It is gently snowing outside. The air is crisp and very cold
– it must be around the low 20s. It is growing dark; the moon is not up yet. I
know it will be beautiful when I take my last trek to the communal toilets. I
am reluctant to leave my tent. The quiet
huffing of my Buddy heater gives me at least an illusion that it is somewhat
warmer here inside the tent than out but in all honesty, my frozen fingers keep
hitting the wrong keys. I haven’t slept outside in a tent in this kind of cold for years.
And this night I would rather be here on the South Rim of
the Grand Canyon than anywhere else in the world - except perhaps down at the bottom with my
adventurous friends at Bright Angel Campground near Phantom Ranch. I should be
there, too; that was the plan. But life often provides one doors for one to
decide to step through or to resist opening, all the while lamenting that the
door is too heavy or sticky or whatever to move forward.
I’ve had to step through a lot of doors in my adventurous
life. I’ve been laid up with a case of cellulitis from a kayaking injury off
the Channel Islands, fractured my shoulder, sprained my ankle yet another time,
torn yet another ligament. If you live adventurously, injury is part of the
package no matter how careful you might be. Fortunately, while all of these may
have left small tokens for me to remember them, I have always recovered –
quickly. In each case, the doctors admonished me to be still, give up my
activity for a few months, give my body time to recover. Honestly, giving up
activity even for a 62-year-old person who has been hyperactive all her life is
almost impossible.
This morning I was supposed to awaken in the relative warmth
of my down sleeping bag at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is
very familiar to me; I have been down into its inner canyons many times. I
raised my son backpacking there. This trip was my way of going ‘home’ for the Thanksgiving
Holiday.
But then again, there’s Life erecting one of those doors. A
door that prompted decisions. Late this July, not feeling well, I visited my
doctor. From my doctor’s office, I was taken in an ambulance to the emergency
room at which I was declared as actively having a heart attack. From there I was
whisked up to intensive cardiac care to await an emergency surgery. As I was
wheeled through the door, my adventure buddy and cardiac case manager Alice leaned over my gurney and asked me “I was wondering if the Beth Haas on my chart was you.
What are you doing here?”
Darn good question. No heart disease in the family that
wasn’t brought on by old age. No diabetes. A long, long active life. Honestly,
it seemed at the time that this was happening to someone else - not me, not
the 15-year-old who was still climbing trees. Not the 30-year-old that hiked
across the Grand Canyon for the first time. Not the 40-year-old who backpacked
her 5-year-old across that same Canyon for the first time. Not that 50-year-old
who danced under the Eiffel Tower at midnight on her birthday. Not that
60-year-old who snowshoed around by herself in a beautiful quiet snowy forest for several hours with only the breadcrumbs of her snowshoe imprints to lead her back to safety.
Not the 62-year-old who had planned and already obtained the coveted permits
for a Thanksgiving trip down into the bottom of the Grand Canyon, taking 5 of
her adventure buddies with her. Not me. Not that active woman.
But there I was. As I was wheeled in to my room, the door to the cardiac unit
started swinging shut behind us. That door. That extremely inconveniently timed
door. Eventually, my doctors and I finally figured out that my heart does not
respond to activity in the way everyone else’s does. And THAT is a condition
with which I am stuck. That door. That most inconvenient, life-altering door.
And every day I am reminded as I start to ride my bike or even step on a
treadmill that my physical heart is just not into it without chemical help. Really. My choices for
the future will be dictated by this heart that generously let me do all kinds
of things for years without letting me know that part of it was wearing out.
I can think of the heart attack as the end of something
that feels so intrinsically ME that I stop in my despair and decide to no
longer go on my adventures. Be safe. Live a long life. OR I can decide to test
out the limits of my condition and keep on adventuring within new limits. Perhaps
testing my limits may mean a shorter life as I place my dicky heart under more
strain than I ‘need’ to. Same door but the outcome will be very different
depending upon my response. And I have made my choice to live – truly live.
So here I am at the freezing South Rim while my buddies are
down in the Canyon, eating dinner at the Phantom Ranch Cantina. It’s so cold
here that I am not even TRYING to cook anything. My fingers are too cold to
turn the gas valve on my Jet Boil. And I am completely at home. I know my down
sleeping bag will keep me warm. I trust that my friend Max’s deluxe tent is
sound and safe if the winds pick up. I am grateful that he left me a
super-sized, super-warm sleeping bag in which to burrow into with my own down
bag.
And I have decided in just the last few days that the day after tomorrow I will join them at Indian Gardens, half-way down the canyon. Testing my limits. Asking my heart to give me at least one more backpack. More if I stick to my bargain with my dicky heart and take it easy on the 4.5-mile trek back up to the South Rim with 30 pounds on my back.
And I am so very grateful that I am here at all. That door, that very inconvenient door, may lead me to wondrous things that I might never have thought of before its opening. That door. That beautiful door of uncertainty and promise.
