The View from the Thinking Chair
Having worked from home for nearly five years, I have adopted several strategies for breaking up the otherwise monolithic stretches at the computer working on the emails, spreadsheets, proposals, and the thousand other details necessary to propel my business forward. Many of these involve the conscious and regular scheduling of face-to-face interactions with clients, partners, and teammates, but these have been effectively stifled by the coronavirus seclusion. One continuing, pre-quarantine habit that has helped sustain my mental health is what I call the Thinking Chair, which is my exaggeratedly serious name for the place I take my coffee breaks.
Each afternoon, generally somewhere between 2:30 and 3:30 PM, I get up from my work desk, make some coffee — usually a double espresso — and go sit outside on the patio for at least 30 minutes. Sometimes I have my phone with me to check in on various aspects of the non-work world, and sometimes not, but either way it’s a pause; a time to be away from work, be outside and, well, think. Like a cat, I move my chair into any available spot of sun. I breathe the open air, and listen to the sounds of my yard and the weather, which sometimes include wind and/or rain as my patio is covered and I try to carve out this time regardless of the forecast. When it gets particularly windy, you can hear the older cedars in the surrounding yards creak as they sway, a sound that is simultaneously comforting and worrying. In the current imposed dormancy of the quarantine, the nearby road noise is pleasantly hushed. My regular interludes in the Thinking Chair are also opportunities to let my mind step outside the more orderly confines of focused work, and just randomly play with whatever presently occupies my consciousness. I find that this habit allows me to clear my head, and afterwards return refreshed to work. It engenders a sense of gratitude (I have a roof over my head, I have food to eat, I have work to do, and I have the luxury of taking a coffee break), and I often come up with interesting writing ideas or even, ironically, occasional solutions to work problems during this time.
The first thought that crosses my freshly-caffeinated mind today is that right now I am supposed to be finishing up a long vacation in Italy. I should be watching the sun set on the Adriatic Sea from the balcony of our rented apartment in Ravenna, and thinking about tomorrow morning’s train ride to Bologna and our evening flight back to London and then on to Seattle. I should then be getting on another flight for a family reunion on the northern California coast over Memorial Day Weekend. But I’m not. Those trips were cancelled, along with many others, and instead I’m sitting on the back patio at my home on an overcast and drizzly Northwest afternoon, sipping coffee that comes nowhere near the quality of what I remember from other trips abroad. So many things have changed. So many cancellations and postponements. So many people no longer with us. So much division and hostility among the rest of us.
With so much loss and future uncertainty, the backyard foliage coming into its spring livery offers a more hopeful contrast. The heathers have had their brief bloom and are now settled into their seasonal greenness. The azaleas and barberrys are showing a robust hint of great promise, while the coneflowers seem content to keep their secrets a bit longer. The lavender, rosemary and woolly thyme have all increased their hold on the open space, and appear lush and verdant in the intermittent rain. I marvel at the new growth on our gem magnolias. These young trees were severely battered by last winter’s snows to the point where all three are several feet shorter than they were last year at this time, and are still missing many of their previous branches. We weren’t sure they would even survive.
Our resident squirrel stares at me briefly from his perch atop one of our landscaping rocks, then quickly retreats and sprints his way effortlessly up a sheer stretch of fencing. I am instantly jealous of his apparent immunity to gravity. Back in my mountaineering days I was a decent rock climber, but unlike our squirrel, I seemed to plateau at a certain level of difficulty. The American system of climbing grades is based off the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS), which ranges from class 1 (hiking over flat ground) to class 5 (technical rock climbing), and then provides further incremental gradations for class 5 depending on increased difficulty. A climb in the 5.0 to 5.7 range is considered easy, 5.8 to 5.10 is considered intermediate, 5.11 to 5.12 is hard, and only a handful of the world’s most elite climbers can complete anything of the 5.13 to 5.15 variety.
As a “weekend warrior” when it came to climbing, I could consistently top out routes up to 5.8, but could never successfully complete anything 5.9 or higher. After being frustrated with this for a while, I sought out an instructor at a local climbing gym to see if I could push through this ostensible barrier. After watching me climb several routes, he reached the following conclusion: I didn’t seem to trust my feet. When I asked what that meant, and what I could do to work on it, I very clearly remember him putting his hands on his hips, furrowing his brow, staring me straight in the eye, and saying, “Today, I am going to challenge your definition of a good foothold”.
I had been taught that rock climbing in particular could be broken down into three constituent things: Vision – the bigger-picture puzzle-solving skills to see a way to the top and the sequence of moves required to get there, Mechanics – the ability to understand and use the laws of physics and gravity to assist you in skillfully maneuvering and manipulating your body over the required sequence of moves, and Conditioning – the ability to apply strength when strength is needed, flexibility when flexibility is needed, and the endurance to ration both of these over the time necessary to complete the climb. I had never really considered the trust aspect.
What began was a process of reviewing my footwork mechanics – ensuring my weight was securely held by my arms and the leg opposite the one I was about to move, quickly and smoothly placing the ball or toe of my free foot on the new hold, rotating the foot towards the wall to lock the hold, then shifting my weight to the new hold to free up my other limbs to move – and then practicing these mechanics on progressively smaller and smaller sizes of footholds. I spent hours in the gym practicing, mostly on holds no more than a few feet off the ground. After a few weeks of consistent practice, I was able to advance from “requiring” several exposed inches of rock to support my foot to being comfortable on fractions of an inch, and I ultimately completed several 5.9 routes. As much as the mechanics were critical, I found that that they were almost secondary to trust – the simple, compelling belief that the preparation and placement I had done would actually hold my weight.
My coffee is finished, and I begin the physical and mental transition back to work, taking with me the fresh lessons from both the magnolias and the memories of climbing. Everything, no matter how badly damaged or beset by circumstance, can begin to find its way back. Trips can be rescheduled. More intimate personal connections with family, friends and colleagues will return. The challenge to our contemporary definition of a good foothold has been forced abruptly upon us, and now we must embrace both hope and grief as we rediscover our ability to trust our own feet beneath us.
Snow Day
As acclimated as we Northwesterners are to rain, snow is a different matter entirely. The rain may fall on the just and unjust alike, but it appears to have no lasting or transformative effect on their character. Snow, on the other hand, is the great equalizer. The just and the unjust, the sacred and the profane, all are afforded at least the outward guise of innocence under new-fallen snow. Unfortunately, this lovely initial veneer often quickly turns into substantial civic inconvenience and even danger — Seattle and surrounds are simply not built to function in snow. This reality often goads the rest of the nation into making light of Seattle’s ostensibly excessive preparations when a snowstorm of any magnitude is projected as it is for today and into tomorrow.
I believe we live in an era in which we all tend to take ourselves a bit too seriously, so on many levels I genuinely appreciate the national attention ridiculing our preventative measures for a storm only expected to drop 4-6” of new snow. While there’s no question that other areas regularly get hit with much more severe weather and higher snowfall in particular, there is actually a bedrock of validity beneath our otherwise overhyped preparation. The biggest contributing cause to all the clamor and tumult is that this doesn’t happen too often here. Seattle averages only about three snow days a year (with an average accumulation of about 5 inches), so this naturally engenders a few consequences. First, it simply isn’t economically feasible for any local municipality to maintain a fleet of snowplows and sand trucks (salting isn’t allowed here for environmental reasons) capable of dealing with any sort of major storm. If they did, the populace would complain – and rightly so — about the cost of supporting something used so infrequently. Topography also makes large-scale plowing impractical. Seattle is nestled among both hills and waterways, but the same widely-varying terrain that restricts and inhibits the building of roads and bridges also make it difficult to clear existing roads under any kind of icy conditions.
If you take the fifty cities in the US with the largest populations, and re-rank them by the difference in elevation between their highest and lowest locations, Seattle ranks 15th with a net 520 feet between its highest and lowest point (sea level, in our case). Five cities ranked above Seattle are coastal California cities, and with the possible exception of Cincinnati (13th), I don’t associate any higher-ranked city with significant annual snowfall in its metropolitan area. For some comparisons, New York is 20th, Boston is 27th, Detroit is 43rd and Chicago is 44th. Not looking to pick any fights, but it seems like our loudest critics are denizens of relatively flat environs, and I guarantee that an icy ride down one of Seattle’s steeper hills (some with up to an 18% grade) under snowy conditions would make the most weather-hardened midwestern driver cringe.
Our latitude also seems to enable fallen snow to hang around for a while, with patches lingering in the shadows and on the northern edges of buildings and long-parked cars. I find that people tend to forget just how far north Seattle actually is. Sitting at 47° 36′ north, Seattle is generally considered the northernmost major city in the contiguous 48 states, and the low and sparse winter sunlight is often insufficient to aid in melting. For all its heavy winter reputation, the northernmost point in all of Maine is 47° 28′ north, whereas Washington state continues still further north to join the borders of Idaho, Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota along the 49th parallel. To be fair, the Northwest Angle in Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, lays claim to the northernmost point of the contiguous 48 states at 49° 15′.
There are a few additional circumstances that could possibly increase the impact of the present impending blizzard, which is now being called “a once every decade or two occurrence.” While the overall amount of snow forecast is moderate, it is predicted to fall fast and hard in a relatively short period (~24 hours). It’s also the second storm this week. Four days ago we received 6-8 inches on our property (roughly 20 miles north of downtown Seattle), while slightly less fell in the city proper. With high temperatures hovering near freezing all week, much of this snow remains. This means surface temperatures are still near freezing, and any new snow will stick and begin to accumulate almost immediately. This storm is expected to hit in the middle of the peak Friday commute. Anyone familiar with Seattle already knows our traffic woes, and this won’t help. Complicating things further is that this week marks the opening of the new Highway 99 Tunnel, which just replaced the aging, above-ground roadway structure known as the Alaska Way Viaduct. This is one of only two north/south freeway passages through the city, and traffic at this location is already slower as drivers adjust to the new route.
One of the phenomena that invariably attends any regional forecast of snow is our local news media seeming to overreact with nonstop weather alerts and tense, highly-animated forecast coverage. This appearance of hyperbole feeds the national skepticism and draws out local cynics as well, who lampoon these broadcasts and the situation at large with intentionally embellished expressions like “snowmageddon” and “snowpocalypse”. Because the reality is that neighborhood-level non-arterial streets aren’t likely to be cleared, there is the very real risk that emergency service vehicles will not be able to reach most residences should something happen. This, combined with the general population just not being used to dealing with snow on a recurring basis, to my mind warrants some degree of repetition and perhaps even a hint of bombast as the repercussions of underpreparing could potentially be severe. For this storm, however, social media appears to have played a significant role in upping the ante even further. With the intensifying aspects layered on the already breathless media reporting, locals appear to have made a run on nearby stores for both groceries and items like firewood, snow shovels and de-icing chemicals. As a result, many stores were caught off guard and ran out of such staples. Photos of bare, ransacked shelves and long checkout lines began to permeate Twitter and Facebook, which prompted yet another layer of intense local news coverage, which drove more people to stores in search of basic supplies, which drove more social media posts (with new cynics and reactionaries piling on), and so on in a self-perpetuating frenzy. It never seemed to quite reach the panic stage, but there was clearly an element of urgency.
For myself, I love to cook on snowy days and had planned on stopping by a store this morning to pick up a few things. My experience with the lingering ice after a northwest snow also indicated I might not be able to do my normal Sunday shopping. The copious images of shortage led me to believe I wouldn’t be able to get the things I needed, and so I ventured out last night and perhaps contributed to the problem. Many shelves were in fact empty and lines were certainly longer than usual, but I was largely able to find what I wanted. It may fall as expected, or it may all be a bust. Either way, we took basic precautions in case we are snowed in and/or lose power. Our cars are gassed up and we have spare batteries for flashlights. We have shelter and sustenance for ourselves and our animals. Looking outside, the first flakes have now begun to fall. One of nature’s most intimate and perfect moments is the instant rain turns to snow. The sky moves in, low and heavy, and the temperature drop is palpable. We witness the extemporaneous transformation of water into ice, and the noisy splatter of rain is replaced with the hush of these small crystalline miracles alighting without sound. When merely wet, the visual horizon retains all its details, savory and otherwise, but all is rendered pristine under the benediction of fresh snow. For now, we watch in warmth and anticipation.
Anniversary
As you push north out of Bellingham on Guide Meridian Road in the very northwestern corner of Washington, you cross the Nooksack River and come to the small, rural township of Lynden. I’ve driven this route many times over the years heading to the inland Canadian border crossing at Aldergrove rather than taking the vastly more crowded Interstate 5 crossing to the west at Blaine. The municipal center of this bucolic haven of fewer than 14,000 residents lies a few blocks to the east, but Guide Meridian (also known more formally as Washington State Highway 539) runs through a burgeoning business district where it intersects Front Street, the western entrance to Lynden’s modest civic footprint.
The northeast and southeast corners of this intersection sport low brick ramparts with the town’s name displayed in large block letters, but the more distinguishing feature of this corner is that behind these two welcoming facades are the town’s two pioneer cemeteries — Lynden Cemetery to the south and Monumenta Cemetery to the north. Before groundkeepers planted a tightly-spaced arbor vitae fence along Lynden Cemetery’s western prospect, passing vehicles could clearly see the grave markers closest to the road.
For many years, a particular marker would catch my eye as I drove past. Standing nearly four feet high, it was an impressive upright headstone made of a light rose-colored granite, mounted on a foundation plinth of speckled gray granite. The rectangular main column was topped by a graceful curved capital with inlaid neoclassical scrollwork, all supporting a prone cylindrical capstone. Not at all dissimilar in scope or ornamentation from many nearby monuments, what was remarkable to me wasn’t its construction. What was interesting to me is what was inscribed on the crest. A single word, in all upper-case letters, large enough to be seen clearly from the road: HUSBAND. As I drove on I often wondered what feats of marital virtuosity this man had accomplished to warrant such a unique monolexical testament. Of all the roles he played throughout his life, of all the things he ever was, did, said, encountered and felt, what was it about this the one word that his benefactors chose to place it here in prominence, summing up his life in perpetuity?
I was curious to the point where I stopped one year to investigate further. Initially perplexed as there were no additional inscriptions or epitaphs on the marker, I then realized that this was actually a plot marker for a family whose surname was Husband. Although it appears to keep as reserved a parcel of land capable of holding ten or twelve graves, there are only two, each identified by separate and smaller markers slightly to the southwest: David Husband (1841 – 1934) and Rachel Husband (1832 – 1912). The larger marker is called a family stone — a gravestone that marks the entire family’s plot and not a particular individual’s grave. Much more traditional in Europe than in the United States, this practice wouldn’t be at all out of place among Lynden’s original Dutch immigrant settlers. The surname Husband is an occupational derivation (in the way that “Smith” comes from “blacksmith”, etc.) of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, originally meaning a peasant farmer or husbandman. While quite apart from the significance to which I had been attributing it, it is fittingly in line with Lynden’s agrarian roots.
Although I was a bit vexed and embarrassed that I had been carrying such an erroneous supposition for several years, the question of “husband” being something beyond a legal term and title still preoccupied me from time to time. In my initial years of marriage, my view of being a husband was that it was kind of a thing I now was. I didn’t really feel any different from the pre-marriage me, nor did I take any of my relationship responsibilities any more or less seriously than I had prior to being married. By virtue of a ceremony and a license, I simply been awarded this convenient label to allow society to interact with me in a particular way. This “husband as noun” worldview persisted for the first four years of my marriage, but then took an abrupt and unexpected turn. On Halloween Day in 1997, my wife Jessica was diagnosed with breast cancer.
It wasn’t just one cancer, but a particularly rare, virulent and more often than not fatal combination of two different types of cancer. Her prescribed treatment would last nearly 8 months – surgery, then chemotherapy followed by radiation therapy. For the better part of a year she endured all the medical procedures, the doctor visits, the drugs, the drugs to deal with side effects of the other drugs, and all the physical indignities and lasting consequences of this particularly malicious infirmity.
Thrust somewhat unprepared into the role of caregiver, initially I was an angry and disruptive presence in the medical proceedings. I did the best I could in supporting her and trying to create an environment in which she could tolerate her treatments and find some kind of path towards healing. One of the outcomes of this process was that I began to write down summaries of her condition to share via email (a fairly nascent technology at that time) with friends and family en masse as we didn’t have time or energy for all the individual conversations. As an attempt to lighten up the news I was sharing, I titled these missives “Jess-O-Grams”, and sent out just over a dozen during the course of her treatment. While some recipients were effusive in their gratitude, and others were silenced and overwhelmed by the discomforting level of detail and emotional impact, each edition was sent to more people than the previous one, and the final note went out to nearly a hundred people.
After treatment finished, the JOGs (“jogs”, as I had taken to calling them) were quickly forgotten as we moved on to trying to reestablish some new kind of normal life. I was actually quite surprised when someone asked me if they could share them with another friend who had just been diagnosed. Still very much in caregiver mode, I was only too happy to share, and hoped they might find something useful or comforting in them. This began to happen with some regularity, and it was affirming to know that out of this chaos I may have created something of lasting value. I heard from some people that our openness and candor was refreshing, as no one in their family ever spoke about major illnesses. I heard from others that it was a source of comfort and relief just to know that they weren’t alone in their fight. Still others said it gave them a model and a vocabulary for creating their own narratives on behalf of their loved ones undergoing similar treatments. I heard words like “hope” and “inspiration”, and I ended up on the mailing lists of essentially total strangers whose only bond to me was that they had read Jessica’s story.
While riding this wave of positive sentiments and beginning to wonder if I should perhaps start a larger work about our experiences, I received an update from one of my “fans”. After a period of remission, his wife’s cancer had returned and had metastasized to her brain. I received another note about a week later saying that she had died. I was stunned and even ashamed — who was I to continue to tell the story of my wife’s trials and ultimate survival, when clearly there were others who weren’t so fortunate? I had no words or even capacity to address the question of why some cancer patients lived and some didn’t. In her book A Return to Love, spiritualist Marianne Williamson would have us believe that our “playing small doesn’t serve the world”, but nonetheless I stopped sharing the JOGs at that point.
I read them occasionally in the years that followed, and consistently found them to be every bit as visceral as when I first composed them. They also took on a time-lapse quality, as months passed on adjacent pages. A great deal has changed since their original distribution. There have been many advances in both cancer detection and treatment, and consequently much of the medical information contained in the JOGs is now grossly outdated (and gladly so — according to the American Cancer Society, death rates from female breast cancer dropped 39% between 1989 and 2015). Social mores have also changed, and the then-contemporary jokes about the illegality of using marijuana to cope with chemotherapy now seem surprisingly antiquated – especially here in Washington where cannabis is newly legal. They contain what in retrospect seem like weak and forced attempts at humor, and many colloquial references (e.g. answering machines) seem hopelessly anachronistic. While on the surface they are anecdotes surrounding events that happened at a different house in a different town, seemingly as part of a different life, deeper down there remains a kernel of timelessness and universality. The more actual time passed, and the more Jess climbed up the percentiles of the survival projections, I slowly came to see that the reasons people found them worth reading had nothing to do with any promise of the story ending well. Rather, it simply allowed them to be present in Jess’ struggle, and perhaps to find some application or connection to their own circumstances.
The cancer immersion was a pivotal series of experiences in my life. Much was lost, including our plans to have a family. Much was also gained, in terms of insight into how a life-threatening situation can bring your priorities into sharp focus, what a remarkable treasure it is to have caring friends and family, and just what extraordinary things we are capable of as human beings. Will Rogers is reputed to have said that the problem with today’s society is that a man can live his entire life and not know if he’s a coward. While I have certainly disappointed those I care about on multiple occasions, I also know that in times of true duress I can be counted on. I don’t yet know if “husband” will be the definitive reflection of my life or not, but this crisis provided the catalyst for my evolution from husband as a thing I merely was to something I actively did — the journey from husband as noun to husband as verb.
The JOGs were an integral part of this passage. In addition to providing our extended community with updates, they also helped us keep the bewildering array of medical information being thrown at us in a semblance of order, and allowed me to contribute in a way that was both constructive and therapeutic. As I found my footing as a caregiver, I also found elements of my voice as a writer. Today, under the auspice of the 20th anniversary of my wife’s diagnosis, it seems an appropriate time to republish the JOGs so others can read and make up their own mind as to their significance without any of my projected doubts and fears. As they were essentially a blog before such a thing existed by that name, this also seems an especially suitable place for them to reside.
While science and society have changed, I suspect that the intensely personal and life-altering dynamics of individuals and couples struggling to react to a diagnosis have not, and therein lies the true merit of having captured this experience. The story is Jessica’s, and remains a testament to the courage and resilience with which she faced these challenges and her continued ability to see each day as a gift. I was merely a witness; a chronicler and supporting player. Whatever the weaknesses or failings of the storyteller, there is intrinsic value in the story. I offer them up again as a sober reflection on an important chapter in our lives and to mark a significant anniversary, but they also provide a fascinating glimpse of ourselves as we were two decades ago. Above all, they are reposted in loving tribute to one of the strongest, smartest and bravest women I know, and in combined celebration and gratitude for our present reality: twenty years later, she is still here and remains cancer-free.
Here are the original Jess-O-Grams:
JESS-O-GRAM #1 (11/3/97)
We have just received the results from Jess’ biopsy last Friday, and the breast tumor is malignant. We meet with our team of doctors tomorrow to discuss treatment strategies, but in the meantime please fire up your happy thought machines. We’ll keep you posted…
JESS-O-GRAM #2 (11/6/97)
Lots of new/revised information. Some background info: Breast tumors are classified two different ways. First, the stage indicates size and spread on a scale of I to IV, higher numbers being worse. Second, the grade indicates a measure of the speed of division and propagation of the cancerous cells on a scale of 3 to 9, again the higher numbers being worse. It’s basically position and velocity for you engineer types.
The bad(ish) news from Monday’s biopsy report is that Jess’ cancer has been labeled as Stage II based on the size of the tumor (2.4 cm diameter mass) and absence of knowledge about the involvement of the lymph nodes other areas. The worse news is that it’s a grade 9 tumor, the most virulent and aggressive grade. This explains the rapid onset of symptoms Jess experienced.
Tuesday started out miserably with our discovery that someone had broken into the Jeep and stolen the stereo Monday night. Tuesday afternoon we talked with the surgeon who did the biopsy, going over potential avenues of treatment. The initial plan was to run a battery of tests next week, followed by a three month course of standard chemotherapy (to test the effectiveness of the drugs on the tumor and to actually shrink the tumor, thereby reducing the volume of tissue that would have to be surgically removed), then a lumpectomy to remove the tumor, 2-3 weeks recovery, radiation therapy, then more chemotherapy. A long road awaits. However, neither of us was comfortable with the quality or quantity of information we were getting from this particular surgeon, and he didn’t seem to share our sense of urgency — we had already agreed that the tests were the next step, why did we have to wait a week? We’re sure he’s a great surgeon, or our GP wouldn’t had referred us to him, but we weren’t getting everything we needed or developing any sort of rapport or basis for trust.
On Wednesday, Jess was able to get a last-minute appointment with another surgeon who had been recommended to us. To have her going into major surgery without trusting the surgeon was an untenable situation. The second doctor (a woman, which adds to Jess’ comfort) spent a long time going over the mammogram films and report, going over the ultrasound films and report, going over the pathology report, detailing how and where the cancer initiated and how it got to where it is today — all of which had been skipped by the first surgeon. To ask the first doctor to explain all this seems obvious to us now, but two days ago we hadn’t a clue as to what questions we should be asking. Essentially we were still in shock from the biopsy report. Needless to say — we have switched surgeons. Jess had blood work and chest x-rays done right after the consultation yesterday, and today she is having liver and abdominal scans done. All the tests the first doctor wanted to do next week will be complete within 24 hours of consulting the second doctor. This doctor also shares our opinions about the need for rapid action in dealing with grade 9 tumors. Jess is scheduled for a lumpectomy on Friday, Nov. 14th. She will also have some lymph node tissue removed for dissection. The good news is that the position of the tumor bodes well for this type of surgery, and should (hopefully) result in minimal disruption to both the surrounding tissue and pectoral muscles. Depending on the outcome, surgery will be followed at least by both radiation and chemotherapy, so this thing is still a long way from being over.
In the meantime, we are reading, making phone calls and surfing the web to get more information, continuing to get the support network in place, and getting mentally ready for this whole process. Thanks to all for your continued support — we’ll keep you posted…
JESS-O-GRAM #3 (11/10/97)
What promises to be a big week for us has begun with some encouraging news (with the Dawgs losing to the Ducks last Saturday, we need all the encouragement we can get…):
- Blood work results came back negative – no indication that the cancer has spread to her blood.
- Bone scan results came back negative – no indication that the cancer has spread to her joints. She does, however, have some nasty shin splints from running that showed up :).
- C/T scan results came back negative – no indication that the cancer has spread to her internal organs.
- Chest x-ray “looked good” to quote her surgeon, but has been sent to Radiology for an expert opinion.
So far, so good. None of the above results will alter our plan for treatment, but at this point it appears the cancerous cells are confined to the breast tumor. The schedule as it stands:
Tuesday afternoon we meet with our oncologist to go over the schedule for post-surgery chemotherapy and radiation therapy. The only thing that will change these plans is if the tumor turns out to be estrogen receptive, in which case a drug called Tamoxifen can be administered orally instead of using standard chemotherapy. We won’t know this until after another set of tests is run on the tumor after it is removed, so chemo/radiation is “Plan A”. We will also be having a very frank discussion on the benefits and side effects of each these treatments.
Thursday morning we have a final meeting with the surgeon to sign release forms, go over the surgical details again, and lay out a plan for convalescence. Jess’ mother will be flying in Thursday night, and I have been pricing the 55 gallon drums of chicken soup at Costco.
With the test results above, we haven’t changed the surgical approach (lumpectomy). The actual operation is scheduled for 7:00 AM this Friday at Swedish Hospital. She will also have a portion of her left side lymph nodes removed for dissection, and will have a catheter installed for future blood drawing (required at least once a week during chemo/radiation) and for administering the chemo treatments. This is done to protect the arm veins from the abuse of multiple needle insertions, and our surgeon prefers to do it during the initial surgery so Jess won’t have to have a separate second operation to install it — we like the way this woman thinks.
For those of you not in Washington, the weather has just turned phenomenal — clear, sunny and 65 degrees. We take this as an auspicious omen as we get ready. Jess bought herself a new bathrobe (“gotta look good in the hospital!”) yesterday, and we’ve started looking at cool hats for the chemotherapy days ahead (although she, displaying the humor that will help get her through this, insists she will be having everybody sign her head like a cast). Another big thanks to all for your continued support. More news later…
JESS-O-GRAM #4 (11/12/97)
Just when you think you understand what’s going on, and just when you think you’ve formulated a good plan, the game changes again. Our optimism from Monday has been tempered by some clarifications requested by our surgeon on the biopsy pathology report, and by our consultation with the oncologist yesterday.
The meeting with the oncologist was our most trying session to date. From the clarified pathology report, it appears that what Jess has is actually an extremely rare combination of cancers, and data on this type of tumor is scarce. The first type, carcinoma (technically adeno-carcinoma, based on where the tumor started), is the most common form of breast cancer, and is the type of cancer usually addressed in the popular literature. Data on this type is plentiful, and deciding on treatment is almost a flowchart process depending on the size of the tumor, the number of lymph nodes involved, and whether the patient is pre or post menopausal. Success rates for treatments of this type are also fairly well known. The second type, metaplastic sarcoma (sometimes called carcinosarcoma and yes, it even sounds nasty) is a very rare form of breast cancer, and is the more aggressive of the two (most likely responsible for the grade 9 rating of Jess’ tumor). The data on this type is much sketchier, based on its infrequent occurrence.
The combination of these two is even rarer still. The oncologist said that this combination constitutes less than 1% of all reported cases of breast cancer in the US, and that there are probably fewer than 500 cases documented in the worldwide medical study database. This does not mean there have only ever been 500 cases, it means that only about 500 patients have participated in documented studies using clinical trials to determine the effectiveness of various treatments. He is continuing to do a literature search for more data.
This presents us with several problems. The needle biopsy Jess had done was quick, non-surgical, and contained sufficient tissue to determine that both types of cancer were present, but it was not sufficient to determine which, if either, is the dominant form. Because both types behave differently and are treated differently, we are caught in a very grey area as far as treatment. Because of the scarcity of historical data, there is very little statistical data to support any course of treatment. Both Jess and I as engineers like to hear numbers to back up courses of action, so this news is very mentally disabling. We spent quite a bit of time playing “good news – bad news” in the oncologist’s office. The good news is that sarcomatic tumors don’t tend to spread to the lymph nodes. The bad news is that carcinomatic tumors do. The good news is that sarcomatic tumors don’t really respond well to chemotherapy, so it might not be necessary. The bad news is that carcinomatic tumors usually require chemo. The good news is that smaller carcinomatic tumors can usually be extracted with a lumpectomy. The bad news is that patients with sarcomatic tumors tend to opt for mastectomies, usually to err on the side of caution — the more cells removed, the fewer left to rely on chemo/radiation to clean up (which is consistent with the priorities of the Seattle Breast Center with whom we are working: 1. Save the life. 2. Save the breast). The good news is that if it’s a sarcomatic tumor, we caught it fairly early. The heaviest news of all is that post-treatment relapses of sarcomatic cancer are almost always fatal (98%+ mortality rate). I am not trying to scare anybody with that statement, this is simply the brutal reality of what we are up against. The paradox is maddening — we won’t know the dominant type (which will more than likely decide the course of treatment) until after surgery, but the question of which is the dominant type helps decide the type of surgery to be done.
The surgery originally scheduled for this Friday is now on hold for at least a week, and the surgeon and the oncologist are conferring today. The rational side of me is struggling to understand why two doctors can’t look at the same pieces of data and arrive at least at similar conclusions, but the best explanation I’ve been given for this stop/go roller coaster we’re on is this: The surgeon is the expert at the mechanical processes of treatment, while the oncologist is the expert at the biological processes, and we need to make sure there is some consensus between not only them, but between them and Jessica. As opposed to engineering, medicine is a soft science. We can’t just define and solve the correct set of equations. We have only unknowns and potentialities to supplant the facts and data we are used to dealing with. Even though a particular surgery was already scheduled, the oncological consultation was a scheduled and necessary pre-surgery step. It just happens that in our case, it may alter the surgical plans. When we asked about the need for expedient action, we were shocked to learn that the oncologist estimated (based on current size and type of cancer) that the tumor had been growing for over a year and a half, doubling in size roughly every eight weeks. If we hadn’t being doing yard work a few weeks back that caused Jess to massage her sore pectorals in the shower, she still might not have found the lump. Ladies, I tell you this in all love and seriousness — if you do nothing else today, do your monthly breast self examination. Gentlemen, if you do nothing else today, remind your wife/girlfriend/sister/mother to do her exam.
In the “Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Worse” department, we were scheduled to talk with a radiological therapist this afternoon to go over the possibilities of success in treating a potentially sarcomatic tumor with a lumpectomy and radiation therapy, but another problem has surfaced. We thought Jess was having some side effects from all the tests done last week. She awoke about 1:00 AM last Friday morning with terrible pain in all her joints. The radioactive isotope used as a tracing element in bone scans pools in the joints to help detect cancer at these locations, so we suspected she was having some adverse reaction to this isotope. The pain went away by Friday afternoon, but was replaced by a slight fever Sunday morning. By Monday, she had started breaking out in a rash. We didn’t know if it was from the chemicals or if it was or stress-induced or what, so after the oncology appointment she went to our GP. In a million years we wouldn’t have guessed — Jess has chicken pox. That’s right — chicken pox. Good old “didn’t you have those as a kid?” chicken pox. Well, she didn’t. We haven’t a clue as to where she might have picked it up, but it’s a fair guess that her immune system is down a notch with all the stress, which made her much more susceptible. If any of you have not had chicken pox and have come in contact with Jess in the last ten days, you might be on the lookout for the symptoms described above.
The radiological meeting has been rescheduled for next Monday when she is no longer contagious, and she is home from work until at least then. Microsoft has been tremendously helpful thus far. The visits to doctors and hospitals have nearly exhausted Jess’ sick leave, and she wants to save her short-term disability for whatever combination of surgery/chemo/radiation she ends up doing, so her boss has worked out a way for her to telecommute part-time (including the possible subsidizing of an ISDN line to our house — Boeing types should mention that to your managers!) and not have to take any unpaid leave. My co-workers have also been very patient with my erratic hours and short temper.
We wish we had better news. So many of you have honeymoons, pregnancies, schoolwork and all sorts of happy, positive things going on that it is quite difficult for us to tell you these things, and we understand that they are hard to hear. If any of you are uncomfortable or desire less detailed or less frequent information, please do not hesitate to contact us. Also, do not be afraid to call. Yes, we’re juggling all sorts of crap and the phone is very busy, but the last thing we would do is to turn away another voice of support. Sometimes we get pushed a little far and let the answering machine run interference for us, but leave a message and we’ll definitely call you back. E-mail has proven itself a reliable means of getting information to geographically diverse locations, but it’s a bit impersonal. We are enlisting the aid of counselors and support groups to see us through this, not only because the mental strain nearly equals the physical, but because simple human interaction is essential for the healing process. We are not at 100%, but please don’t let this stop you from calling or coming by. Again, our sincerest thanks for all your support, and we’ll keep you informed…
JESS-O-GRAM #5 (11/19/97)
Well, since the last update the optimism pendulum has swung back to at least the middle, if not slightly to the upbeat side. The latter half of last week was a flurry of consultations between our three key medical personnel: our surgeon, our medical oncologist and our radiological oncologist. To distinguish the between the two oncologists, the medical oncologist is the specialist who will determine the types and dosages of chemotherapy Jess will receive if we have to go that route (“The Bartender” in the lingo of our dark medical humor), while the radiological oncologist (logically) is the specialist in radiation therapy.
Jess’ chicken pox turned out to be a very mild case, which is somewhat unusual for adults, but nothing so far in this entire ordeal has turned out to be ordinary. By last Monday, she was able to return to work. Monday afternoon we had a good meeting with the radiological oncologist, if any meeting of this sort can be classified as “good”. She went over what historical data there is on Jess’ type of tumor (including what turned up in the literature search by the medical oncologist), gave us a complete overview of what’s involved in the process of radiation therapy, detailed the risks and benefits, and spent a lot of time answering our questions.
So, despite last week’s side trips, we have arrived back on Plan A, just one week later. We have a pre-surgery meeting tomorrow morning (11/20) and Jess is scheduled for surgery (lumpectomy) this Friday at 10:00 AM. Her decision to go with a lumpectomy was based on several things. First, for her type of tumor there is no medical evidence to suggest any tangible benefit to be derived from a mastectomy as opposed to a lumpectomy. This information is based not only the literature search, but from consultations by our medical team with many of the leading cancer research institutes in the U.S., including the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Dallas. Second, the amount of tissue taken out around the tumor (called the margin) is typically about one to two millimeters. Our surgeon is planning to take a margin of about a centimeter. Also, as I reported before, the location of the tumor lends itself well to a lumpectomy. If the tumor had been centrally located in the breast, or back against the chest wall, then a mastectomy would have been a no-brainer (“You mean a no-breaster!” she says laughing). This 50-100% increase in planned margin and the superficial location of the tumor made the medical oncologist much more comfortable with the surgeon’s approach — comfortable enough to alter his initial recommendation for a mastectomy. Consultations with the other cancer research centers also yield nothing suspect about this approach. Third, treatments that we (and much of the popular literature) thought were one-shot deals turn out to be somewhat repeatable. If there is a recurrence in the same breast, she can go back and have a full mastectomy done. Chemotherapy is repeatable. Even radiation therapy, with close control over location and dosage, is repeatable. In summary, not everything rides on this surgery.
Mentally, at times Jess is fairly calm and confident. But there is still a large element of fear in the air. I suffer most from the Demons of Distraction. I set my keys down and those pesky demons whisk them away to a place I’ll never think of looking. Fortunately, living in Seattle I don’t have many occasions to set my sunglasses down, or they’d hide those too. Last week there weren’t many jokes, but we’re trying to maintain our humor. It’s kind of like mountain climbing — somewhere above 11,000 feet I usually stop making jokes (right Mike?). There is a lot of waiting. We should have the post-surgery pathology report by next Wednesday (11/26), which will lead us to the next steps as far as treatment.
On an interesting side note, owing to the rarity of Jess’ tumor her case has achieved a degree of celebrity among the local hospitals and research centers, and her progress will be watched closely and documented. She represents one of the few cases where a tumor of this type was caught fairly early (most of the cases in the documented studies were advanced Stage III and IV tumors), and hopefully her treatment data will be of use to other women down the road. The pathology report is scheduled for nearly nation-wide distribution. Keep your fingers crossed…
JESS-O-GRAM #6 (11/20/97)
The pre-surgery meeting this morning was tolerable, and (as always) there’s some new information. Based on further consultations with both oncologists and other cancer surgeons, our surgeon has decided that a 2-3 cm margin would give her the best chance of getting all the nasty metaplastic stuff. The initial estimate of the tumor maximum dimension of 2.4 cm has been revised to 2.7 cm based on another review of the mammogram and ultrasound results, but the opinion of the radiological oncologist was that there is usually some visual enlargement on the mammograms and that the actual tumor is probably slightly smaller. In any case, we are now talking about removing roughly a 5-6 cm sphere of tumor and surrounding tissue. This will probably now require shaving some of the pectoral muscle, but shouldn’t result in any loss of strength or restriction of movement. While the superficial position of the tumor has its advantages, there is one drawback that we weren’t clear on until this morning. Because the margin is a measurement that surrounds the tumor in all directions (concentric spheres for you left-brainers), the skin over the tumor within the bounds of the margin will have to be removed. This will require a more drastic set of incisions, and will result in additional external scarring. Intellectually at least, physical scars are the least of our worries at this point.
The surgery has also been moved up to 7:30 AM tomorrow, which we were hoping for. Getting up and then having to wait several hours before checking in would have been nerve-wracking. The three procedures (lumpectomy, lymph node sample extraction, and portacath insertion) should take a total of about 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Tomorrow also happens to be my sister’s birthday (Hi Beth!), so the date is a good one. Last Monday was the 10th anniversary of our first date (a Def Leppard concert in San Diego), and this Sunday will be the 5th anniversary of the date I proposed to her, so we are surrounded by good omens.
Jess will be off from work a minimum of two weeks. While some patients recovering from this type of surgery have been up and running about in as little as three days, and there is every likelihood that Jess will too, we both think it’s important that she take some time to heal after the physical and mental trauma of the last few weeks (we’re hoping the Huskies find a way to beat the Cougars in Saturday’s Apple Cup to help lift her spirits). Jess’ mother is flying in tonight, and we will be having a quiet dinner at our favorite local Italian restaurant (Lombardi’s in Ballard). We’re not optimistic about getting much sleep tonight, but we’ll see how it goes. Again, please feel free to forward these notes to anyone you feel would want to know, or have them send me their e-mail address to add to the list. I will try to drop by work and get a report out tomorrow afternoon, but I think you all understand that these updates are of secondary importance. Please keep Jessica in your thoughts. Show time…
JESS-O-GRAM #7 (11/21/97)
So far, so good. Jess is out of surgery, out of the recovery room, and sleeping. In the discussion I had with the surgeon, she said everything went “great” and she was able to take “good, wide margins”. She said Jess “sailed through it” and there were “no complications”. She did end up having to shave a bit off the pectoral muscle on the posterior side of the tumor, but she didn’t seem overly concerned about it. Jess is already able to move her left arm fairly freely, so preliminary indications are that it will have no residual effect. All her incisions are sutured and then covered with a clear protective wrap. This will allow her and her doctors to monitor healing without having to undo any dressings, and will also allow her to bathe. She has a drain line linked to the main breast incision, which will have to monitored and emptied.
Things were a little tense at the start. While finalizing all the consent forms, the pre-op nurse gave Jess some pamphlets and other materials about recovering from this type of surgery, which indicated among other things that 50% of recovering patients will experience some permanent loss of feeling in the area surrounding incisions. More new and frightening information right before surgery is NOT what any of us needed. Her mother and I also got a little frenetic when the duration of the surgery passed three hours, but it was over in 3:15 (7:30 AM – 10:45 AM). Jess was in the recovery room for just short of two hours after surgery while the anesthetic wore off, and was then moved to her regular hospital room. All her vitals are normal. She was on a metered morphine drip for pain when I first spoke to her (which made her pupils shrink to about a millimeter in diameter), but she was semi-lucid and making jokes. The morphine makes her sick, so she was also on an anti-nausea medication. She was able to walk (with assistance) to use the restroom, but vomited once she got there. The vomiting caused quite a bit of pain, so once she was back in bed she pinged the machine for an additional cc of morphine, and then promptly fell asleep. Her mother stayed with her while I drove the few miles south to work to make some phone calls and send out this note. I’m heading back to the hospital now. If she’s feeling real strong, she may come home tonight, but in all likelihood she will stay overnight.
The initial pathology report should be out early next week, but the estrogen receptor tests will take a little longer. With the holiday break, we will probably not have the full story until the first or second of December. Right now it’s time to concentrate on healing from surgery. Jess appears to be over the first of many hurdles, and we thank you again for all your love and support…
JESS-O-GRAM #8 (11/25/97)
(My apologies to anyone who already received Jess’ note yesterday — there seems to be some overlap on our distribution lists)
Late yesterday we received the most encouraging news to date: the initial pathology report is complete, and there is no evidence of lymph node involvement — none! Also, the tumor (2.6 cm) was extracted with “clean margins” (no cancerous invasion of surrounding tissue) and appears be carcinoma dominant, with only a few sarconomus masses present. This does mean Jess will still have to have both chemotherapy and radiation therapy, but the odds of a cure have just tilted dramatically in her favor. We meet with the medical oncologist again on December 3rd to see where we go from here.
She appears to be healing rapidly. She stayed overnight at the hospital Friday night, and she was released around 11:00 AM on Saturday morning. One funny note — as we were out taking a walk around her floor Saturday, we met her surgeon coming out of the elevator. After being counseled on post-surgery nutrition, we were quite surprised to catch the surgeon slurping on a jumbo coffee and chowing down on a big gooey maple bar. Brings to mind something about the cobbler’s kids not having shoes. Anyway, Jess is on a fairly steady stream of Vicadin for pain. Not enough to put her out, but enough to “soften the edges” as she says. Yes, her pupils have returned to normal size :). By Monday, the volume of fluid drained was down to 58 cc, compared to 178 cc for Saturday. When it drops below 30 cc in 24 hours, she can have the drain line taken out via an outpatient procedure. No signs of any infection or other post-surgical complications. As a precaution, we plan to hook her up with a physical therapist to work on the arm. This will help not only with strength and range of motion, but will also help prevent or control various arm swelling problems she is at risk for after this type of surgery. Even with things going as well as they appear to be, she will stay out the full two weeks, and has given herself permission to take a third if she feels she needs it — more than just the body healing here.
Sunday was a bit of a rough day, due to pain in the affected areas, stiffness from sleeping on her back (she’s a side/stomach sleeper), and a bit of post-surgical “crash”. The body treats surgery as a wound — it’s intended as a benevolent wound to be sure, but the body really doesn’t know the difference. This triggers the release of adrenaline and various other steroids into the bloodstream. The body continues on this steroid plateau for several days, and then shuts the chemical release down completely. This shutdown results in physiological crash that our surgeon described as similar to post-partum depression (which leaves some of us with only an intellectual reference, but it was the best description she had), involving both physical and emotional reactions. The spells were very difficult to endure, both for Jess to go through, and for her mother and I, who wish we could do something besides just hold her. We’re both very tired, but we’re hanging in there. Our discomfort is really nothing compared to what Jess is dealing with.
Yesterday, her disposition was much improved, and she and her mom took a walk around Green Lake (about a three mile walk for you non-locals). She then took a nap of several hours, which she described as “some of the best sleep [she’s] ever had”. Her time is divided between watching TV, reading, doing crossword puzzles, handling multiple phone calls, the occasional (non-work-related) e-mail, and resting. The range of motion on her left arm has increased quite a bit. There is some numbness on portions of her arm, but it’s way too early to tell extent and/or duration. Her biggest problems right now are itchy incisions, a few sutures that are poking her, and preventing the cat from pulling the drain line out prematurely. But, as she figures, if those are her worst problems she’s doing pretty damn well. Your collective positive thoughts appear to have worked, and we’ll keep you posted…
JESS-O-GRAM #9 (12/9/97)
My apologies for the delay is getting this one out. Life has been rather full lately, and this installment has become something of an epic.
As we head into the second phase of Jess’ treatment, I find myself looking back at what a difference a year has made. For us, 1997 has been a year of extreme highs and lows. It was only last January we found out that Jess was pregnant (yes, intentionally), and we were awash in the fears and hopes of impending parenthood. While her miscarriage in February seems fortuitous in light of recent events, it didn’t feel so at the time. Our grief was compounded by my father’s death in late March, which remains emotionally unresolved. Things took a decided turn for the better mid-year, as Scott and Tara’s wedding in early June was easily a high point of our lives. It was a week in the Sonoma sunshine spent reminiscing and reveling, subsisting on great Italian food and extraordinary wine, rediscovering old friends, making new ones, and removing any doubt that I may just need to leave the sport of golf to more capable hands. It was also wonderful to host Scott and Tara here in Seattle for a few days on their way to honeymooning in the San Juan Islands. Jess’ 40th birthday party in August extended the happiness, as did our trip to Paris in September. November and December we have shared with you (mail me if you are interested in any previous Jess-O-Grams) as we bounce along on this roller coaster, alternately submerged in the struggle with this potentially deadly disease and buoyed by the thoughts and actions of friends and relatives.
This past week brought the exceptionally painful news that guitarist Michael Hedges was killed in an automobile accident the previous weekend. For me this news makes the world a slightly colder place. He redefined not only my own approach to guitar, but my entire approach to music in general. He was the only musician who ever lived about whose work I was absolutely rabid. He was my Elvis, my Hendrix. Fortunately, Jess and I had the opportunity to see him in concert many times both here and in San Diego, and were also able to introduce many friends to both the music and the musician. I doubt that there will ever be another like him. A sad irony is that my very first clumsy attempts at making music on the guitar were the songs of John Denver, while my most recent clumsy attempts focused on Michael Hedges. Musical icons from my childhood and adult life both taken in the same year. Another dark stone to lay in our 1997 basket alongside the shiny ones.
Meanwhile, back to the medical front. Last Thursday, Jess had her drain line removed and all the staples and sutures taken out. According to her surgeon, all of her incisions are “healing fabulously”, and she is off of the painkillers. Some of the numbness on the back of her arm has disappeared, although it appears that due to sensory nerve damage from the incision some of the numbness in her armpit will be permanent. This is fairly common, and she was aware of this risk beforehand. The appointment with the medical oncologist last Wednesday confirmed what we already suspected — Jess’ treatment will be a combination of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. While the post-surgery pathology tests determined that the tumor was carcinoma dominant, with only a few sarcomatus masses (Come on! Sing it with me — “supermetaplasticsarconomasimplechronichalitosis”!), it was still a Grade 9 (of 9), the most aggressive form. Chemotherapy was recommended to go after those microscopic bits of cancer remaining after the surgery, before they can get together and start a new tumor. If she had only the more common form of breast cancer, she would probably not have elected to use chemotherapy, but an aggressive cancer requires aggressive treatment. The tests also determined that the tumor was estrogen receptor negative, so using hormone therapy (Tamoxifen) won’t be an option. This isn’t necessarily bad, and wouldn’t have changed the current course of treatment, it’s just one less tool Jess has to fight off recurrence. Many people have written me and said they liked having some technical stuff included in these notes, as it broadens their understanding of what is happening. For those people, I’ve included the following (short) primer on chemotherapy.
Cancerous cells grow and divide rapidly. Therefore a logical approach in treating it would be to administer chemicals that retard or suppress rapid cell growth, which is precisely what chemotherapy does. Of course all cells grow and divide, but most do so at a fairly slow and static rate — you’ve probably noticed that you haven’t gotten any taller since puberty when all your cells were on a rapid growth program (no guys, that extra bit growing around your middle is due to something else entirely). The rapid growth cells in adults (even adults that act like children) are found in the hair, nails, and the lining of the intestinal tract from the mouth to the, uh, exit ducts. They are also found in the bone marrow, which produces red blood cells (oxygen carriers), white blood cells (infection fighters) and platelets (clotting agents).
The chemicals that suppress the cancer cell growth also suppress the production of these other rapid growth cells, which explains why hair loss, darkening of the nails, mouth sores and nausea (stomach irritation) are very common side effects of chemotherapy. Other common side effects are illnesses brought on by immune system suppression (low white blood cell count), so-called opportunistic infections. Once the chemicals have passed through the system, the production of these cells begins to return to normal (one exception is high-dose chemotherapy, see below), including any remaining cancer cells. The “average” person’s WBC (white blood cell) count reaches a low about 10 days after receiving a chemotherapy injection, and returns to the pre-dose count about 21 days after the injection. This is why chemotherapy is usually given at three to four week intervals. Chemotherapy works because the rate at which the white blood cell count returns to normal (meaning the body is “ready” for another treatment) is faster than the rate at which (most) cancerous cell production returns to normal. Left brain translation: If you plot the WBC count vs. time, you would see a repeating wavy pattern of “normal” down to “low” and back up to “normal” (I know you want to say it, so go ahead. Constant amplitude oscillatory spectrum! Very good — now please sit down). If you plotted the number of remaining cancer cells (which is unfortunately impossible to determine, but stick with me here) on the same axis, you would see the number drop down after the initial dose, then start to rise with the WBC count, only to dip down even lower with the second injection (because the WBC count has returned to normal before the cancer cells can recover fully), then start back up and so on. Over the course of treatment, the number of cancer cells “ratchets” down to zero.
The other mechanism that makes chemotherapy effective is that since the chemicals are injected into the bloodstream, they are able to fight microscopic cancer cells wherever the blood goes. One trick we have been told is to suck on ice cubes during the treatment, which reduces the blood flow (and therefore volume of chemicals) to the cells around the mouth, thereby reducing the intensity of any side effects at that location. This trick is safe because cancer does not usually spread (metastasize) to the mouth cells. Hair loss can actually be minimized or prevented by wearing an ice cap during treatment, but cancer has been known to metastasize in the scalp. Temporary baldness seems infinitely preferable to potential brain cancer.
The oncologist outlined four of the different approaches currently used in chemotherapy. The first two were termed standard chemotherapy, which means that these protocols have at least five years of documented studies of their effectiveness, side effects, etc. after FDA approval to use the drug. These versions of chemotherapy can reduce the risk of relapse by about a third. For example, pre-menopausal women with regular carcinoma-type breast cancer and no evidence of cancer in their lymph nodes (called node negative) are on average only about a 10% risk for recurrence. Chemotherapy will only drop this risk to 6 or 7%, so chemo is not usually recommended for these women — the benefit gained doesn’t really offset the physical discomfort of the treatment or the risks of potentially permanent and damaging side effects. The oncologist made an offhanded guess that Jess, although she is pre-menopausal and node negative, was a 45-60% risk for recurrence based on the aggressiveness of her tumor. A 30% reduction leaves her at 30-45% risk, which are still very large numbers.
The second two protocols are called investigational chemotherapy, because they use newer drugs and in different combinations than the standard protocols, and have not yet completed the five year study period. They are also called high-dose, (logically) because they are also substantially more toxic than the standard approaches. The most severe form of high-dose treatment involves removing (harvesting) some of the body’s own cells, then giving doses of chemo sufficient not only to suppress bone marrow function, but to kill the marrow outright. Once the series of treatments is complete, the harvested cells are re-injected to jump-start the patient’s own cell production. This protocol is used mainly for patients with either systemic cancers (like cancers of the blood) or cancers that have metastasized to a significant percentage of the body. This protocol was not recommended for Jess, so I won’t go into all the risks (which are numerous and significant). Many of you at Boeing may know about Pat Sobota here at PSD, who has just gone through this procedure and appears to be making a solid recovery.
The protocol Jess and her oncologist have agreed upon uses a combination of newer and older drugs. In standard chemotherapy the chemicals are all mixed together (a.k.a. “The Cocktail”) for each treatment. In this therapy Jess will receive three treatments each of three separate drugs. The first drug, Adriamycin, is a veteran of many standard chemotherapy studies. Even though sarcoma in general does not respond well to chemotherapy, Adriamycin is regarded as the best drug available for treating sarcoma. Because this particular drug is being used, Jess will definitely lose all her body hair. The second drug, Taxol, is about 5 years old and although it is considered to be the best drug for treating carcinoma, it has not yet completed the studies required to be included in the standard treatments. Our oncologist predicts that once these studies are complete, Taxol will form the basis of most if not all standard protocols. The third drug, Cytoxan, is considered to be the third-best drug for treating sarcoma, though we never did find out what number two was. Jess will receive her treatments every two weeks, for a total of nine over eighteen weeks.
But “Wait!” you say, “What about her WBC count — won’t it take three weeks to bounce back?” Very good — you were paying attention. Another difference between this protocol and standard protocols is that she will receive regular injections of a substance called G-CSF (granulocyte colony-stimulating factor for those keeping score at home). G-CSF is a substance that occurs naturally in the body, where it stimulates WBC production. This will prevent her WBC count from falling as low as it would otherwise (but doesn’t have the same effect on the cancerous cells), and allow it to recover faster, which will allow more frequent treatments. Her WBC count will be monitored for the entire process, but at the outset it is predicted that she will be able to handle injections at about two week intervals. Although this protocol, called Adjuvant ATC in the literature current enough to mention it, is still in the investigational stage, it looks to be the best risk/benefit tradeoff for Jess’ situation. Her oncologist reported that there are studies in the 2-3 year range that show very encouraging results. Unfortunately, another feature of the newness of this protocol is that the reduction in risk of recurrence cannot be statistically determined yet — all we know is that it is something better than standard chemotherapy. She will have her first injection tomorrow (Wednesday, 12/10) afternoon. Although this is fairly soon after surgery, her surgeon concurs with the decision to begin immediately. Again our mantra — “Aggressive cancer, aggressive treatment”. Because even the number one and number three drugs for sarcoma are not usually as effective as Taxol is against carcinoma, chemotherapy will be followed by five to six weeks of daily radiation therapy to treat any remaining sarcoma. We look forward to having a “Last Treatment” party sometime in June.
There are bits of good news is all this. The side effects of Adjuvant ATC are apparently a bit less intense than with other forms of chemotherapy. The primary symptoms will be fatigue (usually about a 15% drop in energy) and, again, body hair loss. The other optimistic information is that while chemotherapy will slam her into menopause (menstrual cessation, hot flashes, the whole bit), since Jess is only forty years old the effect may not be permanent. Apparently the closer a woman is to reaching menopause naturally, the more likely the body is to throw in the towel permanently when subjected to chemotherapy. The oncologist said there was substantial evidence that women into their early forties returned to normal menstrual activity after chemotherapy.
With decisions about treatment in place, and since she was feeling fairly strong, Jess returned to work yesterday (Monday, 12/8). Her office has been 110% supportive through his whole thing, and I know they will provide an atmosphere that will let her balance work and recovery. Her boss did something amazingly cool. At his request, a support group called Microsoft Cares brought an oncologist in to talk to her department. The oncologist talked about cancer, types of treatment, what the patient is going through, what co-workers can expect to see, and how they can help. The presentation was followed by a question and answer session, which by all reports was very helpful. Our thanks and major kudos to John Battle and Microsoft.
Due to uncertainty about how Jess will feel during chemotherapy, our plans are for a bit of a “minimalist” Christmas, with a reduction in the usual holiday madness. We’ll know much more after the next few days. Those who know us know that humor is as much a way of life for us as it is a simple defense mechanism, so I’ll leave you with a bit of humor (some of you have seen this already) from Jess:
“Things I Have Learned Having and Recovering from Breast Surgery”
- Surgeons eat really badly (my surgeon came to see me the day after the surgery with a large coffee and a maple bar…).
- Once the anesthesiologist administers the sedative you will probably babble.
- Morphine doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good night’s sleep – but it makes it more fun.
- You never know you will miss your armpit until you can’t feel it.
- When you are out in public make sure the drain line doesn’t show through your clothes. (It puts really puzzled looks on the faces of your spouse and mother…).
- If your incision is unguarded the cat will probably step on it (this has happened a bunch of times, mostly when I don’t get up to feed him).
- Never, ever check for lumps in your breasts when you’ve forgotten you have a portacath that makes a nice big lump (Scared the s**t out of me!!!).
- Don’t read books about breast cancer before going to sleep.
- The ends of sutures will poke you at the most inopportune times causing you to jump and frighten the cat which causes #6.
- Napping every day is a lot of fun.
I’ll send out another update sometime after the first round of chemotherapy tomorrow. Take care…
JESS-O-GRAM #10 (12/15/97)
Jessica received her first chemotherapy treatment as scheduled last Wednesday. The treatment itself was rather unremarkable, perhaps because none of us was quite sure what to expect. The oncologist spoke to her for about an hour, and she had her blood counts (RBCs, WBCs and platelets) taken. The blood was actually just a small sample from a fingertip lancing (remember blood typing back in high school biology class?), and not drawn from the portacath as we had thought it would be. She was then started on IV drips (via the portacath) of saline and an anti-nausea medication (Kytril). The saline solution serves as sort of a “base” to help carry and diffuse the other drugs. The Adriamycin is a wicked-looking red compound (or “it looks like cherry Jell-O”, for those less anthropomorphically inclined) which was administered manually from two monster (“very large”) syringes into a small shunt in saline line. Both the Taxol and the Cytoxin will be given via a separate IV drip, but the Adriamycin is a vessicant (meaning it can cause damage if it gets outside the veins), so the syringe gives the nurse better control over the application. After the Adriamycin was administered, the portacath was flushed out with a Heparin solution to prevent clogging. The total time involved was about two and a half hours, though according to the nurse the Taxol and Cytoxan may take a bit longer. Jess will receive injections of G-CSF (see J-O-G #9) every day from Dec. 11th through the 21st. These are given subcutaneously in the shoulder, which (depending on which nurse does it) doesn’t hurt too badly.
The chemotherapy stations at the Northwest Cancer Center are quite comfortable. Each area has a padded (reclining!) chair, a video player, blankets, guest chairs, and a privacy curtain. There is also a large selection of books, magazines, and videos to select from. Her mother and I just sat and stared at her during the whole procedure, as if we expected her to begin vomiting and her hair to begin to fly off instantaneously. Didn’t happen. Other than some small irritation around the portacath site, she felt fine.
She actually felt well enough to go to work on Thursday, though she had begun to feel a bit “flu-ish” (kinda tired and achy) by midday. Thursday afternoon she had a follow-up appointment with surgeon to check on the incisions and the site where the drain line was removed (a procedure we since have nicknamed the “Getthisouttomy”). Everything looked to be healing well, and the butterfly bandages on the incisions were taken off. She continued to feel “not quite right” on Friday, and she (actually “we”) took the day off. By Saturday morning she was vomiting and unable to hold food down. We got her mobile enough to get to Northwest Hospital for her G-CSF shot, but the balance of the day alternated between sleeping on the couch and running to the bathroom. After eating only a few crackers, a few anti-nausea pills (some of which didn’t stay down long enough to do any good), and a few sips of water and flat Sprite during the day, she was able to keep some potato(e) down by dinnertime. Prior to Saturday, she hadn’t thrown up since our trip to Russia in 1993 (mixing great quantities of vodka and champagne – a recipe certain to end in disaster!), and had forgotten just how miserable the experience is. Sorry we didn’t make it to the Microsoft Christmas party Saturday night, but I don’t think we would’ve been much fun. Hope all who attended had a good time in our stead. Never being one to miss an opportunity to show the Boeing folks how real companies treat their employees, I should point out that her division’s party was dinner and dancing at the Seattle Art Museum. Again ;).
The various literature we have reviewed indicates that such flu-like symptoms are one of many normal reactions to chemotherapy. The fatigue and achiness are due to the body’s reduced ability to get oxygen to the muscles, which is caused by — wait for it — suppressed red blood cell production. During the previous week, Jess had spoken with a former co-worker from San Diego who had been through the same exact chemotherapy protocol and she described similar reactions. For this woman, the second day after the treatment was actually the worst. For Jess, so far it looks like the third day. Her appetite returned (with a vengeance!) Sunday, though she still slept quite a bit during the day. The nausea was gone, but it was replaced by another pain. As the G-CSF stimulates WBC production, it causes some flushing and swelling in the bone marrow, which can cause pain in the bones — Jess seems to feel it most in her sternum. She felt strong enough to return to work today (Monday).
The irony of all these things hurting her in the process of healing her is difficult for me to handle. Jess thinks she is being “a wuss” by sleeping so much, but by Sunday night she was cranking out Christmas cards. In any event, she’s made it through the first treatment — eight to go. Speaking of true colors, one of you (yes, an engineer — and you know who you are), mailed me last Thursday and voiced the opinion that the plot of WBC count vs. time I described in JOG #9 should be thought of as a waveform, and not a spectrum as I had indicated. I argued, and successfully I think, that the procession of data from the “normal” count the “low” count and back to “normal” could indeed be thought of a waveform, but a connected series of these waveforms, especially when plotted in the time domain, definitely constituted a spectrum. Further, I pointed out that…SHUTUP!! Shutup all of you! You’re all sick! Sick! Do you hear me? Now I want you to march right up to your rooms and practice your Fourier Transforms until you think you can come back down here and act like normal people! Ummm…yes..well..uh…sorry.
Her next treatment is scheduled (blood counts willing) for Christmas Eve, Dec. 24th. We hope this will allow her to feel decent for Christmas Day, which should be pretty quiet around our house. Unless something big happens between now and then, this will be the last Jess-O-Gram for 1997. Our warmest thanks for the outpouring of love and support you have all shown us during this difficult time. Our thoughts and best wishes are with you and your families for the holidays. Recent additions to the distribution list can reply to me here (old email address removed) for “back issues” of Jess-O-Grams. Please distribute these to anyone you think may want to know, or contact me with names and e-mail address to add to the list. We look forward to sharing better times with you in 1998. Take care…
JESS-O-GRAM #11 (1/8/98)
The obvious medical aspects aside, 1998 is already shaping up to be vastly different from 1997. At this time last year we were still under the 18 inches of snow dropped during the Christmas and New Year’s Day storms. So far this winter, we have only flirted with snow a few times at our house, and nothing has stuck. Some experts are blaming El Nino, but I suspect we inadvertently precluded any possibility of snow by actually purchasing a snow shovel last August. Nonetheless we are winterized — the hoses are stashed in the garage and the spigots have donned their foam winter hats. The trees are pruned, the gutters are cleared, and the flower beds are layered in bark. I hear all you (present and former) Midwesterners and Easterners snickering at our paltry preparations, so go ahead, get it out of your system. Of course, all the San Diegans are saying, “winterize?” We hope 1998 has found you and yours healthy and happy.
Jess received her second dose of Adriamycin on December 23rd. This was one day ahead of schedule, but her WBC count had bounced back sufficiently to handle it. Actually, we don’t think it ever went down. Her pre-chemo count was around 9K (“normal” is anywhere from 4K to 10K). Boosted by 11 straight daily injections of G-CSF, her count the day of her second treatment was an astonishing 23K. As her oncologist said – “This lady can make cells!“. He then reduced her prescribed G-CSF injections by one day. The third day after treatment was again the worst. The side effects seemed less severe this go-around, but were longer lasting. She bounced back pretty much to 100% the week following her first treatment, but after the second dose the fatigue has begun to be cumulative. Even though she was able to return to work, she experienced continuing low-level nausea. The queasiness lasted well into the second week, and prompted a few unpleasant surprises when trying to brush her teeth. Her senses of smell and taste are a bit jumbled. Some things that smelled and tasted good before treatment have lost their appeal, and when she finds something she can eat there is no guarantee it will sit well her stomach. Coffee, previously a morning staple, has become a bit of a culinary pariah. The slight bitter taste of some blends is very reminiscent of the metallic aftertaste from the Adriamycin – a most disconcerting flavor. The caffeine is also an unwelcome agitation to her digestive system. Sorry Starbucks…
The most noticeable side effect is that her hair began to fall out on Dec. 24th (“the Rain of Hairor has begun“, she said). This was also slightly ahead of schedule — “typical” hair loss begins 17-21 days after the first treatment (the 24th was just 14 days). I swear Jess is trying to bring this whole thing to completion ahead of schedule and under budget. “I’d like to call your attention to this Chemotherapy Gantt chart, which shows we should be able to begin Phase II much earlier than scheduled. Bob, do you have those dollar cost averaging figures?” By the 27th, it was coming out in clumps, and she elected to have her hairdresser shave her head. This was done partially to relieve the physical discomfort of the hair falling out, but mostly it was to relieve the anxiety associated with the progressive defoliation (ever had a dream where your teeth crumbled or your hair fell out?) and to preserve some semblance of dignity. Breast cancer, among its other insidious qualities, is a master at breaking down personal dignity. Treatment can permanently alter your appearance, which often triggers an erosion of self-image, as both breasts and hair are attributes which our society, sometimes against its own best intentions, holds forth as simple-minded measuring sticks of femininity. The disease itself can make you distrust your own body. Cancer isn’t something that you catch from somebody. It isn’t something that develops as a result of an injury or accident. It’s your body’s own cells killing themselves — a sort of internal cellular revolution. Jess’ tumor was growing so rapidly that it outgrew its own blood supply. As a result, the cells in the tumor interior were already dead (called cellular necrosis) by the time of her surgery. This idea of bodily betrayal can give rise to the worst sort of fears. For those of you who saw the movie Arachnophobia, remember how afterwards you thought every little movement out of the corner of your eye and every little itch on one of your limbs was a spider? After her initial diagnosis, Jess felt like every little ache or discomfort was another tumor, or a sure sign the cancer was spreading. For now, she has conquered these fears. But what she will have to go through mentally after treatment, living in the shadow of recurrence, remains to be seen.
For Jess the difficulty with her hair is not so much the fact that it’s gone. She is actually quite at peace with that. The difficulty is that this is the first truly external sign that she is sick. Scars from surgery are easy to conceal. Nausea from medication can be masked with a brave face. With her hair gone, she is broadcasting via her appearance that something is seriously wrong. All in all, her reaction has been very positive, possibly because she has the good fortune of having a well-formed head. This may have been much more traumatic if she still had her waist-length hair of years past, or if her bare noggin were a less pleasant sight. She is content enough with her appearance not to bother with any sort of wig. She rotates through her newly assembled collection of hats, though these are worn simply to keep warm. Thanks again to all those who gave hats for Christmas, and special thanks to Vicki for the loaning her the long, black Elvira wig!
The period from Christmas to New Year’s Eve was a very relaxed and low-key affair, with lots of chicken soup, football, and visits with friends. Jess received her third dose of Adriamycin on January 6th. With the reduction in G-CSF injections, her WBC count was only up to 11.5K – still plenty to allow her to have the treatment. The reduced G-CSF application also seems to have eliminated the sternum pain she reported during the first series. Her red blood cell count is falling, however, which may explain the fatigue. The nurses will continue to monitor her, and she may need to go on medication to boost these levels. The oncologist suspects that her lingering nausea may actually be due to some form of gastritis (her esophagus is fairly ripped up from vomiting), and not the chemicals. She is now taking medication to reduce stomach acid. This is the final dose of Adriamycin, and in another two weeks she will start on Taxol. It’s hard to believe she is already a third of the way through the treatment. I’m starting to call Jess “the Lone Ranger”. . I said, I’m starting to call Jess “the Lone Ranger”. . “, Gee Rob, why is that?” Because she’s becoming chemo-savvy! Thankayou! Thankayou vurry much! You’re too kind! I’m here every night, with two shows on Sunday! And don’t forget to tip those hard-workin’ waitresses!
Jess has sent out a separate mail with the details of Operation Clear-Cut, the charity event Jess’ group at Microsoft is sponsoring, so I won’t go into too much detail. Basically, people are pledging donations to have a bunch of people at Microsoft shave their heads. These generous people have volunteered to lose their hair both to show solidarity with their “follically-challenged” coworker and to raise money for charity. I volunteered, but have been told by Jessica in no uncertain terms that I am not to even cut my hair, let alone shave my head. Microsoft will match all funds contributed by Microsoft employees, but all donations are being accepted. The event will be held January 20th, and will feature comic John Keister, host of (the local Seattle late-night TV show) “Almost Live”. All money raised will be given to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, a breast cancer research organization that Jess selected. We are encouraging everybody to pledge or donate whatever they feel they can. Some of you have already made donations on her behalf to various agencies, and we cannot thank you enough. Mail, call or drop by if you need more details.
That’s where we stand. Tomorrow is another “Day Three”, so we may or may not be in. As usual, recent additions to the distribution list can reply to me here (old email address removed) for “back issues” of Jess-O-Grams. Please distribute these to anyone you think may want to know, or contact me with names and e-mail address to add to the list. Take care…
JESS-O-GRAM #12 (2/25/98)
It’s been a while since I’ve put one of these out, and I apologize for the gap. Life has become quite crowded again, forcing us to focus on select tasks at hand. Some of you have joked about receiving the “Cliff Notes” version of Jess’ condition. For those people, it may help you to remember that this forum serves several purposes besides distributing information. The volume of information and data being thrown at us is staggering, and this log helps keep it straight. More importantly, it is also a chronological log of her experiences for later (personal and/or medical) reference. For me, it has the additional benefit of being part of my own personal therapy — a digital support group of sorts where I can hash it all out and digest it. For the quick version, you can always call!
OK, where were we? Ah yes — snow shovels. Of course, of soon as I mentioned that we haven’t had snow — the weather felt compelled to make a liar out of me. Tuesday (1/13) we had a nice little storm that gave us 3-4″ of yard frosting, which in true Seattle fashion melted before noon the next day. Amidst the melting snow on the 14th, we had a bit of a scare. Tuesday Jess had complained about feeling weak and a bit dizzy, and we suspected it had to do with her blood cell counts hitting their post-treatment lows (right on track, 7 days after her last Adriamycin). However, by the morning of the 14th, simple tasks like cutting grapefruit for breakfast and getting dressed had become almost insurmountable tasks. She was scheduled for a G-CSF shot that afternoon, but we decided to get her in to the doctor early to see if she was having complications. As it turns out, her cell counts were not only low — they were through the floor (WBC count was down to only 2K). Her blood pressure had dropped to 90/50. Despite drinking up to two liters a day of water, she was also severely dehydrated. With her hit-and-miss eating habits, she was not getting the amount of sodium or electrolytes required for her body to retain the water — she was literally drinking herself into dehydration.
Basically, she had experienced a total metabolic crash. The nurses started her on a liter IV bag of Dextrose to help recover the 3-4 pounds of water mass she had lost since her previous treatment, and gave her the G-CSF shot. As I mentioned in JOG #11, her red blood cell counts had been falling over the course of her treatment, and her oncologist decided to put her on Erythropoietin (“EPO” in the nurses’ lingo) to stimulate red blood cell growth. With all the medicating and hydrating, it was a long day at the doctor’s office. While we were there, Jess also managed to demonstrate her ability to vomit spontaneously, which prompted her oncologist to prescribe yet another anti-gastritis medication. Where a year ago the center of our kitchen table was occupied by a single bottle of pre-natal vitamins, there now stands a small army of pill vials. The disparity of our plight now versus a year ago continues to amaze and confound me.
Jess received her fourth chemotherapy treatment on January 20th. This was the first dose of the second drug, Taxol. The procedure was basically the same as for the Adriamycin, except that Taxol is “spiked” directly into the IV bag instead of being hand-administered into the IV line. Many people experience anaphylactic shock reactions to Taxol, so an antihistamine (Benedryl) is added to the pre-chemo medications. For Jess, they have also added prescription-strength Zantac to the mix to help with her chemo-induced gastritis. She takes Zantac daily, but the IV is a convenient way to get a good dose. Even though Taxol is administered directly, the drip takes much longer than the Adriamycin. There are two reasons for this. First, Taxol is thicker than Adriamycin (and is also colorless, as compared to the bright red Adriamycin). The Taxol suspended in the bag of sodium chloride looks a bit like vegetable oil in water, and there is quite a lot of cavitation (sorry — non-engineering translation: “bubbles”) as it passes through the drip control. The second reason is a bit more unnerving. The Taxol must pass through a special filter before entering the body, because it can actually leech some of the plastic from the IV line. Great, and you want to put this stuff in my wife?? The entire process (blood work, oncologist consultation, pre-meds, Taxol and portacath flush) took about five hours.
Despite feeling a bit woozy from the Benedryl, Jess made a quick stop for lunch and we were off to the Microsoft campus for “Operation Clear Cut” that afternoon. The fund-raiser was an incredible success. By the time the last lock of hair hit the floor, fifty-six people (including six women) were sporting shaved heads, and over fifty thousand dollars had been raised for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Apparently this was one of the largest single lump-sum donations the Foundation had ever received. We had people involved who also participate in other charity events tell us about large-scale events that took months of planning and only raised half the money this event raised in a few weeks. Nearly two hundred people attended the proceedings, which were held in the cafeteria of Jess’ building at Microsoft. Five local television stations (KING-5, KIRO-7, KSTW-11, KCBQ-13 and Northwest Cable news) covered the event, as well as KIRO radio and the Seattle Times newspaper. Microsoft provided food, and a supply of Red Hook, Pyramid and Sierra Nevada beer for those that needed a little artificial courage to go through with their pledge. The company also provided Microsoft baseball hats for the freshly-shorn volunteers. John Keister provided hilarious running commentary, and the afternoon was filled with energy and humor. For me, the most stirring moment occurred when Jess was addressing the crowd and asked how many people there knew someone besides her who was dealing with or had gone through treatment for cancer — more than half of the people in the room raised their hands. Despite the incredible amount of money raised, it seems there was a good deal of confusion about this being a “Microsoft only” event or my guess is the donation total would have been even higher. I would like to offer my sincerest thanks to those organizers and donors who gave of their time, their hair, their money, or all three. It was evident that concern and compassion are very much alive in what has become a rather crazy world. At some point, we will have scanned copies of articles and pictures, and I am working to get the taped news reports into digital format. Anyone whose e-mail system can handle attachments and is interested in receiving any of these when they become available, please let me know. On a disappointing note, the following Thursday the jeep was broken into again, and the stereo was stolen again. It’s kind of strange being exposed to some of the best and the worst human nature has to offer all in the same week.
Similar to Adriamycin, the Taxol side effects kicked in about 3-4 days after treatment. The most notable side effect she experienced was severe joint and muscle pain. This type of pain is a common Taxol side effect, and stems from the way Taxol inhibits cell growth. The following is taken from a pharmacological brochure on Taxol: During the stage in the cell cycle known as mitosis, the cell attempts to divide. At this point, the cell already contains a miniature supporting structure, a type of cellular skeleton. This skeleton supports the cell, gives the cell its shape, and also supports other structures within the cell. Just as your skeleton must be movable for you to walk, turn, and move your arms, so must the cell’s skeleton be movable. Taxol “paralyzes” this support structure inside the cell. The cell is then unable to perform any functions necessary for growth or reproduction, so it dies. Lovely description. Steroids such as Prednisone or Dexamethazone are often prescribed to combat the pain associated with this process. Yes, some people also use the popular alternative “Growyourown”, but as far as I know it’s still illegal in Washington. Call me naive, but I didn’t realize that so many Canadian snowboarders were undergoing chemotherapy. The catch is that you have to start taking the steroid before the pain kicks in. Jess felt she had weathered the pain from the G-CSF pretty well, and was a bit worried about the side effects of the steroids themselves, so she elected not to take any. Mistake. Big mistake. As she said on Friday (1/24), “If I ever again tell you I can take it – smack me!” The pain laid her low for the duration of the weekend, and began to dwindle just in time for the pain from the G-CSF to kick in the following week. If any of you ever have the desire to feel what it’s like to be utterly useless, I recommend trying to care for a person undergoing chemotherapy. Sometimes, there is absolutely nothing you can do but sit and watch them endure it all. The first round of Taxol was very difficult for all of us. Jess continued to receive G-CSF for the eleven days following the treatment, with three EPO shots thrown in along the way.
The week following her first Taxol, she crashed again, though to a lesser degree. She had supplemented her water intake with Gatorade and fruit drinks and was not so dehydrated, and was finally experiencing some relief from the EPO booster. By the second Taxol on February 3rd, she had begun to experience the second major side effect — the “Taxol tingle”. Taxol can cause nerve pain (neuropathy), which can manifest itself as numbness, tingling or burning in the hands or feet. Jess is experiencing numbness in both her fingers and toes. The condition should be temporary, but the effect is a bit unsettling. Taxol is also reportedly tougher on hair than Adriamycin. What hair is left on her head is slowly making its way to the pillow, and her eyelashes are just about gone. Much to her chagrin, however, the hair on her legs remains mostly intact. She also experienced quite a bit of intermittent itching. For the second dose she decided to begin taking Dexamethazone, which gave her quite the collection of pre-meds: Kytril for nausea, Benedryl for allergic reactions, Dexamethazone for pain, and Zantac to protect her stomach from the drug soup. Taking the steroid during and after the treatment did seem to boost her appetite and energy level, but it had no apparent effect on the pain. The cycle of Taxol pain and itching, crashing, then G-CSF aching repeated itself following the second dose.
According to her oncologist, the Dexamethazone should have completely suppressed the pain, so the fact that it didn’t was of some concern to him. It was his opinion that the effect was due to both the sheer toxicity of Taxol and the large doses Jess is taking. This really didn’t surprise me. When other medications are spiked into the sodium chloride base, the nurses label the bag with the medication name and the dose. I had noticed several other patients were also getting Taxol, with doses in the 80 to 150 mg range. For comparison, Jess was receiving doses of 370 mg. Her oncologist decided to split the final dose into two applications, each of which was still larger than any other dose I had seen. She received the first half of this last dose on February 17th.
The next day was another day of concern, as a small area of hot, red skin had appeared on her left breast. Off to the doctor again. The initial diagnosis was of a low-grade infection, so they started her on an intravenous antibiotic (Rocephin). Since she didn’t have fever or chills, there was also the possibility that the rash was just a by-product of the Taxol working its deadly cell magic, in which case the antibiotics would just be precautionary. Her doctor traced the outline of the affected area in pen to help determine if it was spreading. By Thursday, the redness had spread down the left side of her chest. Fearing some sort of staph infection, they added a second antibiotic (Vancomycin). She had a slight allergic reaction to the Vancomycin (her skin flushed and itched), which required a quick shot of Benedryl to relieve. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday she received intravenous doses of Benedryl, Rocephin and Vancomycin, as well as the G-CSF/EPO protocol. She submitted samples of stool and urine, but no traces of abnormal bacteria were found. The good news is that the rash had disappeared by Sunday, either by itself or from the antibiotics. The other good news is that the reduced Taxol dose combined with Dexamethazone made for a pain-free weekend. She had some minor twinges Friday evening, but that was it.
The antibiotics took just over two hours to administer each day, and the six straight days of treatment gave me lots of time to play with the puzzles in the waiting room, read all the magazines (again) and work on this Jess-O-Gram. In just a few short months we have become grizzled veterans of the Northwest Cancer Center. From all the daily trips, the car now knows the way to the Center, located just adjacent to Northwest Hospital. Occasionally we take a different route, sometimes out of boredom, sometimes because the standard route runs along two sides of the Evergreen-Washelli cemetery and we feel overwhelmed by the implications of the scenery. Sometimes Jess isn’t ready to go back to the house just yet, and we drive to Sunset Park and stare at the Sound and the Olympic mountain range (on those occasions when the weather allows the vista). We have come to know all the Center doctors, nurses, lab techs and administrative personnel by name, and they have become like an extended family to us. The waiting room is a fascinating study in the dynamics of human interaction. All eyes flash to whoever comes through the entrance. Knowing smiles and nods are sometimes passed from patient to patient, and caregiver to caregiver. Mostly it is an exercise in degree of suffering. The anxious “Oh my god! Am I going to look like that?” stares of the newly diagnosed are returned by the weary “Don’t worry – they tell me it’ll grow back” smiles of the veterans. The ambulatory patients look at the patients with canes and walkers, and suddenly their own situation doesn’t seem quite as bad. A similar thought occurs to those with canes and walkers when they see those in wheelchairs, who in turn look with a limited empathy on those confined to gurneys. The ones on gurneys stare at no one in particular.
Yesterday (2/24) Jess received the second half of her third and final dose of Taxol. A small area of the rash reappeared this morning, but still no fever or chills. She stands at the 2/3 point in her chemotherapy, with the toughest of the three drugs to go. She is learning to endure things she never thought it possible to endure, and your support has been instrumental in the process. Hopefully it won’t be another six weeks before you hear from us again. As usual, recent additions to the distribution list can reply to me here (old email address removed) for “back issues” of Jess-O-Grams. Please distribute these to anyone you think may want to know, or contact me with names and e-mail address to add to the list. Take care…
JESS-O-GRAM #13 (6/2/98)
I have come to believe that there are really only three types of people in the world: Those who put their garbage out on the curb the evening before collection, those who set it out early on the morning of collection, and those who run out when they hear the truck coming. Under normal conditions I endeavor to be a “morning of” person, but lately I’ve been chasing a lot of trucks. I take some small solace in knowing that the garbage actually being picked up overshadows the aggregate importance of the details surrounding its collection.
While El Nino has certainly been wreaking havoc in other parts of the country, Washington has been visited by an early spring after a mild winter. The yard floral parade has marched from crocuses to daffodils to tulips to rhododendrons, and the lawn now expects weekly attention (though, as our neighbors will attest, I routinely fail to meet these particular expectations). It’s nice to talk about good things growing for a change, even (relatively) non-organic things like Operation Clear Cut and even these JOGs (I sent the first JOG to sixteen people – this one will go out to over sixty). In yards, as in life, some not-so-good stuff still grows, though. My annual war on moss in many ways has come to mirror Jess’ struggle with cancer: There is the exasperation of icky stuff growing in beautiful places, the use of toxic chemicals and the endurance of great physical suffering, all followed by worrying about whether or not it will come back. Jess has become suspicious of me, however, since she caught me eyeing her breast with my thatching rake.
Jess received her first dose of Cytoxan on March 3rd. The procedure was old hat: Blood counts, consultation, pre-meds, chemo, portacath flush. The experience was blissfully short compared to the Taxol — about an hour and a half start to finish. Cytoxan carries a significant risk of damage to internal organs (particularly the liver, kidneys and bladder), so it was essential that Jess stay hydrated around the time of each treatment. To help protect her organs by flushing the drug from her body, she had to drink three liters (8/10 of a gallon) of water the day before, the day of, and the day after each treatment. At one point, she swore she could hear herself sloshing around as she walked, and she refused to take another sip.
The rash on her breast and ribcage has been annoyingly persistent. Jess proffered the theory that she was simply Robin Redbreast, the first bird of spring, but the Cancer Center nurses were skeptical. The surest and most welcome sign of spring, however, was the return of hair to her chemo-deforested head. Small white tufts began to appear the week after the first Cytoxan, which of course elicited great rallying cries of “Chia Wife!” from her husband. The tufts then began to fill in the blank spots and darken up to what I called “Dutch bunny brown” (probably only the country kids among you will get that). The speed at which her hair propagated was amazing to watch. There were afternoons when I swore it was longer than when she left in the morning. Her hair has since lightened a bit in color to a sort of…well…taupe. It’s also beginning to get wavy and curly in spots. Changes in both color and texture are very common in hair returning after chemotherapy, so we’ll have to wait and see what the final product will look like. She’s just glad it’s coming back.
Despite predictions from her oncologist and the relayed experiences of others that Cytoxan would be the worst of the three chemotherapy agents, her first dance with the stuff was essentially side-effect free. She was taken off the EPO medication, and received a reduced daily G-CSF dosage. Her WBC counts barely dipped, and she was able to have her second treatment on March 17th. Somewhere in between the first and second Cytoxan doses, the Taxol-induced neuropathy in her fingers and toes stopped. The intermittent rash and some residual numbness and stiffness in her armpit are the only lingering effects of surgery and the first two chemotherapy drugs.
In other news it appears I have developed other maladies related to Jess’ illness. In a session with one of our counselors we were discussing some pretty heavy topics and Jess began to sniffle. From the start of her chemotherapy, I have been carrying the “husband kit”, consisting of a small package of tissue, lip balm and breath mints for getting rid of the post-treatment “chemo mouth”, paper and pencil for jotting down questions and recording answers, and pills of various types. On this particular occasion, I found myself without any tissue (I left them in the car). As Jess began to cry, the counselor and I looked at each other, then suddenly our arms and heads began to flop around and our torsos began to gyrate wildly as we searched frantically for the nearest box of Kleenex. Only when the box was located and placed in front of Jess did our seizures began to subside. In medical circles, this condition is known as helpilepsy, and there is no known cure. While there have been no reported fatalities, helpilepsy has been diagnosed as the root cause of getting very quizzical looks from total strangers. Since this episode, I have had many repeat occurrences, from small fits to full-on helpileptic seizures. Our counselor confided that she had been suffering the effects of helpilepsy ever since her son was diagnosed with Leukemia some twenty years ago.
There is much more to tell (Jess is now undergoing radiation therapy), but this must suffice for now. Best to stop and let everybody catch their collective breath. As usual, recent additions to the distribution list can reply to me here (old email address removed) for “back issues” of Jess-O-Grams. Please distribute these to anyone you think may want to know, or contact me with names and e-mail addresses to add to the list. Take care.
JESS-O-GRAM #14 (8/21/98)
It seems I’ve made a habit out of opening each JOG with some sort of excuse for the delay since the previous one, and I see no reason to break form now. As Jess finished treatment, we experienced a strong desire to just drop it all — to put it all behind us and set about the business of reclaiming our lives. However, many of you have monitored her condition faithfully via these dispatches, and deserve at least the remaining details.
Different types of cancer respond differently to the various treatment options, and radiation was prescribed in Jess’ case specifically to go after any sarcomatus remnants of her cancer. The principle behind radiation treatment is the same as chemotherapy (namely, “kill the bad cells”) except that the treatment is very localized and the collateral damage to adjacent healthy cells is much less drastic. Her radiological oncologist prescribed a six and a half week course of daily treatments, based on her breast tissue characteristics and the type and grade of her tumor. The treatments were administered each weekday (weekends off) and were given at the Northwest Cancer Center where she received her chemotherapy.
The first step in ensuring the radiation would be applied to exactly the same area each time was to take a series of x-rays and CAT scans. These were done to get a three dimensional “map” of her left breast, showing not only physical dimensions, but also the variation in tissue density. The second step was to take a styrofoam impression of the back half of her upper body, from the waist to the top of her head. This form, or cradle as the nurses call it, was used to help immobilize her torso during treatment. To allow the radiation gun (which looked to me like an eight foot tall KitchenAid mixer sans beaters) to be placed in the same orientation relative to the tissue each time, Jess received a series of four permanent tattooed dots, three running down her sternum and one on the left side of her ribcage. Each dot is the size of a mark made with a small felt-tip pen, and was actually administered using genuine India ink and a needle (by one of the radiation technicians, not a biker named “Mad Dog” they keep in the back room expressly for this task). Jess said they were less painful than having her finger lanced for blood samples during chemotherapy. One of the radiation nurses had one done on the back of her hand, which I thought was a good way of helping to dispel patients’ fears about large, disfiguring marks.
Jess began radiation therapy on April 30th. The treatment took place in a large, shielded room where Jess was placed on a table (with her torso in the foam cradle) under the radiation machine. The nurses used her tattoos and a system of laser optics to align the apparatus. The actual administering of the radiation was similar to getting an x-ray at the dentist. They aligned the machine, told you not to move, then left the room. “Hey! If it’s so safe, why are you-all leaving?” Due to the intensity of the radiation, no one else was allowed to stay in the room, which was sealed with a large, vault-like door. The nurses kept in contact with her via an audio/video link. A few blips from the computer console and it was over. Each treatment usually took about fifteen minutes, with alignment taking the majority of the time.
The principal side effect of radiation therapy is a darkening of the skin at the treatment site, similar to a severe sunburn. The area surrounding Jess’ left breast became progressively darker until it reached a deep red-brown color. In some cases, the skin becomes too damaged to continue treatment, but with the use of special creams and moisturizers this didn’t happen to her. The second major side effect of radiation is fatigue, though I wasn’t able to get a completely satisfactory explanation of the physiology behind this. With chemotherapy, the fatigue comes directly from the depleted red blood cell count – impaired ability to get oxygen to the muscles results in the reduced capacity of the muscles to perform work. With radiation, the fatigue apparently comes from the body having to expend energy in healing — carrying off the dead cell waste and repairing the skin. Anybody who’s ever felt sort of sluggish and sick and after sustaining a serious sunburn may be able to identify with this. Another explanation I received was that radiation is often the last phase of cancer treatment, and the sheer duration of the diagnosis/surgery/chemo/radiation cycle begins to take its physical toll on the patient, manifesting itself as fatigue. In any event, Jess developed the habit of taking a nap for an hour or so each day after treatment.
On May 27th, Jess suspended radiation treatment for surgery to remove the portacath that was installed last November. The procedure was performed at the Polyclinic (an outpatient treatment and surgery center associated with Swedish Hospital) by the same surgeon who did the installation and lumpectomy. As a veteran of many childhood ear surgeries I have a patent dislike of hospital waiting rooms, and sitting through Jess’ third operation in six months was very difficult. The procedure was done in the morning, and she was able to come home in the early afternoon and returned to work and radiation therapy the next day. In a slightly macabre tribute to the device’s contribution to her treatment, she plans on using the extracted portacath as a Christmas ornament this year.
The final week of radiation treatments were directed less at the tumor site and more at the scar tissue surrounding the site. These doses, called a scar boost, were prescribed because scar tissue is less able to absorb radiation than normal tissue, and therefore needs an extra zap, or “boost”, to accomplish the same level of tissue saturation. Jess received her final treatment on June 17th.
Last February, I was watching a television sports show that featured, among other things, coverage of a women’s triathlon. As several of the contestants neared the finish line at the end of the marathon portion, one of them collapsed and fell to the ground. Her supporters, including her husband, rushed to her side and tried to help her up, but she waved them off. She struggled to her feet, took about three steps, then her legs buckled and she fell again. Again her husband came to her, but this time he encouraged her not to move. Again she waved him off and rose on uncertain legs. With her short hair hidden under a racing cap, she looked almost bald. Suddenly, I was struck by how similar she looked to many of the cancer patients I had seen in the past months, and to Jess in particular. The physical depletion, the tears, the pain-laced looks she gave her husband that said “I love you, but you can’t help me. I have to do it” — all spoke to me of a woman struggling to draw on strength she wasn’t certain she possessed. I watched spellbound as the woman took several teetering steps, then collapsed again. Somehow, she rose again, and began to move forward with singular determination, only to have her limbs fail her once more. Refusing to yield to her exhausted body, she crawled the last few feet over the finish line, where she dropped completely to the ground and began to sob uncontrollably. The scene was utterly galvanizing. This is the image of Jessica I held for the remainder of her treatment — a woman struggling against enormous physical odds and refusing to give up. Instead of swimming, cycling and running, she had to face surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Some seven and a half months after diagnosis, she crossed the finish line.
Since finishing treatment, Jess has begun exercising with a group called Team Survivor Northwest. They take long group walks on Monday nights and work out with exercise bikes and free weights at the University of Washington Physical Therapy Center on Wednesday nights. But, as with overexertion during a triathlon, there is a price to be paid for enduring treatment for cancer. The Adriamycin she received during her chemotherapy has a potential long-term side effect of causing heart disease. As a consequence, her doctors advised her not to raise her heart rate into the aerobic zone (i.e. stay below 75% of her maximum heart rate) for six to eight months after her last Adriamycin dose. Her last dose was January 6th, so she has just reached that milestone. It will take until approximately Christmas this year for all the chemotherapy drugs to be flushed from her system. The radiation sunburn has also faded, but she must continue to monitor exposure. This tissue has already been exposed to a lifetime’s worth of high-dose radiation. It can withstand lower dose exposure for future x-rays and mammograms, but additional high-dose would almost certainly lead to new types of cancer. No more topless sunbathing!
Other than the scars from surgery, the most permanent reminder of her experience concerns the swelling and redness on her breast and ribcage. The swelling has since extended to her left arm, and has been diagnosed as a form of lymphedema, or inflammation due to an accumulation of lymph fluid. The lymphatic system is like the body’s sewage system, removing wastes from the body’s cells by circulating a clear fluid called lymph. The clusters of lymph nodes located in the neck, armpits and groin act as processing centers, helping to circulate and cleanse the lymph. Having had nodes removed from her left armpit, Jess has lost a portion of her body’s ability to process the lymph. The lymphatic system is arranged in quadrants, so in Jess the upper left quadrant of her body has been compromised. Essentially the lymph pump and filter in this quadrant now have reduced capacity. As a result, the lymph in excess of what her reduced node cluster can handle actually pools in the surrounding tissue, which is what caused the intermittent swelling and redness. Things like heat, exertion and rapid altitude (pressure) changes also influence the extent of the swelling. The swelling can cause some discomfort, but infection is the real danger. Lymph is rich in protein, offering bacteria a wonderful place to grow if the lymph isn’t circulated and cleansed.
Lymphedema is permanent but treatable condition, with treatment consisting of moving the lymph from the compromised quadrant to one of the other node clusters. In some cases, the nodes and lymph can be “trained” to compensate and automatically redirect the lymphatic flow, but generally the process involves manually relocating the lymph through a series of stretches and massage techniques. Even though lymph typically doesn’t like to cross the so-called median (an imaginary vertical line dividing the body into left and right halves), Jess has had some success in using physical therapy to retrain the lymph to do so. Lymphedema manual drainage massage is a highly specialized field, and though the technique is quite common in Europe it is only beginning to see widespread use in the US. There are actually two different schools and philosophies of massage, the German (“Ve vill march ze lymph from here to here und it vill like it!”) and the French (“ahhy monsieur lymph, why don’t you come over ‘eer and ‘ave a nice croissant, eh?”). Jess has a daily regimen of maintenance exercises she must do to keep the swelling in check, and she now wears a compression sleeve when flying.
The loss of lymph nodes in her left armpit also means the upper left quadrant of her body has reduced infection-fighting capacity. She has to be very careful about injuries to her left arm, particularly cuts and burns. In addition to increasing her general level of caution, she now has to wear gloves while gardening or doing dishes, or working around any other potential sources of infection. Lymphedema management and guarding against infection can become serious quality of life issues for some cancer survivors, but so far Jess is doing quite well.
Despite the scars, tattoos and swelling, life has settled down somewhat. Jess’ hair is now about an inch and quarter long, and remains mostly taupe-colored. It’s also very soft and very curly. Energy-wise she is back to about 80% of her pre-diagnosis level, and is still a big fan of afternoon naps. She is back working full time, and looking forward to participating in the Seattle “Race For The Cure” (a 5K race held nationwide to benefit breast cancer research) on September 13th, where she will wear a pink survivor’s cap. Though her prognosis is good, she is at the greatest statistical risk of recurrence over the next three years. She will have follow-up visits to both her medical and radiological oncologists in September, as well as blood work to look for “tumor indicators”. She will have another mammogram and follow-up with her surgeon in October, then she will have mammograms and blood tests done every six months for the next three years. After that, the checkups will become yearly. Today, she is celebrating her 41st birthday by taking the day off work and attending the grand opening of the new Nordstrom flagship store in downtown Seattle with her mother and a few close friends. Even after all the various therapies she’s been through, retail therapy is one she’s still willing to endure.
That should pretty much bring everybody up to speed — my apologies again for the delay. If any of you are recent additions to the distribution list and are interested in “back issues” of Jess-O-Grams, it’s best to reply to my home e-mail address (old email address removed) since Boeing is going through another “phase” and as a contract engineer my continued employment here is suspect at best. Any openings out there for a soon-to-be-unemployed engineer/writer? As usual, please distribute these to anyone you think may want to know, or contact me with names and e-mail addresses to add to the list. Your thoughts and prayers have been invaluable to us over the past nine months, and we can’t thank you enough. Look for another update sometime in September/October, and take care in the meantime.
Father’s Day, Redux
I wrote the original Father’s Day blog entry back in 2011 to celebrate what would have been my father’s 81st birthday. It was a soft, adulatory piece that overlooked many of the rougher edges of family life with this man, but while it is the harshest truths that bring the most perspective, there is limited virtue in total disclosure. The seed and focus of the piece was not that he was a flawless or even sympathetic character, but more my growing awareness of habits and behaviors I mockingly attributed to him that I myself was beginning to manifest, and the more subtle ways in which my own contemporary actions appeared to be at least in part the result of his presence in my early life.
On this, my twentieth Father’s Day holiday since his death, this burgeoning awareness still continues. My father was a glazier by trade, and in addition to working for several Sacramento-area firms (Basco, Combustion Engineering, and Western Shower Door are the ones I remember) he also owned his own business. As children, we often spent time in his shop on weekends, though in retrospect I think this was to get us out of my mother’s hair. We would “work” at tasks like sorting screws (separating the various fasteners used in assembling shower door frames from a large pile that had become inexplicably combined) and sweeping the shop floor. In addition to being paid some actual money, there was compensation by way of forklift rides and lunch at McDonalds.
In addition to household chores, these were unknowingly my first lessons in business: being paid an hourly rate for a specific job with a specific definition of completion and success. Both my parents were believers in the nobility of hard work and self-esteem through accomplishment, and my father’s approach to parenting was one of hands-on demonstration accompanied by clichés: “Measure twice, cut once”, “A job worth doing is a job worth doing well”, “Every job has three parts – the preparation, the doing and the clean-up”, etc. To my adult ears these still sound hopelessly simplistic and trite, but words were not my father’s forte. I think he used them to simply fill the air around his hands showing us what needed doing and how it was to be done, whether he was teaching us chess or racquetball or how to line up a bevel cut on the chop saw.
What I am only now beginning to realize is that there were also larger lessons in play. My siblings and I continued to work in his shop on and off for years, including full-time during a few summers all the way into our college years. This was actual work, and not only introduced us to the broader economic reality of taxes and withholding, but also gave us a front-row seat from which to observe the dedication and sacrifice required to run a successful business. My father was the owner, but he was also the primary sales person, did all the invoicing and accounting, and still did much of the actual installation work. I can still see him sitting at his messy office desk, poring over the details of inventory and payroll.
We also got to see the toll this job took on his body. Moving both the materials required to construct mirrors and shower doors into and around the shop as well as lifting the finished products onto and off of his truck rack was seriously physically demanding. Even with employees who eventually took over most of the lifting duties, he developed back issues and severe bursitis in both elbows, which required ongoing cortisone injections to manage the pain and inflammation. His own vices, chief among them drinking, smoking and a penchant for large quantities of red meat, cannot have helped his condition. Although he stopped both drinking and smoking in his later years and remained very physically active, the corrosive course of heart disease that would later claim his life was established early in his working years.
After nearly 30 years of working for other companies, I am approaching the midway point in my first year as a business owner. While I am fortunate both to be in a services industry that doesn’t require inventory (let alone inventory that requires forklifts or other heavy lifting) and I have a business partner that shares responsibility for day-to-day operations, I now sit at my own messy desk and tussle with questions of sales, revenue, margin, staffing, payroll, taxes, insurance, and a thousand other details. I have a new and profound respect for this aspect of my father’s life, and am once again surprised by the ever-evolving parallels to my own.
I don’t know if my father was actually the best businessman or not. I was only really just getting to know him as an adult when he passed away. He died at a relatively young age of sixty-seven, barely fifteen years older than I find myself now. By comparison, his identical twin brother is alive and nearing ninety. What I do know is that he worked hard, provided jobs for other people, and kept his business going for several decades. Whether this atones for any other shortcomings is not for me to say. Another fatherly aphorism comes to mind: ”There are only two kinds of jobs – shower before and shower after”. I’ve done my share of both, and like to think I’ve done each with the same thoughtfulness and integrity. I can confidently say that this approach did not come wholly from the tutelage of my father (my mother was clearly a strong role model as well in this regard), but there is no question that he was a major influence. For this reason I hold him among the better coaches and mentors I’ve had, and on this holiday above most his absence is keenly felt.
My father and I at my wedding in September 1993. This would
turn out to be the last picture taken of just the two of us.
Catching Daylight
In the summer of 1977, I had only one goal: to be cool. As a young man a few months away from his thirteenth birthday, there were of course many aspirational definitions of cool. One was the fashion kind of cool, embracing the sartorial trends of the day in hopes of drawing the attention of the girls at school. This helps explain my predilection at that age for overly long hair, overly short cutoff jeans, and overly high white athletic socks. Shoes were another matter. Being one of four kids and living on acreage on the outskirts of a small town, our budget for shoes was both meager and divided, and our parents tended to steer us towards mostly functional footwear.
“Town” was the small farming community of Elk Grove, a mostly rural former stagecoach stop south of the California state capital of Sacramento. After several years in Sacramento proper, my parents had decided to move to this quiet little township that boasted fewer than 3800 residents in the 1970 census, and after about two years decided to move again about six miles out to the east end of Sheldon Road in the open country that surrounded the small civic center.
But even small country schools have social trends, economic strata, ruthless peer pressure, and children struggling to find a way to just fit in; to belong. I did well academically, but this was no basis for cool if you didn’t have wardrobe to back it up. When the hip shoes became brown suede oxfords with wavy plastic bottoms, I was still sporting the plain black Keds I’d worn for (what seemed like) an eternity. When I finally convinced my parents that my standing in school and my future success depended on me getting the right shoes, they eventually relented. I remember the day I showed up to school proudly displaying my new oxfords — made by Kinney, with the “GASS” logo (an acronym of Kinney’s “Great American Shoe Store” tagline) molded into the bottom, only to find that the cools kids were now wearing blue athletic shoes with a white swoosh on the side. It appeared that the combination of our financial circumstances and the need to have shoes that could stand up to heavy outdoor chores would dictate that I would always be at least one fad behind, and that this kind of cool would be difficult to achieve.
As pressing as my footwear needs were, the latter part of the seventies was also marked by the disintegration of my parent’s marriage. In just a few short years, they had shifted from building their dream home in the country to becoming precariously estranged. This particular summer marked nearly a year since my father had moved out in what they called a “trial separation”. I look at their struggles now with adult sensibilities, but at the time I had no experience or even the vocabulary to process what they were going through, and consequently I mostly found ways to ignore or escape their foundering reality.
Fortunately, life in the country offered ample avenues of escape. Our house was situated in the middle of a rectangular parcel of land that ran north/south off of Sheldon. The property was approximately three acres in square footage, though technically an acre is (perhaps archaically) defined as a rectangular area measuring one chain (sixty-six feet) by one furlong (six hundred and sixty feet), while our land was nearly nine hundred feet long by about a hundred and fifty feet wide. The southern or “back” third of the property – the rough equivalent of a single acre — was fenced off for livestock, as was the northern or “front” third aside from the driveway, which left the middle third open for the house and yard. After dodging the cattle and/or sheep we regularly kept on the back acre, you could also hop the very back fence into another large field that adjoined our property. The field was large enough that my father and uncle often took us skeet shooting there, and it was also home to a wide array of rodents and snakes. I remember bringing home two large gopher snakes I had tracked and killed in this field, only to discover that my father was actually deathly afraid of snakes.
This field also contained a huge oak tree just a few yards from our fence. I spent countless days and hours in this tree, climbing up to branches thinner than my wrist, gyrating on the tire swing we rigged to a large overhanging branch, and just hanging out in the nook of the trunk where the major limbs converged and contemplating my juvenile universe while trying to avoid the ubiquitous red ants. Further south and over yet another fence was a set of railroad tracks. Many pennies met their untimely and compressed end on these tracks, accompanied by intense (and largely fact-free) debate as to whether a penny could actually derail a full-size locomotive. A short walk southeast along the rails led to a large warehouse paralleling the tracks that housed the local feed and tack shop – Sheldon Feed and Supply. At any given time we had some combination of a few Polled Hereford cattle, Suffolk sheep, pigs, chickens, rabbits, ducks, and geese to go along the with the family dog and various cats, and “going to the feed store” was a routine occurrence. Here was where we bought nearly everything to keep our growing ranch running – bales of hay and huge bags of pelletized food for the larger animals, bales of straw for bedding, the grainy chicken feed (and ground oyster shells to make their egg shells stronger), food troughs and water bubblers for our menagerie of smaller animals, steel fence posts, wire fencing (both the large-meshed “hog wire” and the smaller, honeycombed “chicken wire”), rope, tarps, and all manner of tools. The best part of the feed store was the Coke machine, a true chest-type dispenser with refrigerated Coca-Cola in glass bottles. After putting in a quarter, you lifted the lid, grabbed the top of an available bottle by the tips of your fingers and guided it along the metal rails to the corner mechanical flaps where you pulled it up and out. A quick flick under the bottle opener and you could sit in the shade on the loading dock and watch the business of farm commerce unfold with bored adolescent indifference.
If I tired of the fields, trees and tracks to the south, I could traipse around the neighbor’s property to the east of us through the thick groves of foxtails to a rainwater-fed lowland we called The Swamp. In retrospect it was probably highly unsanitary if not outright unsafe to swim there, but it offered a refreshingly muddy way to cool off from the California Central Valley heat in the absence of a swimming pool. There was also a wide variety of bugs, birds, turtles and crayfish (which we called “mudbugs”) to harass with rocks and sticks in the way that young men seem compelled to do. On a dare I once crawled through a culvert from The Swamp to another fetid, brackish pond that lay on the opposite side of Sheldon, which bent south at Excelsior Road on its way to meet Grant Line Road towards the Sheldon Feed and Supply.
The property to the west of us was owned by a family named Torgerson, who primarily used it to graze horses and raise alfalfa hay for sale. At harvest, the pungent and slightly earthy scent of the freshly-cut alfalfa would drift over our property for days as it lay drying before being baled. Fenced, flat and featureless, it offered no real opportunities for adventure other than occasionally feeding the horses across the fence. During my parent’s separation my mother went back to college at night to earn an updated teaching credential, and the older Torgerson girls would watch us on the evenings she attended classes.
Nearly three hundred feet of gravel driveway connected our house to Sheldon Road, which provided a first-rate bicycle racetrack. At twelve, I was just beginning to be allowed to ride my bike to school and around the spread-out neighborhood. As an added thrill, our eastern neighbor’s aggressive Australian Shepard would leap from his perch on their steps and chase us down the driveway, barking until he lost interest in us amidst the dust our bikes kicked up or was called to heel by his owner — an older gentleman named Frank Butler. Frank and his wife (the dog’s name was Prince, but the wife’s name now escapes me completely) lived on a tract nearly identical in size and shape to ours, except that their house was situated north on the parcel, just off the road, and the remaining acreage was divided into various pens and training paddocks for the stately Arabian horses they raised. Many ranches in the Elk Grove area bred and raised horses, mostly Appaloosas, Pintos, Quarter Horses, Morgans, and Palominos. The electrified fence that surrounded most of the Butler’s pens provided additional fodder for youthful dares.
The first six trees lining the driveway were older almond trees that were on the property when we moved there. Their brilliant white blossoms in spring were beautiful, but their relatively short height, fragile branches, and rough, scaly bark made them less than ideal for climbing. In our first few years there my parents planted nearly thirty more trees along the driveway, both to provide shade for the driveway and to prevent soil runoff from the natural drainage ditch that bisected the front acre.
The copious outdoor recreation aside, the house itself also offered ways to isolate myself from the marital turmoil that seemed to pervade our lives. This was the first house in which I had my own room, and I could close off the world by shutting the door to the hallway and sliding shut the vinyl divider to the space occupied by my older brother’s room. My walls were adorned with science fiction movie posters and pop culture pinups, and various model airplanes I had painstakingly constructed hung from the ceiling. An added feature was the Nutone intercom system my parents had opted to have installed. In our main living room was a wall-mounted console that contained an AM radio, a set of switches that corresponded to each room in the house, and a record player that actually folded up into a cavity in the wall. You could use the intercom to converse with any or all the rooms, and you could also broadcast the radio or record player to any selected rooms. I soon discovered that I could load the record player with up to ten of my favorite albums (each album would drop down the spindle into position to be played as soon as the preceding album had finished), set the intercom for just my room, and raise the volume to the point where my parents and siblings would complain. AM and FM radio at that time wasn’t as differentiated as it is today, and nearly every station offered a wide variety of programming. I could hear John Denver, Crystal Gayle and even Sammy Davis Jr. on the same station as Peter Frampton, the Steve Miller Band and the Eagles. I filled my room and my ears with these artists along with Kiss, Boston, Ted Nugent, Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith – a far cry from my mother’s preference for the Kingston Trio, Andy Williams and Herb Alpert. In the days when our television had to be manually adjusted between the seven channels we actually received (with an additional manual adjustment of the antenna for better reception), this was pure magic.
In addition to working on models, most of my time in my room was spent reading. I was a voracious reader, and devoured everything from borrowed library books on lasers and spaceflight to monthly selections from the Science Fiction Book Club (all of which I still own) to various magazines. Even as a pre-teen I subscribed to multiple periodicals, including Starlog (a fledgling sci-fi publication started in 1976), National Geographic (which in addition to its educational value offered titillating images of topless native women) and Boy’s Life (the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America). But the mag that occupied most of my attention was Skateboarder. Driven by a surfer ethos that combined the laid-back Southern California beach lifestyle with a healthy dose of punk rebellion, skateboarding as a sport was just beginning to take off. Skateboarder offered page after page of long-haired SoCal rebels cranking their way through public parks, viaducts, and emptied-out backyard pools with their ever-expanding repertoire of gravity-defying tricks playing out on any available patch of concrete. For me, the beaches of Malibu or the urban Los Angeles skate scene might as well have been on a different planet, but I was fascinated nonetheless. Day after day I would lay on my bed listening to the music coming through the small, tinny intercom speaker in my room and reading about the exploits of Tony Alva, Doug “Pineapple” Saladino, Stacy Peralta, Shogo Kubo, Tom Inouye, Micki Alba and others, and imagining myself pumping up the vertical walls of a pool and “catching air” – actually jetting up and out of a pool clutching the edge of my board and then reentering in a smooth graceful arc.
I was reasonably good at many sports, but not overly athletic. At this age baseball was my clear sport of choice, though the filled-out body that would eventually bring me some high-school conference-level success in both baseball and wrestling was still a few years away. In 1977 my physique remained trapped in a kind of lanky, coltish awkwardness, but it seemed to mirror the skaters I saw in the magazines – these weren’t musclebound jocks, these were skinny punks. In this comparison I found both inspiration and a potential path to cool: I would become a skateboarder.
The first and most immediate barrier was that even with some limited exposure to the sport, I really didn’t know how to ride a skateboard. Despite growing up near the Sacramento River Delta and only about two and half hours from Lake Tahoe, I had never skied on water or snow, let alone surfed, which according to my magazine research was the natural transition sport to skateboarding. Undaunted, I decided that my roller skating experience would be sufficient. The nearby town of Franklin (a scant seven miles southwest of Elk Grove) had a roller rink – King’s Skate Country – which had been a staple of school field trips and birthday parties for years. A session at the rink consisted of various kinds of skating activities called out by a disc jockey that played the accompanying music – separate skate sessions for boys and for girls, rounds just for couples, rounds only for skating backwards, reverse skate (moving around the rink clockwise instead of the usual counterclockwise), games like Red Light / Green Light (in which you made your way on skates laterally across the rink, moving only when the DJ said Green Light! and freezing when they said Red Light! – any kind of movement on Red Light got you eliminated) and Limbo tournaments where you had to duck and skate under an adjustable bar that got set progressively lower.
Even here the hierarchies of proficiency presented themselves – beginner couples moved around the rink simply holding hands. The more experienced couples would skate with one arm around the waist of their partner and the others clasped together in front of them. This required their legs to move in unison, lest their skate wheels collide and send them tumbling onto the hard, urethane-coated wood rink floor. The most advanced couples were those that could skate facing each other like ballroom dance partners, with one partner moving with his or her back towards the direction of travel. This required moving in tandem with the added difficulty of one partner skating backwards. The top of the skating social pyramid, however, were the roller hockey players. In addition to their superb skating skills, honed through years of playing competitive hockey on roller skates, they also had cool-looking team jackets that proclaimed them members of a fairly exclusive brotherhood. Yet another avenue of hip where I was unable to trespass, let alone belong. In addition to not playing hockey, I never mastered skating backwards and never lasted many rounds in Limbo. But what I could do is to go around the rink at relatively high speed – “Speed Skate” was always my favorite round. Accordingly, I figured that my familiarity with moving along on wheels and using my body to control turns could be parlayed into the skills necessary for skateboarding.
I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with skateboards themselves, either. When we lived “in town”, among the four children we owned two secondhand skateboards, and had brought them to the country with us. One was a small plywood board on which you could barely place both feet, with small aluminum wheels containing steel ball bearings that allowed the wheels to turn – very similar to our lace-up “outdoor” roller skates. The other was a slightly longer fiberglass board that had a little more room and a little bit of flex you could feel when you stood on it. It, too, had essentially metal roller skate wheels, which was the principal limitation of this type of construction. Being small and hard, these wheels tended to trap any small bit of debris the rider encountered against the ground rather than rolling over it. If the debris was hard, like a small bit of wood or stone, this would stop the forward turning of the wheel. The same was true of our skates, but if one wheel of one skate stopped, you had the potential of quickly moving the other foot forward and catching your balance. This was not true of these skateboards – any wheel skid would send the unlucky rider sprawling forward with essentially no warning. Having led to a few bloodied knees, these boards were only used sparingly and were why – despite my skating experience – I hadn’t yet developed any real feel for skateboarding.
The next obstacle was that, unlike the streets and sidewalks of our more urban setting, the house in the country offered very little in the way of places to skate. The only relatively flat, paved surface of any size nearby was at our local elementary school, about a two-mile bike ride away. Even though the distance was manageable, most surfaces at the school were coarse asphalt that was nearly impossible to ride, especially as a relative beginner. On the east side of our house, immediately outside the garage, sat a twelve foot by twenty foot pad made of poured concrete. I think my parents put it there with the intent of using it for parking, but they always parked their cars on the gravel in front of our house or the continuation of the gravel driveway than ran past the parking pad to the edge of our back yard. In our years there, the pad had been used mostly for holding the contents of our garage when it needed sweeping or hosing out, but also occasionally for play – bouncing tennis balls against the garage door, serving as the court for a basketball hoop mounted on a post at the southern end, and even providing a small skating rink. This, then, would be my skateboard training ground.
I had pretty much learned to stay balanced and upright on the board when the wheels would actually turn, but this was nearly as problematic on the parking pad as it was on the school’s asphalt. Even when I swept it clean from the dirt and gravel that would inevitably find its way from the driveway, there was still the problem of the wooden dividers that sectioned the pad and served as stress-relief joints in the concrete. While they produced a moderate and tolerable thump-thump under our roller skates, they tended to catch the skateboard wheels and send me stumbling. Worn-out jeans and skinned knees were more a part of everyday life in the country, but it quickly became clear that if a change of venue couldn’t be found, then a change of equipment was in order.
With money earned from my weekly allowance (based on the successful completion of the many chores needed to keep an agrarian household functioning) and my summer job of working in a neighbor’s orchard, I bought a new skateboard at a local garage sale. It was about the same size as the fiberglass one we already owned, but was made of molded plastic and had slightly larger urethane wheels, which were more forgiving on uneven surfaces. This allowed me to actually begin to skate in small ovals on the pad, with two or three quick push-offs with my foot along the length of the pad to prepare for the tight turn at either end. I quickly moved from doing simple loops around the pad to adding in a few tricks and maneuvers gleaned from Skateboarder. I started with simple slalom turns, using my hips to turn the board left and right in small repeated chicanes that combined to form an elongated, serpentine motion. Where the pro riders in the magazines did seemingly insane slalom courses down steep streets, weaving in and out of a line of obstacles – usually orange traffic cones – in timed competitions, I was content to string together one or two turns around bits of scrap lumber or the previously unwelcome small stones I had set spaced out in a single-file line.
I then graduated to kick turns, shifting my back foot and my weight to the very trailing edge of the board (the tail) to raise the forward wheels off the ground and turn the front, or nose, of the board in alternating directions. From here there was a natural evolution to three-sixties – keeping the nose of the board in the air and seeing how many times I could spin around in a complete circle. The learning curve here was a bit steeper, and practicing three-sixties often sent the board skittering away while I fell backwards. The seats of my shorts were now seeing more wear than my knees, but I took this as a sign of my maturing skills.
As invested as I was in learning these basic moves and tricks – collectively called freestyling in the skater lingo – I was beginning to get a bit bored with it all occurring on the flatness of the pad. I longed for the opportunity to leave the horizontal world – skating down into a pool and actually achieving enough speed to scale the vertical deep-end wall and catch some air or run the axles of my board along the coping in a move called a grinder. Grinders could be either frontside or backside, depending on whether the front or back of your body faced the wall of the pool during the move. Skateboarding at the time was generally uncharted territory, and skaters made up tricks and the associated nomenclature as they went along. Terms like Ollies, inverts and handplants peppered the Skateboarder articles. The axle housings themselves became known as trucks, ostensibly after railroad cars. The trucks on a railroad car consist of an assembly of wheels, axles, bearings, and suspension, which pivots flexibly underneath the deck and chassis of a railroad car. The layout on a skateboard is conceptually nearly identical, though none of my skateboards to date had any form of suspension. All these tricks and the tantalizing possibilities of the vertical world seemed out of reach until once again Skateboarder provided inspiration: To extend my skills and move beyond the flat confines of the pad, I needed to build a ramp.
As often occurs in rural environments, you make do with what you have. My father’s other faults aside, he was both industrious and resourceful. For a businessman (a glazier by trade), he proved himself quite adept at building fences and chicken coops and rabbit hutches and pen shelters to keep our animals out of the sun and rain. I never learned what inspired him and my mother to move to the country (both are now gone, so the question fades unanswered), but perhaps this was part of the draw for him – to work with his hands on his own land. Whatever the motivation, he was prone to keeping building materials around, and with his departure I felt free to use these resources for my own purposes. Around the back of the house I found a four by eight foot sheet of plywood in relatively good condition that would form the basis of my new endeavor.
My first attempt was to align the short edge of the plywood with the center of the driveway-side edge of the parking pad, raise the board up about thirty degrees to the ground, and block the higher end up with other scrap lumber. This met the technical definition of a ramp, but there were two key flaws. First, the angle at which the plywood met the concrete was too severe, and threw me headlong onto the ramp on my first attempt. After picking splinters out of my palms and making a second run in which I elevated the nose slightly as I hit the ramp, I discovered that the plywood flexed too much under my weight. This caused any momentum I had to evaporate, and I never made it more than a few feet up the ramp. I played with digging the edge a little further down and adding support to the middle of the ramp, but could make no further progress. After further study of photos of makeshift backyard ramps in Skateboarder, it occurred to me that what I needed was some curvature in the ramp. This would put the “takeoff” edge of the ramp closer to level with the parking pad for a more continuous transition, and would more closely approximate the curved bottom edge of a concrete pool.
Plywood by its very nature doesn’t want to bend, so I had to resort to a bit of ingenuity combined with brute force. After several unsuccessful approaches to getting the plywood to bend and hold its new shape, I ultimately succeeded by soaking the plywood with a garden hose to make it more pliable, loading the heaviest thing I could find (in this case, our garden rototiller combined with several large logs from our woodpile) onto the middle of the ramp to induce a curve, and then nailing the bent plywood to a post anchored in the gravel below the ramp. While not a thing of particular grace or beauty, and without enough length or bend to achieve a true vertical surface, it nonetheless appeared to be a bona-fide skateboard ramp on par with some of the photographs I had seen, and I set about conquering it.
Mastery proved elusive, replaced instead with a slow, tedious process of increasing frustration and pain. No matter how much speed I could get up, I could never seem to get more than halfway up the ramp before my inertia would fail and I would have to do a rapid hundred and eighty degree kick-turn and descend. Falls were frequent, and I had taken to wearing pads for my elbows and knees. The pros in the magazines didn’t seem to bother with helmets, so nether did I, and it was probably a small caliber miracle that I didn’t break any bones or sustain any major head trauma.
Day after day I plied the ramp with no apparent improvement, until one afternoon I spied a kid walking slowly down our driveway with something under his arm. When he got closer I realized two things: I had no idea who this was, and the thing he was carrying was a skateboard. Not just any board, but something right out of the magazines. It was nearly a foot longer than mine, and made from some kind of dark, polished wood. I recognized the Independent brand of trucks from ads in Skateboarder, and they sported big, red urethane wheels that were easily twice the diameter of mine.
He was taller than me and clearly older, and was wearing shorts that appeared to have been made as shorts rather than having been converted to shorts by shearing off the legs of a pair of jeans. Above the shorts was a Left Bank velour shirt, the kind most of my contemporaries would only wear for school picture day. In the v-shaped neck opening was a strand of puka shells. He introduced himself as Kevin, Frank Butler’s grandson. He had been sent to stay with his grandparents for a few weeks (“in the country”, he said almost derisively). He had seen me and my ramp, and was wondering if he could give it a shot. My first reaction was to reflect on the strangeness of him having brought his skateboard from wherever he lived to a place that had very little odds of having suitable surfaces, but I didn’t say anything. On the one hand, he smelled of city and of money, but on the other I was dying to see how that skateboard performed, and I told him to go ahead. He strolled casually to the far end of the pad, then did a few quick pumps and shot up the ramp. On his first run the nose of his board cleared the far end of the ramp during his kick turn. On the second run he actually caught air, grabbing the side of his board with his hand to guide it around for the landing. He came down smiling, rode back to the far edge of the pad, dismounted and gave me a quick chin-up nod, indicating that it was my turn.
I was somewhere between mesmerized and stupefied. I had never actually seen anybody catch air in real life, let alone right outside my garage. His mechanics also threw me. I rode with my right foot on the tail and my left foot forward – facing to the right of the direction I was moving. He rode with his right foot forward. While I approached the ramp from the left side, then kick-turned clockwise to descend on the right side, he did the complete opposite. In baseball, left-handed pitchers used to be a bit of a novelty and became known as southpaws – the same with left-hand dominant boxers. In skateboarding, right foot forward riders were also somewhat unusual and were called goofy-footers. Goofy-foot also applied to right foot forward surfers, but there is some controversy about whether it originated from a 1930’s Walt Disney film in which the animated dog character Goofy surfed with his right foot forward, or if it just derived from the older and quintessentially American expression goofy, meaning ridiculous, silly, nutty, etc. Etymology and equipment envy aside, one thing was clear — Kevin wasn’t goofy, he was cool.
Rattled, I lined up and made my run. I made the same feeble ascent up half the ramp that I had made hundreds of times, punctuated by the loud thunk of my front wheels returning to the ramp as opposed to his smoothly rolling reentry. I skated sheepishly back to the far side of the pad and awaited his critique. Rather than commenting, he just made another run. Following another beautiful liftoff – I could see all the way to Sheldon road between the end of the ramp and the edge of his board – he made another perfect landing. We spent another few hours trading runs and not talking, until his grandfather called down the driveway — in tones just a few degrees more pleasant than when he called his dog — that it was time for dinner.
Kevin came shuffling down the driveway the next afternoon as well, and we took up the alternating run rhythm where we had left off the previous day. After one of my more dismal attempts, Kevin made an unpleasant face. I thought he was going to say something snarky or derisive, but instead he asked if he could try a run with my board. I happily obliged. He put one foot on the board, then eyed the ramp and shoved off. Instead of his usual gravity-defying ascent, he managed to get about a third of the way up the ramp before the board shot out from beneath him. He landed on his feet in the gravel next to the ramp in such a casual fashion that a bystander would have thought that the entire maneuver was intentional. He retrieved the board and walked back to the far side of the pad making the same unpleasant face. Still silent, he set off towards the ramp again. He made it about the same distance up, but was able to stay aboard and make a noisy, awkward turn to descend. It was the only clumsy maneuver I would ever see him make. He skated back to me, and said simply, “This board sucks…try mine”. I declined, worrying that I would somehow break it and never be able to pay for it, but he insisted. I acquiesced, and took a few warm-up laps around the pad to get used to it. The ride was nothing short of amazing. Between the large wheels and the suspension in the trucks, I never even felt the wooden dividers. But the most astonishing thing was how fast I seemed to be able to go – there was no feasible comparison with my smaller plastic board.
Once I had a bit of comfort with the way his board moved, I backed up and took a run at the ramp. To my surprise (and delight), I easily made it more than halfway up the ramp. After a relatively smooth turn I skated back to Kevin, sporting a massive grin. He smiled and gave me another quick chin-up nod in wordless acknowledgment. From that point we alternated runs, but both used his board.
Over the next few days this process repeated, and I slowly made it closer and closer to the top edge of the ramp. On the day that Kevin announced would be his last before returning to his parent’s home (I don’t think I ever caught where this was, but his limited conversation implied that it was some distance), I was determined to lift off the ramp the way he could. Despite my best effort, I couldn’t seem to get anywhere close – I was hopelessly earthbound. On my last run on his board, I finally managed to get the at least the front wheels past the edge of the ramp. As I handed his board back to him and thanked him for its use, he said, “Well, you didn’t catch any air, but you caught some serious daylight on that last one!” With that, he turned and headed back up the driveway. I would never see him again.
In the days that followed, I returned to my plastic board and a clipped-wing exploration of the lower third of the ramp. Later my high school and college physics classes would give me concepts and formulas to explain what I knew intuitively from my flailing – speed was essential. Rolling on flat ground you were mostly fighting the friction between your wheels and the ground and a negligible amount of air resistance, but once you moved up an incline like a ramp, gravity comes into more significant play. Inertia is a function of both mass and speed, so the higher the speed the higher the inertia. This is somewhat intuitively apparent, but what isn’t as obvious is the energy component. In classical physics, the kinetic energy of a body, or the energy a body possesses due to its motion, is also a product of mass and speed, but is a function of the speed squared, so a doubling in speed is a quadrupling of kinetic energy. For a certain mass, a certain kinetic energy is required to overcome both the friction and gravity, which in turn requires a certain minimum speed. With my board’s small wheels and heavy friction on the concrete and plywood, there was simply no way to get up enough speed in the limited distance of the parking pad for me to make a serious attempt at the far edge of the ramp.
It was clear that I needed another equipment upgrade, and with a newfound confidence in my skating skills I returned to my magazines for more research. Based on my fresh experience with Kevin’s rig, I now had a much more refined sense of what I was looking for. I priced out the components I wanted, and convinced my mother to make up the difference between what they cost and what I had on the promise of more chores and future earnings from my orchard labors. I further convinced her to write a check to be sent with my order form to a post office box address in Los Angeles – not something she was used to doing.
In a few short weeks my new board arrived. The board itself, or the deck, was a 27” solid oak board made by Sims, one the leading skateboard manufacturers of the time. It was a “taperkick” model, which meant the tail had a built-up section of wood to give additional leverage on turns and maneuvers that required the nose to be raised. I had added the extra-wide “full” trucks from the Tracker Truck Company – rapidly becoming famous for their suspension and smooth ride. Wheels in those days ranged in diameter from about 45mm to about 75mm (one of my first exposures to the metric system), and were made in a variety of compounds for different stickiness or grip for different skating applications and styles. I wanted something in a medium diameter (large enough for overcoming the roughness of my skating environment, but not as large as those used purely in downhill skating) and with a harder compound made for a combination of speed and grip, so I had ordered a set of 60mm “Hot Juice” wheels in neon orange from the OJ (“Orange Juice”) Wheel company.
Within minutes of assembling this new instrument of diversion I was out doing laps on the pad and adjusting the suspension, and I quickly renewed my acquaintance with the upper portions of the ramp. Bolstered by this success, I kept at it into the evening hours, and almost every day for the remainder of the summer I would find time to go out and get a few runs in. Pumping and turning, further and higher. Pushing against gravity. Pushing against my parents. Pushing against the cool kids. Pushing. While I never did catch any true air, I got to the point where I could reliably get three wheels off the end of the ramp during my turn. Over time my movements became smooth and practiced, and I began to feel a hint of what the skaters in the magazines called flow – the seamless and almost meditative interaction of the rider, the board and the ramp, where the universe slows down and narrows in to just the singularity of the next move and a free and unencumbered sense of motion.
As all summers do, this one gave way to fall and school and other distractions, and my time on the ramp became sparser as the changing weather brought more domestic distress. A separation would become a nasty and contested divorce. There would be divisions of property and court-ordered visitations. In the coming precipitous fall from middle class grace the house would be sold (with the ramp still standing), and we would move away from our town, our schools, our friends, and our community. Yet in the midst of the burgeoning chaos, skateboarding had provided a welcome distraction. Practiced in solitude outside my house it never brought the social acknowledgment I hoped it would, but I was still too young to understand the folly of that kind of thinking. What skateboarding did bring was not only a welcome escape, but also intense excitement and the deep, personal satisfaction of accomplishment – another seed of self-esteem that, given time, would eventually lessen the need to find acceptance elsewhere. There were other seeds – a first leap from the high-dive platform at the community college pool where we learned to swim, a first “real” kiss outside a junior high school dance (thank you Kelly Robinson, I owe you immeasurably) – but to a large degree my ability to recognize and appreciate my own self-worth really began to take shape here, in a music-saturated bedroom and on a rectangular concrete stage. Months of dreaming, of trying and failing and trying again, the aid of a stranger I only knew for a few days, practice and more practice, all culminating in sublime moments of near perfection, catching daylight on a small town summer afternoon.
Catching Daylight, Summer 1977
Coda: Memories are wondrous and powerful things, but as the Chinese proverb goes, “The palest ink is better than the best memory”. As my readers will attest, I feel a fierce gravitational attraction to the autobiographical narrative, and this piece was inspired by finding the photograph above while sorting through my “childhood box” during our recent move. A fleeting but tangible instant of cool, captured forever. I don’t actually remember who took the photo, but the rips and crinkles attest to the innumerous timed I have held it and simply stared at it in a sort of recollective awe. I also found the photo below, which gives a better sense of the pad and the ramp:
Although the perspective is foreshortened, the large oak in the background is the one I described, and the house to the left is the first of several to be developed on the adjacent property to the south – not the first or only harbinger of change. This was taken in December 1979, just days before we piled the last of our belongings in that blue and white Volkswagen Bus and drove away for the final time.
From the views offered by the latest satellite mapping the house at 10460 Sheldon Road still exists, though there has been significant growth and development in the area. The town of Elk Grove itself has grown to a population of over a hundred and sixty thousand people, and by most reports has long lost any resemblance to the quiet town of my youth. In the outlying areas, entire subdivisions occupy what I remember as open fields. The new houses are mansions compared to the older and relatively austere farmhouses, but the overall locale appears to have retained pockets of its former rural character. Sheldon Feed and Supply still operates (they even have a Facebook page), though the last time I visited nearly 20 years ago the Coke machine had long since been removed. What looks like a large barn now sits roughly where our pigpen and chicken coop once stood. The trees along the driveway have reached heights unimaginable to a child who saw them planted and spent hours weeding and watering them. The front and back acres are still pasture, and the large oak over the south fence still stands, though now nestled in someone else’s back yard. On the east side of the house the concrete parking pad still sits in its gray patience, awaiting the dreams and imagination of yet another generation.
Another Cup
Her name is Moon (like the moon, she says in Korean-accented English, pointing to the sky). I wandered in to her coffee shop when we were in the early stages of moving to Snohomish County and it was apparent that her store would be the closest source of non-corporate coffee to our new house. Neighborhood coffee shops are one of the few experiences I cling to desperately as we complete our flight away from Seattle and King County, and her business (Hot Shots Espresso) is one of the very few in our new surrounds where one can actually walk in and sit down. Not that it’s built for the sit-down coffee enthusiast – despite having an exterior deck and ample room inside, there’s a total of one old table inside with four chairs and two stools at the Formica counter. Located a stone’s throw from the shores of Martha Lake, Hot Shots reminds me of the resort stores in the lake town where I went to high school — somewhat dilapidated, with fading signs advertising specials no longer available, supplies stacked up in the corners, and security cameras dotting the ceiling. Everything cries out for attention and updating. It is a business that appears to run on the edge, where there is only time, energy and money for fundamental upkeep but not improvement.
On my first visit it appeared that she caters to what I call the novelty coffee crowd, who favor their brew imbued with flavored syrups and crowned with various and sundry toppings. Her menu board boasts a startling variety of convoluted coffee concoctions from Snickers and Red Bull Lattes to White Chocolate Mochas and other fabricated confections that seem more at home in a bakery than a coffee shop. I don’t begrudge anyone their sweetened drinks, I just prefer my coffee less sugar-encumbered. While the board does list an “extra shot” for fifty cents, nowhere does just it just say “drip coffee” or “espresso”, so I was skeptical from the get-go.
I think of myself not so much as a coffee snob, but more as a coffee enthusiast, albeit with preferences as I grow older. I worked construction in my teenage years and developed an affinity for large quantities of convenience store coffee and survived college largely on various brands of instant, so I am certainly not above the most pedestrian of brews. In my book, even bad coffee is still, well, coffee. But having had the good fortune of moving to the Pacific Northwest during the ascendancy of the artisan coffee movement and having been able to travel much of the world and be exposed to really, really, really good coffee, over time I have developed a certain quality bar and a predilection for espresso in the afternoon. I am quite capable of creating my preferred beverage at home (via an older Jura/Capresso Impressa E8 machine with illy dark roast for those scoring at home), but there is something about the sensuous environment of coffee shops. I love the intoxicating smells and the intriguing hissing and gurgling sounds of hot beverages being prepared, not to mention the convenience of having someone else make your coffee. There is also the fact that smaller home espresso machines, no matter how high the quality, simply cannot generate the water pressure that commercial machines can, which (along with the romantic fog of memory) is the predominate reason it’s essentially impossible to reproduce that amazing espresso you had on that trip to Tuscany.
My first test of any coffee shop is always a dual barometer of their product and their knowledge. I nonchalantly order a doppio like I have been speaking Italian my whole life. If they have no idea what I’m talking about, I apologize and clarify that I would like a double espresso (doppio being nothing more than Italian for “double”). My experience is that those working retail counters are often just punching the clock at a job and are not overly concerned with the subtleties of the industry in which they are employed. Having also spent time in food service, I don’t necessarily hold their ambivalence against them.
When I ask Moon for a doppio, she has no idea what I’m talking about. Assuming a potential gap in our understanding due to language differences (while noting that her relative command of English is certainly better than my handful of Korean words), I change my order to a double espresso. She still seems a bit confused, puzzled by my seeming lack of interest in the dozens of bottles of flavored syrups and powders that line her counter. Correct, I say — no milk, no syrup, no ice, no whipped cream, no cocoa sprinkles. Still shooting me a quizzical look, she turns to her large, red La Marzocco commercial espresso machine like a conductor facing an orchestra and sets about pulling my shot. Mounted to a sturdy bench perpendicular to her counter, the machine is nearly her equal in height, and she leans forward and plays it like a seasoned pro — grinding, measuring, leveling, tamping, locking, and brewing in swift, practiced movements.
Coffee is a dance between the mystical bean itself and everything that happens to it after being picked, integral to which are the quality of the initial product and the processes of harvest, transport, roasting, grinding, and brewing — including the skill of the operator for non-automated brewing. Over the years I’ve paid extravagant sums for imported, fair-trade co-op shade-grown beans craft-roasted then hand-ground and brewed in a pour-over using specially filtered water that ultimately I thought tasted like muddy crap, and I’ve had mass-brewed truck stop coffee to die for, so there is clearly a complicated connection between all the various parameters.
It’s impossible to know which of these many facets influenced the cup that Moon set in front of me, but the net result was mostly unappealing. While the texture and consistency were good (not too thick or too watery) and it had the rich, creamy layer of crema characteristic of commercial machines, something just tasted off. Not burned or anything, but it just didn’t have the nice bitter bite of a good espresso. I found no fault with her preparation, and therefore suspect that the quality of coffee may be the culprit – using lower quality beans to keep costs down in what must already be a low-margin operation. I reflected that it probably tasted just fine when inundated with other flavors and sugary substances, so in one sense she may simply know her market.
At this point I made what in retrospect strikes me as a curious choice. Perhaps sadly, it would not be unprecedented for me to roll my eyes and exit the establishment while complaining loudly about the quality. But on this day something made me stay. My best guess is that if this was my closest non-Starbucks coffee store, at some level I felt it deserved more than one shot, literally and figuratively. It was also a gray and rainy March day, and there are certainly worse ways to spend time on such days than pausing over of a shot or two of bad coffee. Further, as part of our newness and transition to this area we were consciously looking to make new connections, and this seemed like a splendid opportunity.
As Moon singlehandedly worked both the counter and the drive-through (as I’m discovering, there must be some sort of ordinance in Snohomish County that requires coffee joints to sport drive-throughs, and Hot Shots is no exception), we began a staccato conversation. Interspersed by attending to customers, and in sometimes halting English, we took our first steps beyond the regular airy shopkeeper/customer banter.
She has owned Hot Shots for the last 15 years. She actually used to own and run two different locations, but found it exhausting to split time between them. She also had a significant problem with theft by employees when she wasn’t on the premises – caught red-handed by the cameras in plain view. So she now prefers to operate one store full-time with the help of a single trusted employee during the busier summer season.
There is a quickness and a borderline abruptness to her diction, which combined with English not being her native tongue makes parts of our conversation difficult. Perhaps confused by my insistence on sitting and savoring my coffee, and looking at my causal clothing, she asks “Not working today?” in her rapid-fire manner of speaking. It’s a reasonable question, given that her establishment clearly isn’t set up for patrons to work (no Wi-Fi and the aforementioned lack of tables), and I appear to have time to loiter. I took it as an honest inquiry, phrased as best she could, and not as any sort of observational judgement. I explained that I now work from my home and was just taking a coffee break. I tried to expound further that since I didn’t have any meetings scheduled, I was in my “non-client” wardrobe of jeans and a tee-shirt, but the language gap precluded mutual comprehension of most of the supporting details. The additional upside of this portion of our exchange is that it gave me the most insight yet on the lack of sit-down coffee shops in this area – do only non-working people here have time to sit? It’s as practical an explanation as any other so far.
This veneer of abruptness manifests as a negative in her shop’s mixed internet reviews, but my take is that a hurried dash through a drive-up window doesn’t leave much room for deeper understanding. Having spent time in countries where I had a near-zero grasp of the local language, I know it’s entirely possible have a meaningful conversation composed of nothing more than smiles and awkward pantomime, but this takes time, patience, and willingness by both parties to try. I once spent over an hour in a small tea shop at the Lo Wu train station on Hong Kong’s northern border with a proprietor who spoke absolutely no English, and we had a magnificent time finding ways to communicate while tasting various teas. I also know it’s possible – easy, actually — to come off as unintentionally rude when trying to communicate in a language that is not yet your own. I have both compassion and deep respect for anyone that has come to this country and made sufficient linguistic inroads to run an entrepreneurial business.
After a little more back and forth, it becomes clear that I’ve actually caught her on a bad day. The son of a good friend of hers had been taken to a nearby hospital that morning after suffering a heart attack. He was only twenty-six years old, and was not expected to recover. Her own mother passed away just two months ago, and the feeling of loss is magnified with this latest news. I learn that she has a daughter, but her subsequent mention that with her mother’s passing all her remaining family lives in South Korea makes a curious omission of any current or former husband. Having lost my mother a few short years ago, we quickly find ourselves on common ground. But just as quickly the customer traffic picks up and she breaks off, wistful and preoccupied. Before leaving I surprise her by thanking her in Korean, which prompts at least a sliver of a smile.
In a previous career I had the opportunity to travel extensively, with an emphasis on the Asia-Pacific rim countries. These trips were always a combination of business and social, as my hosts were always eager to share of their country and culture. Over several trips to Seoul, I was repeatedly shown an important aspect of Korean culture — the preeminence of harmony and order. This is more than just everybody looking to get along with everybody else, it also surfaces in not trying to stand out or be highly individualized. I had one colleague illustrate this by pointing out the highway running near the office building in which we were meeting. He had me notice that there wasn’t a great variety of types of vehicles on the road, and nearly all were very utilitarian and painted some tone of blue, silver or beige. No flashy red or bright yellow sports cars. This concept applies to everything from art to architecture, and is most intimately expressed in the importance of family and community. They regard family as the basic social unit, and consider harmony at home the first step toward harmony in the community and ultimately in the nation as a whole.
I cannot imagine coming from a culture with such an emphasis on the connected family, and then being essentially alone and over five thousand miles from your nearest relatives. Yet here she is, on her personal version of the American frontier, working and scraping to make it happen. Even if we come from very different places and only cross paths in a small coffee shop many miles later, our current worlds are not so far apart. We both call this our neighborhood, but that’s just geography. Community is built by engaging and building relationships on an individual human-to-human level, and so despite any lingering qualms about the coffee, I’ll be back. Another cup. Another conversation. Another chance to connect.
A Fine Grind
This is the first of what is probably going to be a series of adventures in adjusting to our new life just outside Seattle. The first major cultural shift we’ve encountered is at the local grocery stores. As fully-conditioned former denizens of the People’s Republic of Seattle, we dutifully throw our reusable shopping bags on the checkout conveyor, and the hapless checkers stare at us like we’re two-headed circus animals. The first time we were asked if we wanted “paper or plastic” we nearly fell down. The first time we allowed ourselves to have something put in a plastic bag we skulked furtively back to our car, wary that the King County Bag Police would somehow find us out and declare us apostate. Even worse was trying to sort our food court debris at the Alderwood Mall. We pre-sorted everything and walked over to the trash area, only to encounter a single bin. One bin? What savage devilry is this? True Seattleites can’t even speak or function unless there’s at least three (and preferable five) bins. Mind you, no one’s ever proved out the economics of recycling or shown the true environmental efficacy of citywide composting (especially when all that compost is stored in large bins made of petroleum products and hauled away by large, fossil fuel burning vehicles), but in the Emerald City a nod to a vague civic morality repeatedly passes for regulatory justification.
All this we can live with, but on the other hand the coffee shop thing has me fundamentally vexed. Those who know me know I love my afternoon coffee. Truth be told, I actually love my breakfast, midmorning, and afternoon coffee. For me and many like me, coffee is life in the Pacific Northwest, but I’m now learning that there appears to be a wild geographic inconsistency in how one may obtain and enjoy this caffeinated nectar. With my last job transition, my local coffee shops became critical venues for team gatherings, meeting clients and often just escaping the confines of the home office, and I had a multitude of options within a short distance of my house — Diva, Herkimer, Caffe Fiore, Holy Grounds, Ballard Coffee Works, Firehouse, Caffe Ladro, Grumpy D’s, Zoka, Bauhaus (until it folded), and, of course, the ubiquitous Starbucks. There were also all the bakeries and confectioners that offered decent coffee — Larsen’s, Chocolati, Honore, and the rest. What I appear to have missed is that the locally-owned sit-down coffee shop that has good coffee, knowledgeable baristas and quality baked goods appears to be a city neighborhood thing, not a suburban neighborhood thing.
When we were in the middle of purchasing our new home, I made it a point to locate and try the nearest coffee establishment (“Hot Shots” on 164th at East Shore Drive). It’s been run by a very nice Korean woman for the last 15 years, and we had a lovely conversation. Even with its location right on the southern shore of Martha Lake (offering an apparent summer monopoly on gelato for those enjoying Martha Lake Park), I was put off by the run-down state and lack of tables. You can get all manner of novelty coffee drinks (e.g. a “Snickers Latte”), but unfortunately when it comes to straight up espresso it’s just not very good coffee.
According to one website, of the 25 businesses that serve coffee near our new home, 12 are Starbucks and 6 are 7-Elevens. The remainder, with one exception, are drive-through coffee stands. Hot Shots, with its one plastic table, is classified as a drive-through. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m a shareholder and general fan of Starbucks, but I don’t always find their stores conducive to work (tables are too small, music is too loud, and lights are too low), and what they’ve done to La Boulange Bakery in the course of turning their products into bland, overpriced crap is a treatise for another time. I am also a fan of supporting local businesses and most times I just want something other than corporate coffee.
Given this questionable array of choices, I made a beeline for the lone sit-down, the Vienna Coffee Company. My first warning sign was when I asked for my usual afternoon doppio, and the young woman behind the counter had no idea what I was asking for. Actually, my first warning sign was that they too had a drive-through, which their own website calls a “vulgar & ghastly burdensome drive-thru”. That aside, I realize that many coffee counter servers are just retail employees and aren’t necessarily steeped (pun intended) in the coffee culture, and so I clarified that I just wanted a double espresso. She continued to stare at me as if I had asked her to perform brain surgery. Finally she managed to communicate that they only serve traditional Viennese coffees, which involve taking coffee and adding varying combinations of steamed/frothed milk, liqueurs, chocolates and whipped cream. When I asked if I could just get two shots of espresso in a cup, unadorned, the somewhat surprising answer was “no”. At this point I left. Not without a certain amount of respect for having a traditional view reflected in the menu, but I left nonetheless. Later research showed they actually harbor no small disdain for the larger northwest coffee vibe. Again their website: “We share no solidarity associations with “Third Wave Coffee” movements or trendy artisanal coffee preparation methods. We do not and will not prepare coffeeshop styled drinks such as Americanos, Lattes, Mochas, Drip Coffee, Cold Brew, Pour-Overs, Smoothies, Frappuccinos and absolutely no Latte Art! These considerations are contrarily subordinate to Traditional Viennese Kaffeehaus Culture and 900 years of Chatillonesque histoire.” All well and good, and I was heretofore unaware of the term “Third Wave Coffee” (apparently a movement to consider coffee as an artisanal foodstuff, like wine, rather than a commodity), but count me out.
At this point I really tried to understand what was happening here. Were Lynnwood and Mill Creek simply bedroom communities, and consequently the drive-through phenomenon was fueled by people needing to get their coffee quickly and on the way to somewhere else? Was the University of Washington Bothell Campus just far enough away that no students needed a place to hang, study and caffeinate? Was Snohomish County so insular and unfriendly that no one ever wanted to meet and sit and chat over coffee? Was it really just an urban vs. suburban thing? How is it possible that the experiential environment is so very different just a few short miles north of the coffee capital of North America? I doubled down on my research, and discovered the Spotted Cow Coffee Company in Mill Creek Town Center. Temporally forgetting it was essentially in the middle of a conventional if upscale strip mall, I gave it a go. When I asked for a doppio, not only did the barista not bat an eyelash, she asked if I wanted it served in the traditional Italian way with seltzer. I nearly cried. Scattered about the boho-sheik interior were friends deep in conversation, students bent over books, and professionals discussing business. It was good coffee served in an atmosphere in which I could see myself meeting clients, hunkering down to work on a proposal, or just catching an afternoon pick-me-up. I have found at least one oasis in a sea of mediocre, on-the-go coffee. I can see myself spending serious time there, and I will conscientiously return to Hot Shots (for the community if not the coffee), but mostly I remain mystified as to why this establishment seems the exception and the apparent lone outpost of its kind in my immediate vicinity. Any insight from my Lynnwood and Mill Creek neighbors?
Notes From Darcy’s Bench
Weather-wise, camping in western Washington State in late summer is at best a roll of the dice. As autumn approaches, the calm northerly coastal winds of midyear begin their annual dance around to the south. During this shift, they also absorb more moisture from the Pacific Ocean and gain intensity as they bear down on the mountainous Olympic Peninsula that constitutes Washington’s western shore. As they encounter the Olympic Mountains, the winds are severed by the topography. Some of the wet sea air is forced up and over the peaks, losing so much moisture as rainfall in the process that actual rainforests grow and thrive there. A portion is channeled roughly east into the Juan de Fuca Strait between the peninsula and Canada’s Victoria Island to the north, and the remainder shears south along the range’s western slopes. As they reach the southern tip of the range, they bend to continue east as well. If the Olympics act like a rock in a river, then the inland Cascade Range acts more like a dam. It traps the current coming in from the Strait and turns it south, while cornering the flow coming off the southern Olympics and turning them north. These now-separate winds of common origin collide and rise over the Puget Sound, causing highly unstable updrafts. This instability, meteorologically known as a convergence zone, usually brings rain but can also cause strong thunderstorms and hail. Later in the season as the temperature drops, even snow down to sea level is possible.
The volatile nature of the phenomena makes it extremely difficult to predict the weather with any true degree of accuracy, and the forecasts leading up to our annual late summer camping trip had changed daily. This year we opted to alter both the location and the timing of the excursion, bringing us further into potential conflict with the deteriorating weather. For the last few years, we had been meeting up with a group every August to camp on Mayfield Lake in southwestern Washington, about 70 miles north of the Oregon border. This year, with one of the key couples being absent, the remainder of us elected to move the assemblage north to Whidbey Island, and postponed the gathering until a month later.
In the Northwest — perhaps in trade for the uncertain and often inclement weather — we are fortunate in that we don’t need to travel far to find locales ideally suited to camping, and our destination on Whidbey was only about two hours away by car and ferry. In a portentous moment, the first raindrops actually began to fall as I backed the gear-laden car out of the driveway on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of September. Owing to late-breaking schedule conflicts, another difference this year is that my wife and I planned to travel and arrive separately — I would head out midweek to set up camp, and she would join us all later on Friday. Heading north on interstate 5, I had to keep increasing the tempo of the wipers to maintain visibility, and a small level of climatic concern began to set in. I beat it back with the knowledge that I was on vacation, and that a little bad weather here and there wouldn’t matter. Driving the freeway while on holiday in some ways sets you apart from the hurried and purposeful stream of drivers, as if you possess a secret independence to which they aren’t privy, and soon I let any sense of disquiet trail out behind me like the passing lane markers.
Despite a forecast calling for “mostly cloudy with a slight chance of showers,” by the time I arrived at the ferry landing in Mukilteo the rain had increased to a steady downpour – more testimony to the impact of the convergence zone on local meteorological accuracy. After more than two decades of living in Washington, I still admit to being somewhat confused by forecasts that distinguish “rain” from “showers”. It must speak to a native observational faculty which I have not yet fully absorbed, the way Inuit peoples are reported to have multiple words for the subtle varieties of snow. The ticket booth operator eyed the outdoor paraphernalia piled up nearly to my interior roof and asked, “Camping?” When I nodded over the splashes from behind my mostly rolled-up window, he smiled and said “enjoy” in such a uninflected tone that it didn’t seem to be offered so much in mockery as in acknowledgment , as in, “that’s how it goes around here this time of year.”
Even in our wondrous mechanical age, any journey over water is still a journey of consequence. A ferry ride offers the additional benefit of being a clear border in the process of travel; a physical demarcation between the past and what lies ahead, on some level signaling the leaving of one life for another. For the short twenty minutes it took to cross, I was held in wonder at the act of motion over water, and the transition from work-self to vacation-self was greatly and appreciatively accelerated. I doubted that the trip ever became ordinary or mundane even for the islanders who crossed over regularly.
Whidbey is a long, narrow, ragged C-shaped island situated near the geographic center of what is now known as the Salish Sea, a vast, spidery network of waterways consisting of the Juan de Fuca Strait, Puget Sound, the Canadian waters of the Strait of Georgia, and all their connecting channels and adjoining waters. Open to the Juan de Fuca Strait on the west, Whidbey is bordered to the east by the Saratoga Passage which separates it from Camano Island and the mainland. Our chosen campsite in Fort Ebey State Park lay about two-thirds the length of the island – all of about 30 miles — from the ferry landing at the southern end. Built in a time when some sort of attack or invasion from the Pacific was considered a viable possibility, Fort Ebey occupies Whidbey’s westernmost spur, and this outpost forms the bearing point for wind and waves making their way east from the Strait. Following the rural highways that negotiate the island’s mostly north/south axis is an exercise in gently rolling terrain flanked by tall evergreen forests, with occasional glimpses of water through the trees. The already-light traffic thins as you make your way further north, and just when you begin to feel that you may be leaving civilization altogether you reach historic Coupeville (founded in 1852 and boasting a population of around a similar number), from which you head west to Fort Ebey.
A lighter but persistent rain was still falling as I drove into the campsite. Our companions in the annual outing had arrived a few hours earlier, and were relaxing in the adjacent site. The spot we had reserved appeared to be a good one: located in the quiet periphery of the complex, not too near the park entrance or the restrooms, plenty of room and good drainage. The best feature, though, was that several small footpaths led a short distance west to intersect the park’s Bluff Trail. A mere fifteen steps or so yielded a panoramic view of the entire headlands and the shoreline hundreds of feet below. There were a series of wooden slat benches along the trail that offered respite to campers and day hikers, each bearing a small plaque with a dedication. The plaque on the bench closest to our campsite had three simple lines:
In Memory Of
Darcy Ringstad Hawkshaw
Love You Always & Forever
In subsequent searches I discovered that Darcy Hawkshaw was a fifty-five-year-old Vancouver wife and mother of two daughters who “passed away peacefully in the arms of her beloved husband, Bruce, after a courageous and strong battle with cancer” in 2005. While I never uncovered a specific connection to Whidbey Island or to this spot, in the moment it was somehow enough to know that she was loved and missed, and that someone chose this quiet setting of exceptional beauty in which to honor and preserve her memory. The bench is situated so that its occupants gaze due west, into the Strait and nearly out to sea. If there were no low rainclouds sweeping the horizon they would see the dark, undulant profile of Victoria Island in the distance on their right, unobstructed ocean in front of them, and Washington’s wind-shearing Olympic Peninsula far to the left. Even in the obstinate drizzle, the view was so captivating that I spent a few minutes with our neighbors just taking it in before returning to unload the car.
In recent years setting up camp has made me progressively more incredulous, as our equipment choices over the years have marked a steady evolution towards comfort and convenience and away from the conservation of space or weight of earlier days. On many trips in my past I have carried everything I needed to eat, sleep, travel and navigate in any weather in a pack on my back, and so I can’t help but marvel at the carload of gear we now use for just two of us. At some point the novelty of scurrying on our hands and knees to enter and exit my old alpine climbing tent wore off, and we moved to a ridiculously large walk-in model. The product literature says it sleeps six, which provides more than luxurious sleeping accommodations for two. I laugh whenever I set it up, remembering the heavy canvas tent known as the “Green Monster” our family used in my teenage years in which five of us slept like uncomfortably close deck planks. An inflatable queen-sized air mattress with an automatic inflation pump and actual sheets and pillows is an immeasurable improvement over the separate sleeping bags of former adventures, though as it has increased our comfort it has also perhaps blurred the distinction between the uniqueness of camping and the ordinary life at home. For decades, zipping up a sleeping bag was a quintessential experience of camping life, and I must admit to feeling a modicum of sadness when slipping into my now zipperless bedding. The humble zipper holds a valued place in memory, as my very first camping sleeping bag — a genuine goose down U.S. Army surplus bag you sewed shut with long leather laces — had no such luxury.
Other pieces of our camping menagerie have taken on a similarly modern bent. We replaced our first camp stove — a heavy, suitcase-sized, three-burner white gas range – several years ago. It could run on unleaded gasoline if that’s all that was available, and it could bring a gallon of water to boil in almost no time at all, but it scorched the pans and was prone to clogging. We now have a more compact and efficient two-burner stove that uses the ubiquitous small green bottles of propane gas. In perhaps a fond and sentimental nod to tradition, we still keep the white gas lantern we have had for nearly 20 years. Beyond the magic of lighting the mantles and watching them flame and then glow with increasing intensity, the hissing of the gas strikes a remembrance in me whose familiarity offsets the necessity of pumping and priming absent from newer models. The light given off by the lantern itself has a different quality to it, a softness I associate with more distant memories. A few years ago, in the middle of a rainstorm at Mayfield Lake, we drove hurriedly to the nearest town and purchased a collapsible canopy to put over the Park Service table to provide some escape from the rain other than the tent or the car. Two years ago we added a folding camp kitchen with shiny prep surfaces and storage shelves. There are new pots and pans and coffee makers and tablecloths and clotheslines and washing buckets and all manner of utensils geared to make us more comfortable and efficient. Of course this complexity didn’t simply happen, it has evolved over many years and many trips and I have been complicit in its expansion, but when compared to the relative simplicity of our early outings it does give us pause.
By around seven (do traditional notions of time really matter when camping?) the sun was already setting, abandoning the sky nearly two hours earlier than its peak in late June, and I found myself rushing to prepare dinner — partly because I had not yet slowed to the more measured pace of camp life, and partly from the experience that nightfall adds a degree of complexity to even simple tasks. In the absence of electricity, it takes other resources (usually fuel or batteries) to extend the day into night. Dinner itself was a simple and hearty affair: a bowl of reheated stew with bread and an apple for dessert, accompanied by a decent merlot. I ate steadily, with a slightly affected unhurriedness, scribbling in my journal and listening for changes in the rain’s constant patter on the canopy overhead. There is something comforting and almost ceremonial about lighting the lantern and putting water on the stove to boil for cleanup. It’s the final chore, a sign that the day is drawing to a close, a further enticement to slow down. Like taking the ferry between fixed points of land, the first night in camp is a transition, a shift to a new and more gradually unassertive normal.
With dishes done and wine refilled, I returned to journaling. My earliest recollections of camping — other than in living-room forts made from chairs, couch pillows and bed sheets — are of trips with my family and grandparents to Child’s Meadow Resort, a year-round resort outside the entrance to Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California. We made the trip north from my home town of Elk Grove for several summers in the late sixties and early seventies, though our accommodations varied. Sometimes we stayed in the resort cabins, another year I remember a pop-up trailer tent, and one year my parents even rented a full-size RV. Mostly I remember nonstop outdoor activity: shuffleboard, swimming, fishing, horseback riding and hiking. I remember excitement at the prospect of exploring the nearby ice caves, though even in our later trips I was considered too young for this particular undertaking. A favorite fixture was the resort general store where I remember walking on the squeaky, uneven floorboards to buy a comic book or a U-No candy bar with my pocket change. Smell has an uncanny way of grounding us in a particular time and space, and every now and then I will catch a hint of something, a mixture of food, dust and age, that makes me feel like I’m six years old with a pair of quarters in my hand. The resort still exists in the same location today, but I imagine the shuffleboard courts and the general store as I knew them have long since gone.
From trips to the beach at Fort Bragg in a neighbor’s aluminum trailer, to backpacking and summer camps in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to fishing retreats on the Feather River, camping became a life-long avocation. My formative years were punctuated with camping trips throughout the western United States: Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, the Redwoods, and an epic (by adolescent standards anyway) cross-country loop through Nevada, Utah, up into Wyoming for a few days in Yellowstone National Park, then swinging back through the southwestern corner of Montana before visiting family in Idaho and Washington, then south through Oregon and home. After a hiatus for college the practice continued, from the high deserts of Anza Borrego to Magdalena Bay in Mexico to mountaineering in the Cascade Range to our current Washington state park exploits.
In all their myriad forms of camping, each of these trips involved its own unique experiences and added their individual touch to my abundant memories: Cold, itchy nights at 4-H camp in that first sleeping bag, sneaky conspirators who put snow in my backpack on a junior-high climbing trip to Pyramid Peak, the trailer heater that infused everything with the scent of kerosene, watching stars crossed with the occasional satellite between the tall shadows of the Redwoods at night, the process of hauling all our gear off the roof rack of our VW bus, building the family camp, then packing it all up again after a day or two becoming second nature, the taste of fresh, pan-fried cutthroat trout caught just hours earlier from a rowboat on Yellowstone Lake, digging drainage trenches around the tent during rain and hail storms of biblical proportions outside Jackson Hole, listening to my Grandfather talk around a Yosemite campfire about watching the famous firefall, a venerated tradition for nearly a century in which burning hot embers were pushed from the top of Glacier Point and cascaded 3,000 feet down in a fiery waterfall to the valley floor below, and too many s’mores and games of cribbage and Parcheesi by lantern-light to count.
Pitching a tent in the somewhat curated surrounds of a state park, often amidst motorhomes and generators, in a campsite that required reservations up to a year in advance, may strike some as being a rather benign and ersatz adventure, and some may argue that “true” camping doesn’t include access to electricity or permanent structures, but I believe all outdoor experiences speak to us on a level that defies such rigid definitions. “Camping” and “Camp” come from the Latin campus, meaning simply field, and I always found something inspiring and refreshingly unassuming in that etymology. Field implies the spacious, the open and welcoming, ripe with potential and possibility. And therein lies the enticement and the promise. Camping in its true purity is a state of mind, not an activity; a simultaneous process of disconnection and connection. It is a conscious attempt to shed our everyday personas and responsibilities, and see and experience something outside our contemporary urban surrounds. It is a reconciliatory offering from nature herself, connecting us to our own history as well as the history of the terrain we choose to temporarily inhabit. For many of us, the connection is to more than just our childhood — it’s a pattern of tradition; a ritualistic continuity that reaches back to our fathers and our father’s fathers. In its deeper significance, it is a subconscious yearning to embrace something more primal and atavistic, to answer a call from something we don’t quite recognize; a search for something simpler and somehow more authentic. Pared to its core, it is an invitation to pause, to suspend the process of becoming and exult in the humble act of being.
When relative silence announced a lull in the rain’s steady rhythm, I turned the lantern down to a small yellow circle on the table and headed back out to Darcy’s bench. A brisk wind was now blowing west/southwest, sending ribbons of gray-black clouds galloping overhead. The first quarter moon shone intermittently through the clouds in the southwest sky, while a lone, bright star kept watch above the horizon in the west. Jupiter was rising as close to the moon as it had in decades, but the clouds precluded any consistent view. I could hear the low surf rolling on the rocks below, and caught the faintest ripples of motion on the black water when the moon emerged. The wind brought the temperature down to where I could just begin to see my breath, but owing to the combination of fleece and wine I felt no discomfort. Poised on a bluff above the timeless intersection of the land and sea, I was simply grateful for this remarkable moment, for the literal and perceptual vantage offered by this bench, the fleeting universality it engendered, and even for Darcy and those she left behind to remember. After allowing this brief but weighty interlude, the rain began to fall in earnest, and after a last look off into the darkened distance I shuffled back to the campsite. I doused the aging lantern and retreated to the dryness and warmth of our spacious shelter where I fell quickly to sleep, grounded and content.
Horseback riding with my grandfather
Child’s Meadow Resort, July 1969
Trick or Treat?
As autumn beckons the earth into colorful preparation for slumber, the winds that shake the leaves from the trees each year also deliver to my door a rather unwelcome guest: Halloween. What drives my antipathy towards such an ancient and widely-celebrated holiday? My wife Jessica was diagnosed with breast cancer on Halloween Day in 1997, so my displeasure seems to begin with the date itself and the dubious anniversary it represents. In the indefatigable optimism characteristic of many survivors, she now chooses to appreciate each Halloween as a reminder that she is still here, while I continue to regard the holiday with wariness and distrust.
Halloween also seems to have become the unofficial starting gun for the holiday marketing season, so even if I discount any personal signs or omens surrounding the date, I still find growing offense in the rampant commercialization that plagues this day along with our other national holidays. Far from being an exception in this regard, Halloween has steadily moved into the vanguard. According to an annual survey by the National Retail Federation, Americans are expected to spend 7.4 billion dollars on Halloween in 2014, making it among the top holidays in terms of consumer spending. I’m not suggesting that we abandon all novelty and adornment, but do yard-sized inflatable ghosts, suspended witches that fly in endless mechanical circles, and canned spooky sounds activated by breaking light beams on porches and walkways really deepen or enhance our enjoyment of the occasion? The spending report seems to make an emphatic case that they do, but to me it all feels like a triumph of consumerism over significance – the selling of our culture’s ceremonial observances – and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a point where the soul of the exercise gets lost in the accoutrement.
Of the overall expected spending on Halloween, nearly a third ($2.2 billion) is projected to be spent on candy alone. As a Type II diabetic, I have some predictable difficulty getting behind a holiday that seems so intensely centered on sugar. Halloween in isolation isn’t to blame for the current epidemic of childhood obesity in the US, but neither can it be found guiltless. The latest Center for Disease Control report on the topic indicates that nearly 1 in 5 US children and adolescents aged 2-19 years are obese, and obesity prevalence among children and adolescents has almost tripled since 1980. If left unchecked, a lifetime of health issues – diabetes not the least of them – likely awaits, so I question the wisdom of sugar occupying such a prominent role in this celebration. Again, I’m not proposing any particular legislative solution – I’ve simply grown increasingly critical of how I choose to participate in this holiday. In a wicked irony, my enormous sweet tooth and predilection for chocolate in particular complicate the matter. The abundance of confections brought in by coworkers and lining the supermarket shelves this time of year presents a near-irresistible enticement, so perhaps this aspect of my conflict is rooted as much in a personal struggle with temptation as in concern over a generalized health hazard.
The question of a viable alternative to handing out candy to trick-or-treaters is a difficult one. Many of my contemporaries remember carrying around small orange containers to collect spare change for UNICEF rather than gathering treats, but that seems a tougher sell in today’s more self-centered world. As children ourselves, we held out the veiled threat of a “trick” if the offering was not to our liking, and I think we retain some of this wariness as adults – no one wants to risk having eggs thrown at their car or having their trees draped in toilet paper as a consequence of being the only house on the block handing out raisins or pennies to costumed adolescents.
Ah, the costumes. Although in the fading photographs my early childhood Halloween costumes seem to rotate through a rather conventional assemblage of clowns, ghosts and superheroes, I still remember the excitement of the annual trip to the department store to pick them out. Perhaps out of a typically rebellious and boundary-testing attitude, my teenage costumes took a turn for the grisly as I progressed to vampires, zombies, and headless ghouls. While my inclination and enthusiasm for costumes declined somewhat over time, for years I continued to be a devout fan of haunted houses and horror movies.
Today, costumes have all but lost their appeal – conceivably because at this point in my life I am more in search of the genuine than the masked and the illusory. While I do believe there remains a positive and healthy element of fantasy and imagination in the choice and construction of today’s costumes, in stark contrast to my teenage years I have grown disenchanted with the more sinister and graphic ones. While I can attribute some of this to normal philosophical shifts that accompany aging and my perhaps naïve uneasiness with what I perceive is a general coarsening of our society (especially the desensitization to violence), it seems like I can also trace the partial origins of this distaste back to my wife’s cancer experience. There is no question that this brush with mortality caused me to take a cautious and protective step back from certain aspects of my life, as in my decision to stop riding motorcycles. But in addition to making more conscious and considered choices about how I spent my time and money, I also began to pay attention to the energy associated with various activities. I became more aware of the influence and impact of these activities on my well-being – not in any mystical, aura-reading way, but in a very visceral and basic “does this make me feel better or worse” kind of way. I eventually stopped watching horror movies, although this was as much because of what was happening to the genre. The relatively unsophisticated slasher movies of our youth have now largely decayed into the type of torture-porn garbage exemplified by the Saw and Hostel franchises. I also stopped reading graphically violent novels. Cancer was the ultimate horror story, because it was real and you had no idea how the plot would turn out. I did make a notable exception for Stephen King, who I always found to be more psychologically disturbing than overtly violent. In the end I found that the energy of holidays like Thanksgiving drew me in and comforted me; the energy surrounding Halloween did much the opposite.
Perhaps it was due to the personal medical symbolism of the date, or the cumulative effects of the aforementioned aversions, but in the first few years of my wife’s recovery we either left the porch light off and ignored the doorbell on Halloween, or made plans to be somewhere besides home when the trick-or-treaters came calling. Over the ensuing years we slowly made our way back to answering the door, motivated by trying to find a degree of enjoyment in the occasion rather than wallowing in its implications and wanting to not punish neighborhood children on behalf of our own fears and frailties. But my deepest source of disconnection with this holiday remained, and was profoundly powerful in its constancy: In its very heart, Halloween is a children’s holiday, and cancer was the provocation that moved us off the path to becoming a family. The parade of young pirates and princesses that appeared at our door each Halloween was an innocent and unintended reminder of a life that was nearly ours, and another realization that I was not out trick-or-treating with children of my own. We have found numerous ways to emulate parenthood — being an aunt and uncle, babysitting, working with a middle school — but even though these bring much gratification on many levels, in some senses they remain pallid biological proxies. These are not regrets that come calling each day, but Halloween seems to emphasize and intensify these feelings. In the late, quiet hours of fall when the world is still and my head is busy, the question of legacy is the one that brings only more questions. This is the lone sadness and regret that can still undo me from time to time.
The writer Andre Aciman observed that “Sometimes it is in blind ritual and not faith that we encounter the sacred, the way it is habit, not character, that makes us who we are”. He did not seem to be implying that the muscle memory of the ritual itself can sustain us when our convictions falter, rather that it is often not what we believe that brings us closer to divinity – only the action we take based on that belief; the faith put into actual practice. I believe the converse is also possible: That as we become progressively more disconnected from the history and origins of our holidays (holy days), our rituals risk becoming nothing more than hollow motions. The path to acceptance – or at least to a state of emotional détente – then appears to lead in part through the making of conscious and mindful choices about what we want these singular days to mean to us, but mostly in acting in ways that exemplify these choices.
For me, this has now led to a greater interest in and appreciation for observances like the Day of the Dead, where the focus isn’t on costumes, carved pumpkins, and mindless spending on trinkets, but on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. It does not erase the progenitory wound, but it has led to seeing the children in the extended familial and social circles of our lives as miracles to be welcomed and embraced. It has also led to the new ritual of Halloween for us as a neighborhood function – an opportunity to gather and celebrate as a community. Sugar still figures prominently, as does the questionable balance of fantasy and horror when it comes to costumes, and I still struggle with the crass commercialization pervading all our holidays, but in this new context we have found a measure of peace, a further personal and intimate connection that perhaps brings us a step closer to experiencing the true magic of All Hallows’ Eve.
SEA-LAX-ABQ
You sit waiting for the plane to taxi out, staring through the small window at the rain bouncing off the people and equipment moving steadily about in their pre-flight choreography. A single thought precipitates a cascade of memories:
Things change. One day you’re having dinner at a friend’s house, and your wife squeezes your hand and smiles to let you know that the tests are positive and you’re now on the road to becoming a family. A month later, you’re trudging slowly through waist-deep grief in the aftermath of a miscarriage and the passing of your father. At a point further down a trying, circuitous route back towards normality, there are more tests, and more bad news: Your wife has cancer. In the space of that single word, all that you know and value is now potentially forfeit. Your only recourse is to step in and fight, although the fight itself is not yours. You do what you can, but mostly you sit beside her as she endures the seemingly endless procession of doctors and still more tests. You watch over her through the surgeries, the chemo, the meds, and the radiation. Healing and recovery seem like welcome and comparatively simple next steps, but you find them elusive and difficult. The grief draws chest-high and clings to you like a living thing, threatening to engulf you.
You watch the next few years of your life like a movie, fearing each new test and follow-up visit, until that same compulsion tells you again to step in, but nothing is the same in the vaporous post-treatment limbo. You stumble along looking for answers and meaning in what were the familiar contortions of work and distractions of play. Normal becomes an abstract and generally
forgotten notion.
Things change, but often they change along familiar patterns. The phone rings, and it’s your mother. It’s only in the lungs this time she says. She’s been through this before and knows
the drill. She and her sister have both gone several rounds with this demon. No big deal she says – she may have the cancer gene, but she’s also got the survivor gene. Step in. While the weight of your wife’s convalescence still sits heavy within you, you get on a plane and go. You learn that nothing – no book, no class, no training – nothing adequately prepares you for changing surgical dressings on your own mother.
The succession of follow-ups continues for both women, and mercifully the space between examinations grows slowly larger. As your mother’s own treatment wanes, she relays news to you of
how her sister’s cancer has flared aggressively again and metastasized to her brain and organs. In a matter of weeks your aunt succumbs, a severe and personal reminder of what’s perpetually at stake in this fragile new reality. Such bleak news notwithstanding, with each successive negative test you breathe a bit easier, and look to reclaim another small piece of your former life. You begin to work to replace the pieces that have been lost forever with new visions and new challenges. As the years count up and the statistics swing further and further in your wife’s favor, the grief and the fear slowly start to fade, and a new sense of equilibrium emerges.
Things change. There is a chill in the air that seems to come from something other than the shifting season. The phone rings, and it’s your sister. The latest tests have only confirmed what
she already knows in her heart: that the cancer bus will eventually stop on her street as well. She makes the hard, brave choice to sacrifice ostensibly healthy flesh in return for a better chance of seeing her children grown, and has the further courage to ask for help in the recovery process. Although you commit without hesitation, the prospect stirs the ashes and echoes of semi-forgotten things, and you grow apprehensive. You aren’t sure how exactly you can help – you only know that you must go. Step in.
The mechanical shudder of the plane pulling back from the jetway brings you back to your current undertaking. A book of short stories sits unopened in your lap as you rise through the rain’s delicate drumbeat. The clouds around you thicken and roil, then dissipate, revealing a clear and impossibly vast blue sky. Suspended in this singularly beautiful place, you become only vaguely conscious of motion. Dropping down at last, returning, your aerial panorama is slowly filled by the rolling, blue-gray serenity of the Pacific.
The next airport, like all airports, is a cluttered confusion of motion and intention. No one is there by accident; they are all purposefully en route. They are headed off to vacations, business meetings, weddings, honeymoons, funerals, graduations, and all manner of human events and endeavors. Some running towards; others running away. In the kinship you feel with both groups, you find your state of apprehension has lightened, replaced to some degree by humility. You are humbled by the bond of family, and the call to tend to another’s needs. You are humbled because once again the fight is not yours, and you are awed by the capacity of such powerful and resilient women.
You alternate between reading and watching the crowds move along the airport halls. Finally one story holds your attention: a Jack London piece in which an aging boxer is beginning to realize that he is losing a match to his more youthful opponent. Unable to stop the blows, the veteran reaches out against each swing and hits his opponent on the biceps just before the punch connects. It is the move of a fighter who knows and accepts that he is about to get hit, and makes a conscious choice to do what he can to lessen the impact: “It was true, the blow landed each time; but each time it was robbed of its power by that touch on the biceps”. You decide that this is your task: to soften the blow.
You rise again, drifting out over the great, brown ocean of the Southwest. From the air, the evening shadows fall long across the bone-dry arroyos, transforming them into dark, jagged streaks of earthbound lightning. You land in darkness, but soon the full moon rises from beyond the Sandia Mountains to the east, sanctifying the cooling desert below.
You awake to a boundless wave of energy from your nephews, who – although they were just born – are now somehow inexplicably three and five. While in some measures it’s apparent that they, like you, harbor the strong desire to return to the old normal, they possess the remarkable innocence and elasticity of youth, and move forward largely undaunted.
The days fill with helping Dad get the boys get off to school and picking them up in the afternoon, with snacks and naps and stories and endless games of Go Fish. You put your hand to meals and dishes and shopping and laundry and the other countless details that make a household run, help a mother heal, and let a father focus his time on being with his wife and children. Oddly, none of it feels like work. Evenings after baths and brushing teeth and yet another recital of Curious George, Dad puts the boys to bed and then the two of you exchange notes on the newly-common experience of being a caregiver. In the quiet pause of the hurricane eye while Dad is at work and the boys are in school, you and your sister pull up Adirondack chairs outside in the still-warm New Mexico sun and talk about life, recovery, and healing as if they were concepts somehow distinct from one another. Each day you watch as she grows stronger.
These are days and hours you will remember forever. You sit on a park bench, watching your nephews run, climb, imagine and create, and begin to fully grasp that your permanent frame of reference will be to see them as younger than they are. You thank whatever version of God in which you believe that your sister’s pathology report came back negative, and offer a simple prayer that her sacrifice will be rewarded in a long life abundant with such moments.
Amidst the absurd collision of the mundane, the perilous, the anguished and the perfectly joyful that is everyday life, you realize that your true usefulness, then as now, was less in your doing this or that, and more in just your being there. Although the land is deep in drought, your thoughts cannot help but return to water, and you know in their own rhythms the rains will come again. The currents will gather and deepen, then take their wild course over the parched, waiting landscape. You see yourself hesitate at the torrent’s edge, and then step in, letting the water break around and over you, shaping you, moving you on to where you need to be.
Somewhere Near There 