UN-TIED: MY FATHER IN HIS COFFIN (2)

I looked down at my father.

Dead people shrink. I know that. But my father had lost so much weight near the end of his life that the coffin he picked seemed far too large, as if he could have used a size or two smaller. He was not wearing his glasses, but I don't think he had worn them much in the last months of his life. He never wore them during my last visit a few weeks before he died. He was tilted at a slight - uncomfortable looking - angle to the right. His hands did not look comfortably crossed on his stomach. They looked stacked and his fingers were straight and stiff. It was not the undertaker's finest work.

He was dressed in his blue suit - the one he described years ago to my wife as his "funeral suit" - and a light blue shirt open at the neck. No tie? My father always wore a tie with his suit. It was like a uniform - and he liked uniforms. Without a tie he looked not only uncomfortable, stiff and dead, he looked unnatural. I didn't like it.

Whose idea was that? I was ready to go find a tie and fit it around his neck the way he did for me when I was a boy and he was teaching me to tie a full Windsor knot. Men in my family thought a tie wasn't worth wearing unless it was tied in a full Windsor knot. No half-Windsors allowed. No clip-ons. A dress-up occasion wasn't a dress-up occasion without a well-knotted tie. And death always was a dress-up occasion. At least it always had been before.

I told my wife it wasn't right. My sister and one of my father's oldest friends were chatting a few feet away. I had to ask.

"Why doesn't he have on a tie?"

"Because he wanted it that way." My sister smiled.

"But why? It's not like him."

"I know," my sister said. She shrugged. "But he said no tie." She said he was very clear about the way he wanted things done at his funeral.

Dad's old friend Libby said my father quit wearing ties a while back. "When he started losing weight he didn't think a tie fit very well. His shirt collar was too loose on his neck. He didn't like the way it looked." Libby said he didn't even wear a tie to his older sister's memorial service a while back. "He liked to look good and he thought he looked better without a tie," she said. "And he refused to buy a new shirt." Of course he did.

Vanity compounded by frugality. That was my father. He would have angrily denied the first but fully embraced the last (the truth is there was more than a little bit of vanity in his frugality as well). He always said he was the best man at every wedding he ever attended. Now he wanted to be the best looking dead man he could be and that meant no tie. Not this time. And no new shirt to be buried in. Such a purchase would be painful to his Great Depression-honed sensibility (those of us who didn't live through the Depression and WWII never quite measured up in his estimation).


He planned it but it still didn't look right to me especially with the flag draped on the coffin. No tie. No flowers. Just the flag. He planned that too because above and beyond all other things in his life, my father was a veteran, sometimes too much a veteran and not enough other things, but that's who he was. And it's what he wanted.

In fact, my father planned his entire funeral in elaborate detail and paid in advance. The coffin, the vault, the clothes, the flag, the music (which had to be changed a bit because the singer couldn't hit the required high notes); he even went to see the minister about the eulogy. The whole thing went off almost without a hitch. There was gunfire and someone played "Taps." It would have been perfect if the gray-haired veteran helping fold the flag hadn't tripped over the burial machinery and nearly knocked over a weathered

old tombstone before he regained his balance, paused, then went on folding. He was embarrassed but unhurt - and the flag never touched the ground, that's important. I could imagine my father grimacing, but that stumble was the one flaw, the one little thing my father couldn't possibly have planned for, the thing that made everything else perfect. The flag was folded, salutes exchanged. My father loved flags and salutes. The flag was handed to my nephew just like my father wanted it. He loved my nephew (who I found out later was wearing my father's missing tie that day). All went as planned.

And without a rehearsal. He had wanted one of those too, just to make sure things were right. He liked to make sure. Practice. Practice. Practice. My sister-in-law said they talked him out of it, but my niece said she could imagine him saying, "I'll lie right here on the sofa and pretend I'm dead." And keep track of the way things were going. She could imagine it because that is precisely who he was. He was a man who wanted to attend his own funeral to make sure it was just the way he envisioned it, just the sort of man who would go to his grave tie-less and confident he was the best man there and let the rest of us go about our business. Even dead and tie-less he was still in charge. 

My father had a long life full of plans, almost always unrehearsed, and flawed by trips, stumbles and falls no matter how hard he practiced. It was the only life he had and he lived it the best he could, all the way to the end. It is the most anybody can do.

If you visit his grave and find a tie on his headstone (with a full-Windsor knot), you will know that I have been there. And it will be one of mine. I hate ties and see no need to wear one ever again. I never thought he would see it my way.
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If you go to my old blog The UnTexan you will find the pieces I wrote around the time of my mother's death in 2006. You can click on the archive for April 2006 or click on the category Mom, Death and Family. There's lots of other stuff on there too. Years of stuff. In fact, click on anything and everything. Enjoy yourself.
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MY FATHER IN HIS COFFIN

My father was a wisp when he died. There wasn't much left by the end, even less than when I last saw him alive a few weeks before and there wasn't much then. I doubt if he weighed 100 pounds. He declared himself "not sick, just old" and tucked the covers up around his chin, dozed off and left me to watch him sleeping. When he awoke from his nap he looked at me and said, "You don't have to worry about my funeral. It's planned and paid for." A couple of days later I went with him to physical therapy where he introduced me as "my oldest boy" one last time. A few minutes later I kissed him, told him I loved him and went to catch my plane. We both knew all of our time together - nearly 70 years - was over. I would not be there to watch him die; he would not need me there to watch. We knew that too. He didn't call out to me as I left and I didn't look back at him. There was no need.

Within days of my leaving he decided to be done with it. No more physical therapy (it wasn't improving things, at least not enough to matter and he knew it), no more forced doses of bad-tasting goop and glop, no more diaper changing or oxygen tubes. He was ready for hospice and hospice was ready for him, but he never got that far. He simply declared his independence, tucked his life up around his chin and died on a Friday night. He did it alone, not long after my brother's final visit.

He was 91 years old.

When I arrived for my final visit a few weeks before he didn't know I was coming. I walked into his room, kissed him firmly on the forehead and told him I loved him. I surprised us both. I had not kissed my father in years and still cannot remember when that might have been. I do not come from a very physically affectionate family. But men kissing men, men kissing boys, boys kissing boys. It is not what men do. Men kiss children and wives; men shake hands with other men, and with their growing sons. But I needed to kiss my father.

My sister called me later that evening to tell me my father said, "He walked in and kissed me right on the forehead." She said he was happy I did that, and it was important enough for him to mention it to her, and she found his happiness important enough to report it to me. That kiss meant something to him and to me. It was a rare and genuine thing, uncluttered by our kissless past.

The next time I saw him he was in his coffin.

 

FLASH-BACH: DRUGS WITHOUT SEX AND ROCK AND ROLL

When I feel Bach-ish I depend on Glenn Gould to get me through. That is what I did a few mornings ago. Only I put in

the wrong CD. Rather than Gould and his piano, I got Gould playing Bach on the organ. It was more Bach than I bargained for and what I got was flashbacks. Of the druggie type, yes, but not those frightening flashbacks you hear about sometimes. These were flashbacks of the pleasant-memories-of-LSD variety - hallucinogen nostalgia, frightening only because I am not really a nostaligic sort of guy.
 
Back in the hippie days - and I'm talking about the days before hard drugs and barefoot little jailbait runaway girls with dirty bellbottoms and needle tracks on their arms to prove

their worth came looking to screw anybody with long hair and a stash  - I was a picky-druggie. And because I always had a pretty good job, I could afford to be. I did not do street-level drugs. And I didn't much like street-level hippies. I had jeans and long hair and drank me some Boone's Farm when it was passed around, but I never wanted to be one of those broke-ass pachouli-soaked freaks wandering around muttering "far out" (or "far fuckin' out") "spare change" or any of that happy hippie shit.

I knew people and I knew people who knew people. It was like having personal shoppers. And I hung out with a better class of druggie, grownups mostly, people with jobs, working people, professionals, weekend hippies who had slipped into the '60s dragging a lot of the '50s with them in spite of themselves. There were several lawyers, a doctor, college teachers, an accountant, a banker or two, social workers, some newspaper people, a former up-and-comer at IBM. I hung out with some politicians too, black and white candidates running for various things, earnest liberal losers mostly, pleasant pot smokers who turned into celebratory cocaine types the election night they surprised themselves and won.

Those were heady days in Georgia. Pot was recreational, cocaine was celebrational, LSD was revelational. Duane Allman was dead but there was free music in Piedmont Park on weekends. Maynard Jackson was mayor of Atlanta and Jimmy Carter was governor.

Which brings me back to Bach. And LSD.

The first LSD I took was something called purple microdot and a friend brought it all the way from San Francisco. It made the earth shift in large chunks before my eyes, words became pebbles clattering around the room, black became too dark to tolerate, white too white, there was music somewhere and I do not remember what it was but I do remember slipping between the notes and into the sound, etc. I liked it. The whole outing lasted for 16 hours or so. I slept a little, then I got up at 6 a.m. and went to work. That's how the world worked for those of us who acquired our work ethic in the 1950s before we acquired our drugs in the 1960s.

Not long after that first trip I met a theoretical physicist from one of Georgia's finer universities who became the only person I did LSD with after that. It was an instant friendship but we were an unlikely duo. I was a word guy, he was a math guy; he had a Ph.D. and had done post-doctoral work with Richard Feynman, I was a college dropout autodidact who worked at a newspaper, read a lot about various things and had never heard of Richard Feynman until then; his father (also a Ph.D.) was a vulcanologist and his father-in-law was a university president (also a Ph.D. physicist) who had worked on the Manhattan Project before being frightened off into academia after watching the first atomic bomb explode in New Mexico, I longed to be related to people like that (I longed to be around people like that); he was not from the south and I wished I wasn't either; I had dealt with who I was and where I came from by putting it miles behind me and it turned out he had done the same thing (though I couldn't understand why he would want to); and there we were; he had his calculus, I had my vocabulary and it turned out we were both in creative pursuit of something all the time in pretty much the same way; I was a smart guy, he was a smart guy with credentials - and these incredible custom built models of molecules (his theoretical physics involved evolution at the molecular and sub-molecular level) in his office we could mess around with while we got high and talked. And we discovered we had a lot to talk about. And not always high. It was a conversation that lasted several years.

And from time to time there was LSD involved.

We took our LSD seriously. And cautiously - his brother, a medical chemist, at Harvard always tested it before we ever took it. We were not recreational users, though recreation happened sometimes. We were so serious it's a wonder we could enjoy ourselves at all. My friend believed hallucinogenic drugs had liberated science by liberating the brains of young scientists to let all the stuff they ever knew slide around in chunks they'd never even recognized as chunks before. That notion, a little experimentation and an altercation with a Nobelist named Shockley over the great man's crackpot racial theories had cost him a spot as a Rockefeller Fellow. But I agreed with him, mostly based on my experience of watching the world slide around in chunks the day I first took that purple microdot. I understood what he was talking about. Somehow it liberated my head from its vocabulary - or at least from control of its vocabulary - and I saw what he was talking about in his wordless calculus-ified way. Or something like that (though it turned out in the long run that LSD didn't liberate language with the same efficacy it liberated calculus and theoretical physics. Ever tried to read hippie-lit?). But everything we ever knew, everything we thought we knew, was slipping, sliding, banging around, melting and firming up again inside our heads. Things reshaped themselves from the inside out, evolving molecularly, organically, not theoretically (lucky for him). And together we watched it happen. Of course when the LSD wore off most of that acid-powered reality disappeared into theory again. But we brought back what we could and would spend months and months sorting it all out before we decided it was time for another trip. And we took it. Seriously.

It wasn't like we never had any fun. Once we went camping in north Georgia, studied the hallucinogenically and Perseid-enhanced sky all night (meteorites and LSD can chase all your cares away) then ran around half-naked all morning chasing crawfish up and down a little north Georgia creek that ran by our campsite. We were grownup boys full of science, stars and LSD who turned into barefoot and naked crawfish catchers. We stole corn out of a farmer's field for dinner.

But it was mostly serious stuff. At least that is what we believed. And Bach came along. My friend wasn't much of a rock music fan. I was. But music was mostly in the

background for talk anyway - elevator music for reaching the highest floor we could. One night, a little (Harvard tested) blotter acid (the easiest way to ship it back and forth) in the system, we decided to put a little Bach and Buxtehude on the stereo. It was his idea. It was music he liked and he was sure I would like it too if I could get past thinking it was church music (not an easy thing for a God-flummoxed ex-Presbyterian guy whose aunt was the church organist and whose grandfather was the choir director). But suddenly the music was big and loud and elevated LSD to a whole new level. No more stolen corn, no more crawfish. Just a little blotter acid, a comfortable place to sit down in all that music. Fuck rock and roll. Toccatas and fugues. It's what drugs were meant to be.

We even pursued it into concert halls and pipe-organed churches. A little acid, a little Bach, sometimes a little PDQ Bach (you take your pleasures where you find them), organ recitals (we were the guys giggling and muttering in the back pews). It was soul music of the highest order. At least that's what it felt like.

Then it was over. He and his wife had a baby. I moved west (stopping off to see the carnivorous plants in the university greenhouses up toward Strawberry Canyon at Berkeley because he recommended it). Then I went on and acquired my own smart-guy credentials (something I question doing to this day). I have spoken to him only once since then, a call a few years ago. He said he was the head of the physics department, no Nobel and no chance (every year I checked the Nobel list for his name), divorced, and the baby had grown up and just graduated from Harvard. My only satisfaction is that I left him a lawyer friend to talk to (the guy who bought my car before I drove off in somebody else's) and they have gone on talking for all these years. Word guy, calculus guy. It was the least I could do. Sometimes I wish I could have been there. But I wasn't. And most times I don't. I had other things I didn't know I had to do and isn't that what LSD is all about - to remind you of the things you didn't know you had to do (of course there are people who argue that's what life is for and who needs LSD. Let 'em, I say)? Besides, when LSD became purely recreational it took all the fun out of it.

But when I hear Bach or Buxtehude on the organ I think of him. Bach, Buxtehude, calculus, words, and the world as we never knew it until then. At least for a little while. I do not miss LSD but I do miss him sometimes and I miss those days when we were having serious fun rebuilding the world out of chunks we never knew existed before and then watching it fall apart mostly in the same old ways. It is as close to nostaligia as I am likely to come.

A TASTE FOR IT: A FAMILY WITH A POWERFUL THIRST

On my mother's side I come from a family of drinkers: boozers, dipsomaniacs, drunks, lushes, sots, alcoholics of various stripes and even a few pill poppers. My aunts and uncles were all short people and that probably compounded things. But the real problem was alcohol.


Lives were wrecked, people died - a besotted favorite aunt and a couple of innocent and sober strangers died in alcohol-bathed wrecks. One uncle went without a driver's license for

much of his life and booze was involved. Another uncle loved to get drunk, get insulted (he made sure that would happen), start fights in bars and end up in jail from time to time. His violent streak sometimes extended to family members, but they all insisted they still loved him because that is what people in that kind of family do. And they were that kind of family.

Some were loud and angry drunks. Others drank prodigiously and passed out quietly. Some married drunks. And one or two were private drinkers. My mother was one of those and probably angrier than the rest. She didn't begin drinking until I was grown and gone, but she drank her way through anger toward sleep for years. None seemed like happy drunks, but they all drunkenly, enthusiastically, splashed around in the shallow puddles of their own misery. Marriages suffered. Children suffered the way the children of drunkards always do and most of us have lugged it into adulthood in one way or another, never quite escaping no matter how far away we went or close to home we stayed. 


My mother loved wallowing in the family mess with her brothers and sisters. And there always was plenty of it. Their mother encouraged it and made sure they always had something to wallow in. After she died most of them didn't know any other way to live and kept on wallowing. They were a family rich in secrets, lies and liquor. A few slipped away eventually, but not many.

I do not like the wallow of family mess and stay far away from it. And after growing up around those people, I have a complicated relationship with the whole idea of family, particularly extended family, and it took many years of my life to escape my own secrets and lies (I thought that was the way life was supposed to be lived. Why wouldn't I?) and enjoy family life.

I have always been wary of family but I have never been wary of alcohol. In spite of everything, I do not have a complicated relationship with alcohol. I like to drink. I've spent my entire adult life proving how much I like it.

Beer is where I started when I was old enough to drink legally (18 years old in those days). There were only beer bars where I grew up and I was a regular at several. I don't remember drinking much whiskey back then, but I must have

because I remember puking so much bourbon and Coke out of car windows that I didn't drink bourbon - or Coca Cola - for years. I couldn't even stand the smell. Beer was my drink of choice. I even carried an opener - a church key - on my key ring until poptops came along. After training on Pabst Blue Ribbon for a few years (a good training beer if ever there was one) I moved on to tastier, sturdier fare. Budweiser. Tall cans. Imported beer. Dark beer. Guinness stout. The stronger tasting the better. If I drank whiskey it was scotch, but that was rare.

I like to drink but I do not like to be drunk. It happens but not very often. And I have a very low tolerance for drunks and staggering drunken behavior. Both of those things are no doubt linked to the people I grew up around. But the way I see it, I drink the way I do in spite of them, not because of them. I have a taste for it, but I do not have a thirst for it. I do not crave alcohol or develop a mighty thirst if I quit drinking for a while - and I have quit at times. I do not get drunk and go looking for a fight; I do not get drunk and descend on some unsuspecting friend or relative like the raging, weeping drunks who showed up at my parents' house in the middle of the night too frequently when I was growing up - usually after the bars closed or the bottle was empty; I do not get drunk, pass out on the floor and have to be dragged to my bed by friends or relatives. I do not get drunk and behave badly. I do not drink alone or early or instead of doing other things. Drinking and driving used to be a way of life (we all did it), but I don't even do that any more.

And nowadays I particularly like to drink bourbon. I guess the beer years washed the pukey bourbon memories away. A few years ago I bought a bottle and enjoyed it. I like the taste.  Bourbon, a little ice, a little water. Several of those each evening. Along with a little conversation with my wife. Drinking has been part of the rich conversation we have kept going for approaching 30 years and I have to admit I even offered her a little bourbon the first time she came to my house (not a social visit, but I was wishing it was), which she rejected with the promise that she would come back and we would have that drink later and she did and we did and still do. Add a little music, some TV, a book, a movie, a sunset, a fire in the fireplace, a starry sky. Add whatever you like, but don't add anything to the whiskey but a little water and a little ice.

I drink but I am not an alcoholic. I am confident of that fact. It allows me to go on drinking. And every drink I take proves I am not like them. I do not do any of the things I watched my mother and her brothers and sisters do. If I did, I would quit drinking tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. But the truth is I have no plans to quit at all. Happy hour starts at five o'clock around here.

 

QUARANTINE: THINKING ABOUT EBOLA

Our house was once quarantined because I was sick.

I had a sore throat and a fever, but I was a child prone to strep infections, so a sore throat and fever were nothing new. But this sore throat rapidly became worse than it ever had been before, my fever went higher, my tongue coated white, I had chills and broke out in a sand-papery red rash. My mother took me to the doctor. We rode the bus because we didn't have a car back then. The doctor said I had scarlet

I understand this look.

fever and that my mother shouldn't take me home on the bus. He said scarlet fever was a dangerous, contagious illness and that it was his job - and our job - to make sure other children didn't catch it. He said go home and stay home and said I had to stay in bed and rest. My mother took me home - I don't remember how we got there - and tucked me in, pulled the shade, turned out the light, kissed me on my feverish forehead and told me to call her if I needed anything. She went to take care of my baby sister, who could not visit until I was well. The county health department came by not long after that and tacked a big yellow quarantine sign on our front door. It was a serious sign. And we obeyed it. Other people obeyed it too. We stayed put and they stayed away. No questions asked.

I was six years old. I would remain in bed for the better part of a month before the sign came down. Scarlet fever is a childhood disease that once killed many children and left others with damaged hearts and other disabling problems. It also is an illness that could panic whole neighborhoods, towns and schools when it turned up. Antibiotics eventually calmed both the illness and the fears - though the illness remains a danger without early treatment - but not in 1950 when I was sick. So the quarantine sign on our front door told the neighborhood - and the world - I was sick but not to worry, things were under control, a line had been drawn, a perimeter set up, their children were safe. 

I was confined to my bed in a darkened bedroom and could only leave to go to the bathroom. I am not sure why the room was kept dark, but for days I was too sick to care. Nausea, fever, sore throat, headaches, the rash. The doctor came to check on me from time to time. My mother fed me soup; I drank ginger ale (our family's traditional nausea remedy). 

And there was medicine. Awful tasting. Probably penicillin. Liquid. Several gagging doses a day. I hated it. I resisted. Finally I hated it so much I hid my red and white plastic dart pistol under my pillow and when my father came in with my evening dose and turned on the lamp, I jerked the pistol out and said, "If you try to make me take that I am going to shoot you."

My father, who had been a soldier in Italy in World War II only a few years before, took shooting and threats of shooting seriously. He also knew taking your medicine was serious business. He came down with rheumatic fever a few weeks after the Salerno invasion, spent a year in a hospital and barely survived. He calmly handed the medicine bottle and the spoon to my mother, snatched the little pistol out of my hand, jerked me up by the arm and, as I dangled over the bed, smacked my butt several times so hard that I never had trouble taking my medicine again. Ever. He said nothing. He spooned, I swallowed, he left the room. My mother dabbed at my tears with the corner of the sheet, tucked me in and turned off the lamp. I never saw the little red and white pistol again.

Years later I met a guy who was a kid down the block I never knew back then. He remembered those quarantine days,

My sign was yellow.

remembered being told by his parents to stay away from my house, to cross to the other side of the street when walking past, remembered boys daring each other to sneak up to my front door and touch the quarantine sign, remembered touching the sign himself, the thrilling feeling of tempting death, and running home to await his fate.

I recovered and infected no one else. The quarantine sign came down and no others went up.

I have been thinking about all of that recently. About the quarantine. About the way we stayed put and others stayed away. About how I took my medicine. About how I lived and the rest of the kids in the neighborhood went on living too. And about the deadly seriousness of Ebola and the dangers of playing at tempting death on a dare, like neighborhood children.


 


 

MAKING PLANS FOR GETTING HIGH AGAIN

I will be going to Zion National Park in a couple of weeks for a hike to Angels Landing. The last time I visited Angels Landing was October 1974, two months before my 30th birthday. This time I will be two months shy of my 70th birthday. It's been 40 years. I never intended to wait this long to go back.

I first arrived at Zion this way:

After spending the first 29 years of my life as an often unhappy (and occasionally unhinged) southerner, I decided to go somewhere else. Somewhere west. So I took a leisurely 16,000-mile drive to places I had never been. It was a trip without a plan or a timetable to wherever the next place was on the map. Or maybe somewhere else. That's the kind of trip it was.

Zion was supposed to be a stopover on the way back to Santa Fe to close the western loop of the trip. One night, then hit the road. But it became much more than a stopover. I fell in love with the place. I ended up spending a week there on the trails - short ones, long ones, easy ones, not so easy ones, flat ones along the valley floor, wet ones up the Virgin River and steep ones up the sides of the canyon. The last hike I took was to Angels Landing.

But before that there was a treacherous long-closed trail to the top of Lady Mountain. An old guy from Arkansas who had visited the park years before told me about it and told me where he thought it was. Park rangers said the trail had been closed for years because it was so dangerous. That was all the encouragement I needed. I searched out the unmarked trail. I started up. It was more than a hike. A couple of ladders and a chain cable to hang onto while scaling the cliff were part of it, but I made it, stayed long enough to view the 360-degree view (the only one in the park), peel and eat one last orange and head down in the late afternoon.

The ladders and the chain cable are gone now due to what the Park Service describes as "deaths and bothersome rescues" on Lady Mountain. Both ladders and 2,000 feet of hand chain cable were removed in 1978. Obviously bad things happened up there in those four years after I made it to the top. But not to me.

I was invincible.

I was not quite 30 and already had a long trail of wreckage (what I would later learn to tidy up and call "experience"), human and otherwise, behind me in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I had a very good job (with a future). I come from a long line of dedicated employees. My father thought quitting a perfectly good job in Atlanta and going for a drive with no plan for the future was too dumb a thing for a grown man to do. But I was not a very mature 29-year-old and I certainly was not a dedicated employee.

Besides, I was in great shape after traveling, hiking and sleeping in a small green tent for months on end. My hair was long, my eyes were blue, I had a great tan, I had a cowboy hat and expensive Italian hiking boots, I had walked on glaciers, been to the top of Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming (John Denver was there the day before), driven over Beartooth Pass in Montana in a late July snowstorm, been swimming in the cold Pacific Ocean, drunk beer and mai-tais with the crew of a salmon boat at the the Sea Hag bar in Ilwaco, WA (while one of their crewmates, an Apache guy named Ernie who was going home because his grandmother was dying, played drunken boogie-woogie piano until his midnight bus to the Arizona desert arrived), been to San Francisco, Big Sur, Disneyland, sailed the Santa Ana Wind from San Diego to Mexico and back on a teak-decked sloop, saw whales and a nuclear submarine, driven the Mojave Desert at night, been inside Hoover Dam. I had been to Mexico and Canada. I had been places and done things.

And just the day before I had been to the top of Lady Mountain.

I was so ready for Angels Landing that I never gave the hike a second thought. Up I went. Invincibility on the move. A long way up, through 21 switchbacks called Walter's Wiggles and out along the narrow rocky spine to the end. After Lady Mountain it was a bit anticlimactic. But standing there nearly 1,500 feet above the valley floor with sheer drops all around seemed like the place I belonged.

Now it simply seems like the appropriate place for a man in his 70th year to go. Again.

My wife loves the beautiful cliffs and canyons in southern Utah, but she does not like hiking to high, narrow places. There are other Zion trails for the two of us and we will hike them before and after Angels Landing. I had hoped to make the hike with my sons Eric and Nick, but Nick can't make the trip. Eric will be hiking with me. He agreed to go months ago. He called the other night and asked me if I knew people have died hiking to Angels Landing. It's true. The Park Service says five people have fallen to their deaths over the past several decades. I told him we will be careful, we will consider the wind and the weather, we will turn around if we need to. He knows and I know we have been dangerous situations before and come home safely. Angels Landing will be a test in more ways than one. But we will not hike it like we are invincible.

I have nothing to prove by doing this, but the one thing I know is that I will be hiking up the trail to a place I have been before, but not back in time. Nostalgia is a crippling disease. I have no desire to relive those old days because a lot of them were bad old days and there were more bad days to come after I hiked down from Angels Landing in 1974. My good old days started years after I last climbed the trail and they have gone on being good days for more than 26 years now. At the age of nearly 70 I finally have acquired some good old days and they keep accumulating. I like that.

I don't feel as invincible as I did 40 years ago, but I feel pretty good. So I am getting ready. Getting in shape. Making plans. Booking rooms. Counting days.

By the time I came down from my sneaky trip up Lady Mountain and returned to camp back in 1974 it was dark and the old guy from Arkansas was nervously apologizing to the rangers for telling me about the hidden trail and asking them to organize a search party. When I walked in the rangers were angry, the old guy was relieved, I was smiling. I suppose I could have died up there that day, but what kind of life would it be without a hidden trail to a high, narrow place and a search party in it from time to time?

SUNSET OUTSIDE ZION PARK, OCT. 2013

 

SELFIE INDULGENCE #11 (Click to enlarge)