Adventure Unpacked

“But you’re still learning to walk again,” I said aloud to myself as I gaped at the limestone cliffs blocking any hint of a viable route to the summit. The rock walls loomed over a steep, grassy bench as I emerged from the forest, forming a gray fortress of impossibility. What was the date I hiked to Cecret Lake in Utah with my sister and niece and nephew? It was July 17, not even three weeks ago.

They say you always bring a little bit of home with you. On July 22, I left a summer of heat and fire in the American West and boarded a plane to our Shangri-La, the bit of paradise we’ve carved out in the French Alps. That same day, a fire broke out in the Gironde region of Southwest France that has grown into one of the most destructive megafires in European history.

In the past week, I helped my mom move out of her home of 43 years and packed to spend nearly three months in France, so my thoughts have been preoccupied with “stuff.” Traveling out to Salt Lake City in mid-July wasn’t originally part of the plan. I went out to visit my mom in early June — the earliest I could travel based on my surgeon’s recommendations — to say goodbye to the home I grew up in.

On March 22, 2017, I was caught in an avalanche. The whole thing was so maddeningly banal. I was, for no good reason, snowshoeing near the alpine zone along the bench of the appropriately named Thunder Mountain near Juneau, Alaska. I wasn’t even supposed to be in Juneau. I was just killing time between two fights on a convoluted commute between Whitehorse, Yukon, and Anchorage. I checked into an airport hotel and immediately left for the nearest trailhead I could access on foot.

Ten minutes before my 16-week check-in with my knee surgeon, I was sitting on a bench in the lower level of the orthopedic center, aggressively massaging my knee. I hoped to work out the stiffness and hide the overuse of the past week. One sign that I am not thriving is Strava posts showing that I’ve spent a lot of time on Zwift. The wildfires have been relentless, Colorado has been inundated with smoke, and I’ve been finding it hard to breathe in my house, let alone go outside.

Today, at 3 a.m., it was the Babylon Fire. A monster 80,000-acre conflagration chewing through the redrock canyons of Bears Ears National Monument in Southeastern Utah. It’s just doing what fires do, right? But no, no, not these massive sterilizing events from which the landscape cannot fully recover, not in this hotter and drier climate, not in my lifetime. Erosion will follow the fire. The canyons will be reshaped. I loved it for what it was. Now it will be different.

I woke up Sunday morning with an intense feeling of nostalgia about the social media landscape that used to fill my mornings in the Before Times — i.e., the 2010s. My friends would go on vacations, and I’d actually see what they were doing on vacation — surfing in Portugal and bike touring in Iceland. I would paste heart emojis in my sisters’ family posts about Taylorsville Days fireworks and my tiny niece on the Huntington Beach Pier.

Baby photo. Aurora, Colorado, 1979. I haven’t been out for a walk in two weeks, not since I lurched and cursed my way through a three-miler in Utah on June 7. The following day, I was officially cleared to get back on my bike and thought, great, bikes can be my adaptive mobility device. I don’t need to force the walking thing anymore. But I know. I know I’m never going to break through the wall if I don’t keep pushing. It’s just that I’m so tired. Tired of physical therapy.

Last week, I rode a bike for the first time in seven months. It feels disingenuous to write that, since I’ve leaned heavily on my indoor trainer to cope with this Year Of Injury. I rode through January while I was recovering from frostbite. I rode through February and early March after I hurt my knee because pedaling was the only motion I could accomplish without significant pain.

The air at home is different somehow. Almost rarified, with a lightness that leaves me feeling warm and a little bit woozy. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the tenuous feeling of floating through different versions of myself, every one that’s ever existed — at least as far back as I can remember. I walk down the street where I walked my little sister to school, clasping her sweaty hand when she was a nervous kindergartner and I was a world-weary third grader.