. He looked through them with mild interest and then surprise as I told him that we had been to many of those places together.

“We have,” I said. “And we will do it again.”

I told him about the friendships between our wives and kids. Our families got together for dinner every couple of weeks. “Really? That is so cool!”

We sat there for a moment, as I wracked my brain for what to say next, knowing it barely mattered. Anything I said would immediately be forgotten. After a few minutes Mark looked around him and said, “it is so great that they have this place here for us.”

I was surprised as I glanced around the sterile room. “Where is it you think we are, Mark?”

He looked a little confused, and then replied, “well I imagine this is a place to stay, for people who are about to climb the mountain.”

And just for a moment, I was right there with him.

The hospital bed became a bunk. Perhaps we were in the ski hut on Baldy, or a hostel he was remembering from Spain. Or maybe it was the tropics and the embarrassing zippered net around the bed wasn’t some restraint to keep him from wandering off, but was instead a mosquito net.

There was an air of expectancy and possibility there in that room which felt strange. We were just on the edge of another adventure, and tomorrow we would begin the trek up the mountain.

Epilogue

Mark never did recover his short-term memory. For several years afterwards we would spend the day after Thanksgiving in the Laguna Mountains, where he and I would shuffle slowly through the meadow, while our kids climbed boulders and our wives talked. Afterwards he felt happy, but could never remember why. “Today was a good day. I have no idea what we did, but I think it was a good day.”

 In 2012, nearly five years after the surgery that took his memory, he finally passed away. He did, however, pass on his love of the mountains to his two boys, and in 2015, his youngest son, then twelve, joined me and my kids for his first multi-day backpack trip in the Sierras. That has since become an annual trip, eagerly anticipated throughout the year by both boys.

As the kids have grown older, I now struggle to keep up with them.