The Record: Just My Luck
At least I have a view
The Long Drive is a reader-supported publication. Please consider subscribing or following (both free). Or if you’re looking for poetry from my ongoing project, I Remember California, you can choose to switch to a paid subscription, too. Both use the same link below, “Subscribe now.” Click that button and you’ll be able to choose.
And just as good, please share and comment! It helps the platform’s algorithm make my stack more discoverable.
Thanks for your support!
I’ve trained all summer for this, the long hike up and down mountains that will surely change my life forever. My feet will blister. I will poop in the woods. I will be frightened from time to time. Maybe all the time.
But I’m still going. I double check the email I got from Yosemite with my permit instructions. Six days and five nights at high altitude. I practice by carrying a forty pound pack up and down steep hills.
And yet, I still find fear.
Brian could lean back too far and fall. We could come across a bear and be defenseless. I could get altitude sickness, be forced to quit, be forced to come home, a failure.
I am the sort of fool who tells the world about the crazy things I plan to do before I do them. I’m going to buy a house, write a book, sell diamonds, calculate a fortune.
Scale mountains.
This time, though, I am let off the hook. Because I have cancer now. I am a cancer patient. I am unhealthy, undoubtedly too weak to do the things I promise.
It is an accident that my first day of chemo coincides with the intended first day of our hike, and on that day there is an epic storm, both in me and in the wilds of Yosemite. It dumps ten feet of snow right where we intended to plant our feet on the trail.
We would’ve died.
How funny, I think. Because now, of course, the same might be true.
I sit back in the chemo chair and wince as the nurse accesses the new port in my chest for the first time. I am bruised and battered. I take a deep breath and look out the window at the city skyline.
My new reality.