So, what's with these sidewalks?

I’m getting pretty familiar with the five or six mile bike ride from Grandpa’s house to the rehab center—up Maple Grove, west down Overland for most of the way, left on Eagle…. Along Overland most of the development is new, congregations of tract homes, long strip malls at intersections, and business parks spreading all about as if the town couldn’t get enough chiropractic clinics and dance studios and business colleges. But a few nearly moribund farms remain, a corral of horses bordered by new homes, a big hay field recently cut, the grass drying in the hot sun. A few in-between parcels, smaller, orphan remnants of pale weeds, sprout big “Available” signs.

Along much of this part of Overland, there’s a landscaped buffer about thirty feet wide, between the busy road and high wooden fences protecting backyards of the tract homes. The landscaping is new, hillocks of thick grass dotted with small trees, the occasional gathering of carefully placed boulders. Sprinklers ply the grass each day, and I often get a little wet on the ride. This roadside green feature seems pointless and particularly artificial in such a desert place, but southern Idahoans like Americans everywhere are partial to well-watered and trimmed turf.

What is unusual, though, at least in my experience, is the sidewalk configuration along Overland. There’s the usual type, running right along the busy road, but then there’s a parallel sidewalk, with just a few feet of grass between the two. The inner walk runs in curves through the landscaped buffer, fifty feet or so at a stretch, then comes back to the straight bit, momentarily, before drifting off into the grass again.  Why?.... I’ve seen little foot or bike traffic along Overland, but who knows, maybe the planners expect that to change, maybe the dual walks are to accommodate non-motorized traffic jams of the future.... On this Saturday afternoon, though, with the temperature at 96, I had the sidewalks to myself.

Grandpa was eating his dinner, in his room, when I arrived: grilled cheese and ham, baked beans, some sort of custard. He was at the table, from where the television is not visible, and I sat down next to hm. We occupied ourselves with the subject of the weather, but that never lasts long. The night before we had talked easily—or he had—but now we had a hard time getting started again….

I let him eat and wrote a long text to Test, the woman who I’d be hiking with on the PCT just before I left the trail. I’d said I’d write and tell her what had happened, but I had not…. She texted me right back, writing that she was at Mammoth, waiting for a new pair of shoes to arrive in the mail. She said she had been wondering about me, but since no dire news had arrived via the trail grapevine she’d figured I was not too bad off.

Grandpa said he wished he had learned about computers a long time ago, but he still wanted to figure out how to use the one he has at the house. Part of the problem with that Compaq is it’s too old to keep up with current internet features. But as far as “learning” the computer, it seems easy enough, and actually he already knows about email. But I think he means he would like to know how the computer works, and would like to be able to take his apart and fiddle with it…. One of the problems with the rehab center is that there’s nothing for him to try to fix; at home, all sorts of things are broken and he occupies himself for long stretches with repairs. Repairs of a sort. Most everything is either waiting such attention or is working only in an imperfect fashion. I think he used to be more adept, but his skills have slipped, and the technology of small devices has become less friendly to the shade-tree mechanic.

After forty-five minutes of conversational dead-ends, I asked a question about the Harrises, following up from the night before. “So, I said, (I tend, like most people, to run together the first part of a spoken sentence, but Grandpa’s hearing requires first a signal that I’m starting, then carefully and loudly  enunciated words), “I wanted to ask another question about the Harrises. I know they left Nebraska for Idaho in the late 30s, but how long had they been in Nebraska?”

Grandpa looked at me, and I wasn’t sure he had understood the question. Finally, he said, “I don’t know.” He rubbed his neck and thought. “For some time, I figure…. Their Dad, he got a job down in Texas, and they left Nebraska in a covered wagon and went on down there. Mom was born on the trip.” That would’ve been 1898. She was the youngest, so Walt, Charlie, and Lu were on the wagon too. I learned that there had been another sibling, Jim, who was born later, and who like four of the five never married. “But they wasn’t in Texas long before they come back up to Spalding.”

For some reason that I didn’t follow, he thought of a woman named Ruth Peterson. “She was a Harris but she married some fella named Peterson and became a Peterson herself.” She was a cousin of Grandpa’s mother, Liz. Grandpa followed with a long history of Ruth and her descendants, telling of her second marriage, the twins she’d given birth to, Robert and Richard, who had some sort of disease only boys get; they’d both grown up and gone to work for the telephone company…. I couldn’t make the connection to the family I knew, and so was less interested in these people. “I don’t know what they’re doing, but I suppose they’re still out there in Nebraska….” It seems unlikely they’re alive.

I could only stay an hour or so, since Rosemary had invited me over for dinner. I always feel bad when I leave, but Grandpa never complains. He’s more forthcoming with Rosemary. She had visited earlier in the day, and when an attendant arrived to help him take a shower Rosemary said she was going to leave. Grandpa had said, no, and she had said, well it’ll take a while, and then he had shouted in a peremptory tone, “Don’t go!” So she stayed.

At dinner, we all sat around a new table on the patio, Rosemary and Mike, Kristen and her Mike, Rylee. We talked about Grandpa, the dilemma of what would or could come next. We had chicken and steak and fried potatoes, and salad with ranch made from a packet, the family salad dressing, which I always associate with Grandpa. Mike said, “This is good salad,” and Rosemary said of the paper plates, “these are too small,” which was just my problem.

The Harrises

In late afternoon, I drove across town to Los Betos, a Mexican restaurant Alix had recommended after doing her usual online research. I bought too much food and took it back to the house and ate till I couldn’t eat anymore: a bean burrito, a California burrito, and three rolled tacos with guacamole and cheese. Actually, I didn’t eat it all, not in one sitting; but there were no leftovers by bedtime.

Grandpa was sleeping in the chair by the window when I arrived after dinner. I sat down beside him and watched a movie on the tv, Woman in Hiding (1949). The sound was off but the captions were scrolling at the bottom of the screen. Ida Lupino, who also directed the film, was trying to escape from a murderous husband; Howard Duffy thwarted but later abetted her efforts, and they fell in love Hollywood fast.  The two of them were either chewing gum or smoking in most scenes, sometimes both. Grandpa woke up and after a time said, “Back then, everyone smoked.”

I asked if he had smoked. “Oh, yes, till we moved to California, when I was thirty-five…. Off and on after that.” He had started smoking when he was ten. “One time I was out there at the Harrises, out on the farm, and I was smoking in the living room and Aunt Lu got mad, but I said, it’s only corn silk—I’d dry it out and smoke it—but that didn’t matter to her.”

When he mentioned the Harrises his demeanor changed noticeably; he became more animated, alert. And he talked for the next two hours, with fewer pauses and more command than any time in the last weeks.

The Harrises were his mother’s family, and for most of the first forty years of the twentieth century they lived on a farm in Leo Valley, near the town of Spalding in Nebraska’s Sandhills. His mother’s three siblings, Uncle Walt, Uncle Charlie, and Aunt Lu—none of whom ever married—lived on the farm with their mother, a small Irish woman who wore a white cap over her hair day and night. “I was an important person out there,” Grandpa said. He was their oldest grandchild, and the day school ended for the year Uncle Charlie would come to town and get him. “He said I was their hired man,” Grandpa said, smiling, giving a short laugh…. “So many things happened to me out there.”

They put him to work doing many of the same tasks as the men, driving a team, cultivating corn and wheat and barley, taking care of the white-faced cattle, later in the season carting threshed wheat to the storage sheds…. “Course, not all the teams matched,” and as the kid Grandpa wouldn’t get the best team. “They’d put my pony and a mule together, and that mule was lame; it’d got its leg caught in a fence once and never did heal right…. The pony would be pulling along too fast, the mule too slow…. So once, we came to edge of a field, to where the fence was, the grass all grown up, and I cut myself a piece of cottonwood sapling. Once we got going again I poked old Mike [the mule] in the rear, and he kicked right back, kicked me in the hand….” He held up his hands, to show how he was holding the reins. “I couldn’t believe it, it was so fast.” He laughed, and shook his head, to indicate how fortunate had been to dodge injury.

But Mike the mule’s orneriness could be more serious. Grandpa told about how one time he kicked Uncle Charlie in the head; there was a lot of blood. “And the worst was that the pigs—this was out by the barn—the pigs just got in there and were eating up all that blood out of the mud. Terrible.” Uncle Charlie had to be taken to the hospital in Grand island. “Part of his cheek never came back. But he was lucky, that kind of kick could kill a person. He had a scar from his ear to his mouth, and he carried it with him the rest of his life.”

Later the Harrises sold out and moved to Idaho, following Grandpa and his family. “Charlie, he had a place there at the college, in Caldwell…. He was a general…what do you call it?...seeing that everything’s cleaned up?” I suggested “maintenance man,” and Grandpa agreed. “He was like you, if he ever wanted to go somewhere, he just walked. Say across town, to this café where he liked to have his dinner, three miles, every night. He never did learn to drive a car…. He was sort of like that rabbit and turtle story, and he was the turtle….” Grandpa paused, snorted in happy prelude to another detail, then said, “You know he never wore anything but overhauls. You’d never see him in anything else. He had a new-like pair, not roughed up, that he saved for Sundays.”

Uncle Walt took up farming again when they first reached Idaho, on thirty acres outside New Plymouth. “But he didn’t stick with it. He went to work out at Simplot’s,” an ag company, big in potatoes, and probably still Idaho’s largest corporation.

Aunt Lu bought a house across the alley from her sister, Liz, Grandpa’s mother, “over behind the Baptist church.” She did various sorts of work. “She took people in for dinners and stuff…. They always did some kind of job that kept ‘em going.”

After a short pause, Grandpa shifted back to Nebraska…. “Mom was always taking me and Chuck [his younger brother] out to visit family, not just the Harrises but the Sullivans and the Higgins…. Grandma Higgins, she was a nice woman but you wouldn’t have known it…. She didn’t think much of young kids, at least in the house…. Chuck and I was over there this one time, I was about six, and we was jumping about and making noise or something, and she got mad…. There was this long dining table…. For, I don’t know, maybe ten people…. And she started chasing the two of us around that table, around and around, and after about four times we was ahead and we seen our chance and we cut across the living room, and out the door and down into the yard. Safe.”

Grandma Higgins, in her youth

The yard made him think of one of the Higgins boys, Lloyd Higgins. “He was older than me, and this one time we was out by the corral and he said, ‘I want you to see this, you probably haven’t seen this before.’ He was smoking a cigarette, and he took it and put it in his horse’s mouth and then that horse smoked it…. But I didn’t much like Lloyd for this one thing he’d do: I’d be walking along, and he’d get behind me and reach around and pinch me here on the neck, hard”—he indicated a spot near the front, beside his adam’s apple. “That made me so cotton-pickin’ mad…but he kept doing it.”

When he was in his late twenties, on the spur of the moment, Grandpa accompanied some of the Sullivans, who had also moved to Idaho, on a visit back to Nebraska. “That was during Lent, when we got back there,” he said. “And you’re not supposed to drink or anything. But those Sullivans were for going down to the bar, and I went too, and we broke loose of those rules.” That would’ve been in 1947 or 1948, and he’s never been back again, though Nebraska is the location for most of the stories he tells. I said, half-jokingly, half-serious, that if he would get a plane ticket to Omaha some time, I’d pick him up and we’d drive to Spalding and Greeley and have a look around. He smiled, but said, “Oh well, all those people are gone now.”

Soon he launched into other anecdotes, about a night in jail in Grand Island when he was eleven, about his father’s trucking business and the time his father rolled his truck when it was loaded with furniture….Stories I’ve heard many times. I finally stopped him, at dark, long after I’d planned to leave, and said, tell me more tomorrow, and then I biked back to the house and ate the rest of the burritos, sitting in Grandpa’s recliner and watching tv though nothing good was on.  

A long, hot day

In the basement, in an open shoe box full of manuals for small appliances long-disappeared from the world, I spotted a pair of letters I had sent my grandparents when I was a child. Here’s a sentence from one written in an uneven but readable cursive, when I was nine: “At school today I stayed after to help my teacher we cleaned trash cans we’re going to paint pictures on them protecting againast pollution for earth day.” This sentence was followed by a brief, questionable anecdote: “When I was cleaning a trashcan out I had my head inside and my friend didn’t know and he squirted inside the trashcan with the hose and got the back of my head all wet”….

In the fierce heat of the afternoon, the sky was free of a single cloud as I biked west on Overland. I reached the rehab center almost feverish, hoping to find the usual carafe of ice water by the sink in Grandpa’s room. He was asleep on the bed, propped up, and I got a cup of water and sat down next to him. He looks older when asleep, and ancient when awake. He wore his usual khaki pants with a wide black belt; his short-sleeved shirt was tucked into his pants up to the bottom edge of the two breast pockets, the pockets full of scraps of paper and pens.  He had on black shoes with Velcro straps, white socks pulled up tight, a wrist watch loose on his bony wrist. His mottled hands were crossed on his lap, and his hoary head still looks naked after his recent short haircut. His face was slack, and at moments his breathing would grow labored, then smooth out again.

The television was on with the sound muted. An episode of Bonanza was showing. Two men drove a horse-drawn wagon onto a fake homestead; the show’s studio sets were ridiculously bad, the color terrible—the “land” and everyone’s faces a sickly orangey hue. But Ben Cartwright was an imposing, reassuring presence. He’s long dead now, Hoss too, and Little Joe.  Pretty much all the actors on the western shows Grandpa likes are dead….

The rehab center is a place that seems to operate very much in the present. What can a patient do, or what can be done for the patient, today? But the present there is mostly empty, uneventful, slow. Not much happens. Long stretches of daytime tv, naps, silence…punctuated by bits of therapy, a meal. People do get visits, but even those can be strained: we’re all waiting, for the person to get better, or not, and either way it’s a slow process. All the patients are over eighty, they have broken down, and the future is uncertain. Hopefully visits help keep a person’s spirits up, or maybe just provide company for a time.

But if the present is dull, the future vague, the past remains full of experience, eighty, ninety years of material…. Grandpa likes to tell stories, I like to hear them. I’ve heard most of them before, but that doesn’t matter. I visit him to be helpful but also to reassure myself that what I have known I can still know. Time and change press on, and wear him out, but I hold on to what I can still get.  I stay in is house, as I have for some many years, even if he’s down the road. I sit with him and listen, though most days lately he has less to say.

An attendant came into the room, loud and cheerful. “Patrick!” he boomed, “I have a milkshake for you!” Grandpa slowly came out of his nap. He scooted himself up in the bed, rubbed his forehead…. He unmuted the television. Big Valley had come on. After a couple minutes he dropped back off….

Later, I went over to Rosemary’s for a barbeque. We talked about Grandpa and his lawn. The guy who mowed it last time, Randy, won’t return Mike’s calls. Apparently, Grandpa had got on the phone and given him specific and detailed instructions, then insisted on negotiating down the original agreed-upon price. The guy did it, but it seems he’s not interested in doing it again…. Mike told about how a couple years ago when the house was painted, Grandpa had been out the whole time directing the work. And he tried to get them to clean out the gutters, among other extra tasks. Mike had made an effort to mediate, but the painter, once finished, said, “never again.”

“It’s always been about money,” Mike said. “He thinks everybody charges too much.” When Mike was a kid, Grandpa decided he could cut his hair, his brother Kelly’s too. “Of course he didn’t know what he was doing. He had us there in the backyard for two hours, and we were crying, but it didn’t matter.” Not just money, but control.

I’ve only ever been a short-time visitor, and my relations with Grandpa are much less fraught. He’s a difficult man, to say the least, inflexible, obstinate. But we just sit together, and our whole long history is composed almost only of episodes of sitting together…. And I want to keep on coming back to Idaho for more of the same, but he just keeps getting older and older.

Nerves

At an adjoining table at Starbuck’s, two woman sat through the morning and into the afternoon, one silent, one talking without cease about her long list of likes and dislikes, mostly the latter…. A man behind me tapped away on his laptop (as did I), pausing occasionally to make wheedling phone calls in an attempt to secure some sort of accounting work…. I had a straight shot view of the drive-through window, and a young blonde girl, about eight-years-old, sat next to her father in the front seat of a pick-up, singing a song, her expression mobile and animated, her hands dancing about her face, then his…. One of the barista’s shift ended, and she and her two co-workers engaged in a brief verbal lovefest, expressing their great pleasure in the previous hours together, their high hopes for the departing woman’s afternoon and evening to come, the anticipated joys of all soon being together again....

On a morning walk through a treeless tract home neighborhood, I came across a small table laden with ten pound bags of cherries. The table stood at the end of a short driveway, and a sign said, "Free! Take a bag!" and I did. Despite the sign, I looked about guiltily and quickly moved on before someone should see me. A few houses away I stopped and tucked the bag of cherries in my pack, giddy with the ridiculous but compelling pleasure of free stuff....

I rode down to the rehab center after the dinner hour. Grandpa had eaten in his room again, and the wreckage of his meal littered a tray on his table. One of the attendants came to retrieve the tray, saying with perky delight and a little surprise, “Well, he must’ve liked it tonight.” The entrée had been pizza and he’d finished it off and everything else.

He was sitting in his wheelchair by the window, and I pulled up one of the wood chairs and sat down close beside him. Out the window I could see my bike, locked to one of the small saplings that dot the grounds. At a bench under one of the newly planted trees, an attendant in brown uniform was smoking a cigarette. On the television, an episode of The Rifleman  was just ending but another would follow.

After a time, Grandpa said, “I just don’t know.” He’s been at the rehab center for nearly five weeks now, and he’s frustrated with the slow pace of his recovery. It seems to me that he has made progress since my earlier visit—he’s not shifting in his chair and grimacing, he gets in and out of his chair fairly smoothly. But still, he spends nearly all his time in that chair or another. He can get about with the walker, but only does so during or on the way to or from physical therapy.

Sleep remains a problem. He dozes off during the day, but can’t get a good night’s sleep. “I can’t fall asleep till after midnight,” he said, “but then I wake up after a couple hours….”  He says the problem is “nerves.” But it’s not new. Rosemary remembers him prowling about the house at night when she was a kid.  I wonder what it is he’s nervous about but don’t ask; it’s a question that no doubt resists easy answer.

An attendant looked in and asked Grandpa if he needed anything. He said no at first, then, oreos.

At his request, I had brought him tweezers, a magnifying glass, and a ball cap. He already had a hat in his room, but he told me to go through the hat collection in his closet at the house. “You might as well bring along one of those white ones.” The magnifying glass was for reading especially small text. He doesn’t wear glasses, which strikes me as odd for someone his age. He explained that he used to wear glasses, years ago, but then he stopped for some reason—I think after he had cataracts removed he didn’t need them anymore. The cataracts are back, but he hopes to get them removed again.

When MASH followed The Rifleman, Grandpa wheeled himself around to the other side of the room and got onto the bed to lie down atop the counterpane. Soon he dozed off, and I was left to contemplate the humorous potential of a Korean War surgery.

The dead and the dying

The rehab center is on Boise's western outskirts, out in a new business park. I got a bike from Rosemary, and in the afternoon rode out to see Grandpa, sticking to the fresh, white sidewalk and staying out of the four-lane Overland Road. The fast traffic is lethal. In quick succession I dodged a dead robin, a dead mouse, and a dead mourning dove….

On the way back, I had to stop for the light at the Cloverdale intersection, where the road crosses an irrigation ditch. In the middle of the street a barn swallow was down, half smashed but one wing still fluttering. A dozen other swallows swooped through the air over the road, and in turn one after another came down alone and low and hovered over the mortally wounded bird…. As if to help? In empathy and distress? The flock seemed agitated, but of course they were helpless, as was I. The cars passed over the dying bird, until the light changed and a large black pick-up came to a stop over top of it, and the other swallows pulled up and away….

Grandpa was in physical therapy when I arrived. I peeked in the gym: he was in his wheelchair holding a badminton racket and batting a large red balloon back and forth with a young man in khakis and a polo shirt. I felt vaguely embarrassed for him and retreated to the lobby. I sat down in one of the easy chairs with the newspaper and soon dozed off….

I woke when he came out, pushing his walker in front of him, the therapist trailing behind, praising him as you would a small child…. Back in the room, I told Grandpa of my ride, and this got us onto the local roads, and he took up the fruitful topic of alternate routes, though before long other associations intervened….

“Gloria lived over on Five Mile…. Or was it Victory? Somewhere around there.” Gloria was his sister-in-law, my grandmother’s brother’s wife; she died sometime in the 1980s, I think. “They had this…what do you call it…bowling place over there near her. Sold gasoline products too…. I don’t know if it’s still there….” He sat with his eyes closed for a minute or so, then snorted, sort of a laugh, but a sound that portends not humor but calamity. “She had this brother, Gloria did,” he said, shaking his head…. He made an “mm” sound in the back of his throat, a further indicator of disapproval and pain. ”He was something.” Something not good.

When Gloria and her brother’s stepfather died, he left half his money to each of them. “But that wasn’t good enough for the brother…. He wanted it all.” Gloria was widowed and sick, and the brother convinced her to come live with him. “He lived somewhere back east,” Grandpa said, “maybe Florida, but I don’t remember for sure….” He paused, thinking, gathering the details. “Gloria had...what do you call it…the palsy.” He held out his hand and shook it. “Well, that brother he shut her in her room and wouldn’t let her out…. And he gave her only half her medication, and before long she died….” We sat in silence for a time, thinking about Gloria’s fate, or at least I thought about it. “He did have her body shipped back out here. She’s buried over in Caldwell with her mother and father…. I don’t know whatever happened to the brother, but he did get all the money, like he wanted.”

Our visit today felt a little awkward. Long, not so easy pauses stretched out between our talk, and the television was off…. Usually I let him do most of the talking. It’s easier that way, since he can’t hear well, and I’d mostly rather listen anyway…. But today he was less forthcoming than usual, and I struck in with bits of info about Minnesota family life. When I told about Alix’s dog, Lula, that got him on his own dog experience.

He wasn’t much for dogs, hadn’t had one in almost forty years, but there had been three, earlier on. Scatter was the first, a hunting dog he’d owned in the forties. Grandpa told a pheasant hunting anecdote, about how the dog would flush birds, but at the first report of the gun Scatter would high tail it for the car, and perch up on the hood, not to be moved. The other two dogs were spaniels, Jill and Toby.  Grandpa told about Jill’s death. “She must’ve been almost twenty…. Towards the end there she’d growl at you if you got close, and she’d always been good with the kids, but then you couldn’t trust her…. Finally had to take her into the vet to have her shot…. I mean, to get, you know… one of those shots.”

When a young woman came to take his blood pressure, Grandpa ordered two dinners. He didn’t want the chicken enchilada so asked for a hamburger (always an option), and that's what arrived in the room for me too. It was pretty bad, dry and flavorless, but I ate two-thirds for show. Grandpa ate slowly, and we didn’t talk, and I ate my side salad one small bit of lettuce at a time, in an effort to match his pace…. But finally I had no more patience. I told him I had to leave, and he nodded yes, and in a moment I was outside and on the bike, riding home under the evening sun.

Haircut day

Usually I visit Grandpa in the late afternoon, but he called at lunch and wanted someone to bring him ten dollars, before one. It as haircut day, and while I imagine the staff would wait a few extra hours for the money, I knew Grandpa would worry until he could pay. So I got in the van.

When I arrived he was just leaving his room in his wheelchair.  He saw me and said, “Go ahead and push me down there,” gesturing towards the far end of the wide hall. His hair was already cut, and cut close, much like my own, and numerous brown and red spots, a few small scabs, showed on his scalp; he has fairly thick hair on the sides and back, some but not much across the top. He held in his hands a bottle of generic dandruff shampoo.

The small salon room by the front desk was empty, and we waited for the woman to return. I couldn’t see that Grandpa had much hair to wash, and I couldn’t see anything in the way of dandruff either, but no reason to argue. I went back to the room with the Boise newspaper while he was being tended to….

No television today. We sat together at the small table in his room, engaged in the slow and long-pause-laden conversation that is our style. I spoke loudly and in short bits but still needed to repeat most of what I said at least once. One of his hearing aids is out for repairs.

There were two packs of cards on the table and Grandpa asked if I played, and I said, no, a little alarmed that he would want me to play. But no, they were just a means to an anecdote, about a friend out in New Plymouth in the late 1930s, Gilbert Zams, and how they would play pinochle over to his house, and they were Germans, the Zams were, and Gilbert’s father was… well, difficult. Grandpa waved his hand, as if I already understood what it meant to be German-y…. Loud and temperamental, it seemed. The father became explosive when the cards did not go his way…. “Oh, I didn’t like playing with him,” Grandpa said.

“Course, the Zams were from Nebraska, like us. They had twelve kids, Gilbert was the oldest. That’s how people did back then…. I don’t think all the kids came out here, though, maybe just eight or nine…. When they first got here they was staying with some of their people, and it wasn’t a big place…. But they had this porch”—he moved his hand back and forth across his chest—“this porch…it went across the whole front of the house…. And every kid had his own…what do you call it? Sleeping roll?... and all those blankets were laid out neatly on that porch, filling it right up….” Grandpa laughed, as if this had been a sight.

“I was over there for supper once, and they had this long table set up, with long benches, a bowl at every place. And you sat down, and everybody got some bread, you know, torn into…sort of like bits, in their bowl there…. And then the mother come along with a big jug and poured milk in everybody’s bowl, on that bread, it was fresh bread, and that was supper.”

Grandpa fell silent, and we both thought on the bread and milk, and then he sort of laughed but with a catch in his throat. Earlier he had taken up one of his favorite subjects, about how much everything has changed and not for the better. Everything costs too much and scams are rife. The hearing aid business, for example, is simply organized thievery. More generally, he compared commerce to “those big boxes, you know, just inside the door of a store, and you use the … the thingey”—he made his hand like a claw—“and it comes down and you pick up a toy or something, but then you drop it before you can get it out, and there you are, you don’t have nothing.”

A pretty young woman came into the room, holding a tiny plastic cup filled with a white liquid. “This is for you, Patrick,” she said. All the attendants call him by his first name, except the one who calls him “sweetie.” Their tone tends to be patronizing, as if they are talking to a young child, but they are friendly and cheerful. "It’s Milk of Magnesia,” she said, “to help you go to the bathroom.”

Grandpa waited a long moment, then took the cup. He sniffed it, paused again, then took a sip. “This is Milk of Magnesia,” he said, as if he’d made an obvious discovery. The woman simply agreed. He took another sip and grimaced, his mouth puckering. I thought he was going to reject the dose—I’m always nervous when he’s dealing with service workers; he has a history of being particularly curt and rude with waitresses, for example. But he’s been consistently polite at the rehab center if sometimes resistant. He drank it all done and handed the woman the cup and said thank you. I thanked her too and wondered if she was free after her shift, but I didn’t ask….

I stayed a couple hours, and before I left he directed me to a drawer in his bathroom at the house for a nose- and ear-hair cutting implement. I had brought him a Boise city map on this visit. He’s slowly transferring the accoutrements of his daily life to his rehab center room…. 

When I left, I drove to Rosemary’s house, where I had a spaghetti dinner with the younger, healthy and able and free people.

Rylee is a social person

 

In the morning I set off from the house on a two-hour walk, alternating between ugly residential neighborhoods—low-slung, vinyl-sided houses, lacking the softening effects of trees—and busy streets lined with franchise businesses. Grandpa’s part of town is not the best for an amble….

In the evening I went with my uncle Mike to my aunt Rosemary’s new house, in a newer and marginally more attractive neighborhood, several miles to the north. She had moved in since I left; her daughter Kristen, Kristen’s husband Mike, and their daughter, six-year-old Rylee, had moved in too, taking up the basement, which is sort of like a separate apartment. There’s an above-ground pool out back, and Rylee was in it with her mother. She showed me how she can now swim from one side to the next—a maneuver involving much splashing and tightly closed eyes and mouth. When she had crossed, she put her small wet hands on the rim of the pool and I patted one in approbation.

Rosemary grilled steaks and made some sort of boxed flavored rice, and heated up a pan of veg-all. Rylee had to eat most of her serving of the latter, but as an adult I got away with not eating any at all of the too brightly colored mix. Rylee ate slow, taking several breaks from the table on the patio. She had changed to a sun dress, and her long brown hair was still a little wet. She showed us how she can use a trilling sound, in the back of her throat, to perform various songs, her best “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

Rylee and I went on a bike ride after dinner. She was going to “just show” me a small nearby park, but when we got there, she suggested we stop in, “for just a minute.” She took to the playground equipment and the company of two other small girls, both more timid than Rylee, but she soon had them taking chances on the slide.

Three eleven-year-old boys had claimed a set of swings, and one, with long hair and camo pants, was darting between the other two as they swung back and forth, and at the same time narrating the plot of some fantasy book or video game. “So their heads are all red, like covered with blood, and then there are these like fetus things….”  I couldn’t catch the rest.

We stayed till Rylee’s new friends departed, then we rode home ourselves. Rylee wanted to play Frisbee in the backyard, but her mother said, “Rylee, no,” as if to protect me from her demanding child. I held her small face between my hands and kissed her and said, “next time,” and then I went back to Grandpa’s house to watch SportsCenter, and to walk to the nearby Sonic for a half-price vanilla milkshake.

Did they use Brylcreem in the Old West?

In the middle of the morning I took the rental car to the airport. I was reluctant to turn it in. The Elantra was smooth and easy and I’d driven 450 miles and spent only $35 on gas. The van certainly has its advantages, but it is neither smooth nor economical.

I could’ve called my aunt or uncle to pick me up, but I walked a couple hours back to Grandpa’s house instead. I crossed the freeway and wove my way through a neighborhood of ramblers built in the 50s and 60s, comfortable houses, I suppose, but non-descript and without charm. Eventually I had to take to a main road, and I passed banks and fast food franchises, a movie theater complex of stucco grandiosity, strip malls, a Walmart … and the cars rushed past at too high speeds, and I had been one of them, a driver, but now I wasn’t, and they got the wide road and I got the narrow sidewalk, and I had to take great care at all crossings…. A key way of distinguishing any outdoor experience is whether one is in a car or one is not.

Back at the house, the afternoon stretched awkwardly before me…. I watched sports, a bit of the film Casino…. I spread maps out on the living room floor and considered where I might go on an overnight backpacking trip. A tentative plan: rest, send home for some different equipment, do an overnighter test, drive back down to Bishop, take to the trail again.... But I don’t know.

At three I drove in the van to the Rehab Center. Grandpa was sitting in the same easy chair by the window, watching the tv. He was surprised to see me. He looked better, a little less tired. But when I asked about when he might leave he seemed in no hurry. “I don’t know,” he said, “those steps.” He was referring to the two steps at the house, from the garage into the kitchen. I thought a ramp might be arranged, but I didn’t say so. It’s not like he hasn’t thought about his options.

I pulled up a chair next to his and gave him a brief account of my medical adventure, and he told me how his physical therapy was going. And then we fell into silence and gave our attention to the television, which was tuned to a station called MeTv. An episode of Big Valley was showing, and Barbara Stanwyck was overwrought, trying to protect her daughter and jumping off boulders. Next was The Wild, Wild West, with Robert Conrad, then consecutive episodes of The Rifleman with Chuck Connor.  In the second of the latter, Connor temporarily loses his memory, is mistaken for a ruthless, murdering outlaw, and almost lynched (none of which significantly affected his well-producted hair).

I wouldn’t have thought I could sit still for so much terrible television, but I had nowhere else to be , and so why not sit and take it…. But Green Acres followed and I began to get restless….

I had planned to leave at dinner, but when a young attendant came by Grandpa told her to bring two meals to the room. She looked at me, to see if I wanted to override him. I hesitated, trying to decide whether to resist, but then waved my hand and said, sure. The entree was advertised as a club sandwich, but turned out to be half a grilled cheese and ham. Also, a few sweet potato fries on the side, a small helping of spinach and pasta salad, and shallow bowl of melted chocolate ice cream. Grandpa tried to give me his pasta salad. “I didn’t touch it,” he said.

I left halfway through the second episode of Green Acres, in which Zsa Zsa Gabor was flashing back to her work in the Hungarian Resistance in World War II (she would step out into the road, scantily clad, the German tank drivers would open their hatch for a better look, make brief appreciative and laugh track-inducing remarks, and Zsa Zsa's compatriots would blow them up. Ha Ha).

Back at the house I put on the tv to programming more to my own taste—a baseball game, a documentary on Title IX.... All the advertising on MeTv had been for the elderly—emergency response devices, health insurance one can obtain without a prior examination (Alex Trebek, do you really need the money?)—and I wondered, what is it about 60s and 70s network programming that is so compelling for the over-80 set?  Is it connected somehow to nostalgia for the comforts of middle-age?

When I am an octogenarian will I be drawn to episodes of Seinfeld, Law and Order, ER? I’d argue that each of those shows are better than what was on in the 60s, but still, such repetition doesn’t sound like a very engaging story experience….

By bus and by car

Heleen had bought almond milk at the grocery store the day before, after I’d made some passing comment about preferring it over soy or cow’s milk…. So I was sure to use it in the morning with my bowl of muesli.

I sat at the table and ate while Tom made coffee in the kitchen, and soon Heleen appeared, with wet hair from the shower, and they talked of their plans for the day, and I wished I wasn’t leaving, but it was time.

At seven Heleen drove me to town, to the K-Mart, the morning stop for the Eastern Sierra Transit bus, an eighteen-seat affair. We hugged good-bye and I thanked her again, and then I was on the bus and she was gone. I sat in the back and took off my shoes and hunkered down with my book as we set off north on US 395…. We made several stops along the way, in Mammoth (bathroom break at a McDonald’s) and Lee Vining and Bridgeport, climbing through the eastern foothills, crossing over into Nevada, passing through Carson City…. Across the aisle, a scruffy looking man in a baseball cap worked some sort of deal on his cellphone, then called several people in Reno in an unsuccessful attempt to find company for lunch. Another man slept in the opposite corner of the back row, his knees and arms covered with big scabs from some accident.  In Mammoth a young guy got on with a long ski bag, and a stack of five ball caps which he placed carefully on the seat beside him.

At the Reno airport I reminded the driver that he owed me ten dollars change from when I’d paid the fare in Bishop. He said, in an unconvincing manner, “Didn’t I give you two fives?” No, I told him and he didn’t argue. He dug in a small vinyl bag and came up with a ten which he handed over without a word and more than a hint of reluctance.

A one-way rental car is ridiculously expensive, it turns out, fifty dollars more than a plane ticket from Reno to Boise (connecting in San Francisco); but I couldn’t bear the thought of getting on a plane, so I splurged for the car. I was given a white Hyundai Elantra, which seemed a bit large for the “Economy” category but which actually got excellent gas mileage….

On my way out of town I spotted an In-and-Out Burger and, caught by the mystique, I pulled off the interstate…. The restaurant was packed, but an efficient system moved people and burgers along at a rapid pace…. I was disappointed, though: the fries were mediocre, the hamburger bland

I took I-80 east and north across Nevada, listening to sports radio talk about the Heat-Thunder game, till the commentators all started to repeat themselves, then occupied myself trolling through the two hundred or so XM satellite radio stations….

After a couple hours I reached Winnemucca, where I stopped for maps at the Visitor’s Center; the teenaged girl at the desk knew less about northern Nevada than I did, but she was sitting in temporarily for someone else…. I stopped at the town’s grocery store too, Radley’s, and bought a loaf of french bread and some fruit, after standing in line for ten minutes while a sixtyish woman with coppery red hair had to send a bagger to the tobacco department several times before she got what she wanted. The neatly dressed old man in front of me in line—shirt tucked in, cellphone on his belt—turned to me and said, “This is the Express Lane.” I responded appropriately to his observation, smiling ironically and saying, “yeah.”

From Winnemucca I took US 95 north through big and wide sagebrush lands, through one of the least peopled regions on the continent…. After a while I took the turn-off to the town of Paradise Valley, twenty miles off the main road…. Past the tiny town the paved road gave way to gravel and I headed into into the Santa Rosa Range, treeless mountains marked by stony outcroppings, the highest peak almost 10,000’.

The road narrowed and devolved, and then climbed in big, exposed switchbacks, and the drop-offs made me nervous and I clung to the inside of the road, not worried about oncoming cars because there were none in those lonely mountains. Fifteen miles up, I reached  Hinkey Pass and got out to look back over the valley below, where high winds had filled the air with big dust clouds….

A nearby campground was disappointing, the small sites tucked into the bottom of a canyon cleft overgrown with scrubby aspen. I decided I didn’t want to sleep in the tent…. I could’ve gone back the way I’d come but decided to take a chance on the road, which led another twenty miles north back to 95…. It narrowed further on the descent down the other side of the pass, and the faint strip of green in the middle suggested less use…. The smooth mountains stretched away to the horizon, rangelands for a scattering of cows but not many.

I hoped the road wouldn’t get too bad, that I wouldn’t have to go back…. It turned west, came to a saddle and then dropped precipitously, in another set of switchbacks, down the face of a slope. I drove slow, keeping away from the edge….

A half hour before sunset I finally came down out of the mountains and onto the wide plain of the highway valley. Just before 95 an older man in an RV waved me down to ask about camping. “We’re tired,” he said, indicating his wife, and the dog on his lap, “we just need a place to park.” I directed him to a spot five miles back, just before the climb, where I’d passed a pullout with fire ring. “But I don’t think you want to go up to that campground, not in your rig.”

At the very small town of McDermitt, on the Oregon border and just next to the Ft. McDermitt Indian Reservation, I stopped at a drive-in for a vanilla shake, served up by an Indian girl with big arms and numerous tattoos.

The remaining three hours to Boise were a slog. The dark came down, and I shuttled between brights on and brights off as long-distance trucks barreled by headed south…. I passed brown signs for reservoirs and lava beds…I came to the town of Jordan Valley…crossed into Idaho…went through Marsing…reached I-84…and soon after pulled up in front of Grandpa’s dark house, back where I started nine days ago, back much sooner than I’d planned.

Bishop Pass, Juba, Boise?....

This morning Heleen was occupied, so Tom and Chonge and I went off for a hike. Again, we drove up towards the mountains, but took a turn-off to a different dead-end trailhead, this one at South Lake (at 9600’). Heleen was a strong hiker, with pace that was similar if a little more rapid than my own; Tom was noticeably faster, and it took more effort to keep up, as we climbed the rising trail….

The path, a quite popular hike, goes up to Bishop Pass, but we didn’t have time to reach that destination. Tom had a meeting down in town at noon. So we made a loop, turning off and climbing east to Mary Louise Lake, a small, narrow tarn at the foot of a talus field of a looming peak…. We continued upwards, one rocky bench at a time, past Bull Lake, then the Chocolate Lakes, beyond the official trails at this point, picking out faint paths, weaving through bouldery terrain, amongst small pines. We reached the high point of our climb, up over 11,000’, after scrambling up a steep slope to a grassy saddle. From the saddle we could have continued up, above tree line, to the top of Chocolate Mountain, but Tom determined that we did not have time. Which was fine with me.

We dropped down to another lake, Ruwau, and eventually came back to the Bishop Pass Trail and started down….

Now that we were descending rather than climbing, I had the breath to talk more, and I began asking Tom questions about his work in south Sudan….

But before I describe some of what he told me, I should tell a little more about him…. First, we had some geographic commonalities. His parents grew up in Minnesota (his mother in St. Paul), and that’s where he was born. But when he was quite young the family moved to the D.C. area, after his father got a job working for Senator Eugene McCarthy. Tom had subsequently  grown up in Alexandria, Virginia.

Before going off to college he walked the length of the Appalachian Trail; later he bicycled across the continent, on a five-week ride . After college he joined the Peace Corps and lived in the Philippines, helping establish fish farms. After two years, he came back to Virginia and went to medical school. He completed his residency in family medicine in Ventura, then went to work for the Indian Health Service, on the Toiyabe Indian Reservation near Bishop. That was when he and Heleen bought the house in town….

He had remained interested in overseas work, and he eventually took a three-month course in tropical medicine, then applied for a CDC fellowship, in international health. But his interview was a “disaster.” Plus, these fellowships were quite competitive, and he didn’t have the usual public health or infectious disease credentials. “I was just a country family doc,” he told me. But then 9/11 happened.

Suddenly, Congress became interested in “epidemic intelligence,” and they appropriated a few million more dollars for the CDC, and Tom got a call and was asked if he was still interested…. Yes, but the catch was he was offered a position in Iowa—which wasn’t the sort of place Tom saw himself working…. But he took it. And it turned out, unexpectedly, that he soon got a chance to go to Sudan as an information officer for a short project (polio eradication, I think), then again for a second project…. And that experience eventually landed him another, longer term position for the CDC in South Sudan. He moved to the town of Juba and began work on organizing HIV testing and monitoring programs.

The work proved more than a little challenging…. A civil war cease fire had just been signed, the countryside was ravaged, there was no medical infrastructure, and Tom and his people had to negotiate substantial cultural barriers to even talking about sexual habits….

Tom’s efforts were divided between establishing a civil program and one within the military. He spoke mostly about the latter, which was the more successful. He worked closely with the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army), with a general who was eventually amenable to an HIV testing program. He was assigned an excellent liaison from the SPLA, and he brought in representatives from the Ugandan and Kenyan and US militaries, individuals who were working on similar programs. Apparently the Ugandans were especially influential: if they could do it, the Sudanese figured, we can too.

After three years, Tom took a different job. Heleen was working in Juba too, for the WHO (under the auspices of the UN), and the US authorities wouldn’t let her live in the US compound with him, or allow him to live in the separate UN compound with her. Generally, the US security people in Juba said no to much of what Tom wanted to do, whether traveling to outlying towns or going on mountain bike rides outside Juba (he and some friends went ahead with the latter). They moved to Nairobi, where he administered another program, mostly managing funding for Sudanese projects, and, as he said, pissing off enough of the bureaucrats that they were happy to see him go after two years.

After five years in Africa, he and Heleen had returned to Bishop. “If I was going to ever do clinical medicine again, I thought it better be soon,” he said. So he took the job at the hospital. Apparently his sort of career is not so common, the mix of public health and clinical work…. While he seemed happy and content with life in Bishop, it seemed to me that eventually he would work overseas again….

Later in the afternoon back at the house, Heleen pulled out a long article Tom had written for the Washington Post, in 1992. He was a medical student at the time and had just returned from seven weeks in Uganda, which was then in the worst throes of the AIDS epidemic. In the article, he described in heartbreaking detail home visits with sick people, listening to their stories and trying to help though they were mostly beyond help. He said to me, “Yes, it was a profoundly affecting experience.”

On the hike back down, we had begun to pass backpackers coming up, and Tom would stop and chat each time, and offer trail info or advice. At a fork two boys, about thirteen, asked the way to Long Lake, and we pointed them to the left. Further along we came to another three boys, then a group of six, the leader a pudgy kid who when asked how he was doing said, without breaking stride or making eye contact, “Terrible!” They all carried massive packs, with sleeping bags or tents hanging too low off the bottom. We’d passed a dozen kids, strung out along the trail, before we came to an adult who stopped us and asked about the boys. He was angry and looked it. “They’re supposed to wait!” he exploded. “They better be waiting!” They were not waiting. And why should they; I wouldn’t have.

In the afternoon, back at the house (where the temperature was in the upper 90s), I helped Heleen roll out and screw down a sort of awning, on top of the wood structure (word for this?) over the back deck. She was on the roof, I worked from a ladder, and Tom made pizza dough inside in the kitchen. I was happy to be doing something useful and helpful, giving after so much receiving….

Tom made three pizzas, and a salad, and their friends Stacy and Jen came over for dinner, with their dog, JoJo, Chonge’s lady friend. They live nearby, in a big garage they’ve converted to a house, on twenty acres of sage just outside Starlite. Stacy is a doctor too; he and Tom were in the same residency program. Jen runs a local environmental group, and she was off the next day to Vermont for a writer’s workshop.

They said that there was much joking at the hospital about Heleen taking in a patient, that maybe this would become a regular practice…. Maybe not, but I was happy for my good fortune. I liked these people, liked talking with them and staying at their house, getting to know them and their friends…. But I knew too I couldn’t stay much longer, as much as I would’ve liked to, and even though  they didn’t seem eager to be rid of me…. Still, these two days had been an opportunity to pause, to figure out what to do next, and soon I had to act….

I’d had a couple hours alone in the afternoon, and I’d considered how to proceed….I could return to the trail, and I seriously weighed that possibility—from the nearby North Lake trailhead it was twenty miles to the PCT and my first food drop at the Muir Trail Ranch. But the chest pain persisted…. And I sort of wanted to go back to Boise, though that really doesn’t make sense. These mountains are spectacular, and I’m right here…. But in Boise I could stay at Grandpa’s and visit with him, and rest and write, and send for some different gear, and work on lightening my pack….

I don’t want to leave Bishop, but I sort of do, and so I will.

Heleen and Tom and Chonge

Heleen (pronounced like Hel-ane) is originally from the Netherlands, but she left when she was young, and lived all over the world—her family first moved to Denmark, where she went to an international school and learned English, then to England, back to Holland briefly, Brazil, a couple other places I can’t remember…. Her father worked for a Dutch shipping company.

When she was eighteen she decided she wanted to go to college in the States (where she had never been), and sort of blindly applied to schools on the eastern seaboard. Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond accepted her, and it was affordable, so she went. Soon after, she met her husband Tom, who was in medical school in Richmond.

Later, she got a master’s degree in Public Health at Tulane, then followed Tom out to California, to Ventura, where he was doing his residency…. They eventually moved to Bishop, where he got a job, but nine years ago they left for Iowa for two years, where she got a nursing degree and Tom worked for the CDC; then they were off to Africa. They worked in South Sudan and Kenya, she for the World Health Organization, Tom for the CDC.  After five years, they came back to the states and both went to work at the hospital in Bishop.

They had a house in town, but when they came back they bought a house eight or nine miles to the west in Starlite, two thousand feet higher up, closer to the front range of the Sierras. Starlite is a gathering of sixty or so houses, built in the early 70s in a sagebrush bowl, next to a bouldery area popular with climbers and known as Buttermilk  Mt. Tom towers 14,000 feet just to the west, a peak on the high, crenellated wall of the Sierras. The views are pretty spectacular.

Yesterday evening I met Heleen back at the hospital, when she got off at 7:30. I drove her truck and followed her up the hill. Tom was working, and he would come later on his bike.

The heat was less oppressive up at the house, but the temperature was still in the 80s when we pulled up.  The house stood at the end of a cul-de-sac, a modest, though probably not modestly priced rambler, a big garage on one end, packed with bikes and camping gear and tools, three bedrooms and a small office on the other. In between, a large living room and dining room ran together, with floor to ceiling windows along the back wall, and a narrow kitchen to the left. The living room was cluttered, the coffee table covered with books and stacks of paper; one side of the room sported several dog beds and a wood-pellet stove; the walls were festooned rather haphazardly with art and photographs, several bookshelves were messy and full.

A back deck ran along the length of the house, with a jacuzzi perched at one end. A rectangle of grass bordered the deck, then a few small trees, some flowers, while beyond the grass was a stretch of pale sand, the unwatered portion of the yard, peppered with bird feeders. A large shed stood off to the right, an unoccupied stable in a far corner. Beyond a chainlink fence a sagebrush slope rose gently up to a rockpile hill a quarter mile distant.

When Tom arrived home I felt a little awkward, but he was welcoming and friendly (before she had offered to put me up, Heleen had called and checked with him). He was a tall man, probably mid-forties, fit, quite thin, with a gentle manner and a shaved head though only the sides and back needed such attention. His first task on arriving home was to attend to the dog, the third member of the family. He sprinkled big nuggets of dry food on the bottom of a large bowl, then pulled bags of chicken and salmon from the frig and layered the meat on top. Tom and Heleen are vegetarians, but, Tom said, “I don’t need to impose that choice on Chonge (the “e” is a hard vowel: chon-gay). The name means “fang” or “toothy” in Swahili, and refers to the dog’s early tendency to be bite-y. But he’s not like that now, they said.

The dog was a calm, superior creature, or seemed so to me. He accepted their affection but did not seek it out. And after a having a sniff of my hands and ankles, he did not bother further with me. He was medium-sized, gold-ish in color, with pointy ears and a tail that tended to curl up. He was a significant presence in the house and clearly an essential part of Tom and Heleen’s life. Heleen had found him in Kenya, when on a bike ride in the countryside, near a Masai village. He had appeared out of the bushes,  a small thing just five or six weeks old, sick and malnourished, with suppurating eyes, covered with lice and ticks. Heleen took him home and nursed him back to health, intending to find him a home but then they got attached.

After the dog ate, Heleen made a salad and heated up tamales for the people dinner. “A friend made these for us,” she said, and they were delicious.

In the morning early, before breakfast, I went on a walk with Heleen and the dog, a forty-five minute turn through the sagebrush, the dog dashing after jackrabbits, Helene talking and telling me about how the L.A. water authority owned most of the surrounding land which is why so little has been developed. I referenced Chinatown, and she said, yes, that’s about around here, the water part.

Later in the morning, we went on another walk. Heleen and Chonge and I drove up the road (Tom had to work), fifteen miles or so to where it ends at the Sabrina Basin trailhead (at about 9100’). Here there’s a reservoir and a big concrete pipe heads down the valley.

We set off up a trail on one side of the reservoir, climbing. The dog was off leash but Helene had fit him with a shock collar, and she carried a remote in her hand. “He’s fine with people,” she said, “but he can be a bit of a Napoleon with other dogs.” Apparently it depended on whether the other dog (or dogs; many hikers  travel with several) was male or female, fixed or not; size could be an issue too, as well as demeanor. “Not that I usually have to shock him,” she added. “There’s also a tone button, and at this point that’s usually enough to get his attention and bring him back.” She had tried the collar on herself before using it on the dog. The shock is similar to what one gets from a bit of static electricity: unpleasant but not excessively painful.

We hiked about four miles up to Blue Lake, passing several sweating backpackers on the trail, including four young people with REI rental packs; the three men were shirtless, as is often the preference of twenty-year-old males. Up at the lake we sat on a lovely granite shingle beside the water, and Chonge had a wade…. The day was hot again, up in the eighties, the sun bright and intense, and I had a bit of a wade myself…. We went on another mile or so to Donkey Lake—it was amazing the number of lakes that fit into this picturesque and rocky basin; it seemed as if one was right up against the mountains, but no, there was still significant room and depth. We sat on a large flat rock forty feet above the second  lake, in a small bay, and gazed down at trout swimming in the clear green water.

Sometimes when you’ve just met a person, it can be uncomfortable to spend a long stretch of time together, without the distraction of a movie or something like that; but I felt at ease with Heleen (and Tom too). She was talkative and interesting and smart and easy-going, telling about her work, her dog, her husband, the Sierras, and she listened to me tell stuff too….

We walked the five miles back without pause, down two thousand feet in elevation, thirsty and parched in the heat and sun…. At the house Heleen poured me several glasses of cranberry juice, and then I had a lovely shower….

Later in the evening, after Tom came home, we went down to town, through town and out to the small airport to a Thai restaurant, Thai Thai (there was some explanation for this odd location, but I didn’t really get it). Tom ordered spring rolls (which the menu called summer rolls), pad sieu (better than pad thai, Tom said), panang curry, and massamen curry (both with brown rice). The food was quite good, a rarity for small town Thai, in my experience. Afterwards the co-owner, a Thai woman in her late 50s, stopped by the table to chat. Tom and Heleen know her quite well, but she mostly maintained eye contact with me while we talked, though I had almost nothing to say. She had a small face, pale mahogany complexion, dark hair just flecked with gray, and tiny jowls beginning to form on either side of her face, and I thought do we have something going on here, the two of us? 

After dinner, out in the dark, we walked along one of the dis-used runways, a tradition with Tom and Heleen and Chonge, undertaken so the dog can chase the rabbits that proliferate around the airport.

I like Bishop

Hospital personnel were in and out of my room all night. Several times to check the heart monitor connections, in several places on my torso; apparently the signal at the nurse’s station was intermittent. And even when the monitor was working, there was concern about my heart rate numbers. My resting/sleeping rate was in the mid-forties, which I guess is low, and it occasionally dropped into the thirties. Renee stuck her head in the door after getting a reading of 36 and said, “Just seeing if you’re still breathing.”

The visits multiplied after four, maybe because of a shift change, I don’t know, and by six I had given up and embraced wakefulness.

Dr. Kamei visited at 8:30 for another long talk. He said, “We’re all going to die, the question is how we live.” I think this was supposed to be a sort of pep talk, but I wasn’t feeling down. My chest did still hurt, and I was disappointed to be off the trail so soon, but on the other hand the days ahead seemed to have potential, though of what sort I didn’t yet know. The doctor said that all signs indicated I was in good health, and he might not even bother with further tests if I was a little younger, or if I didn’t hope to do more hiking….

He talked of himself too, told me he was “a people person,” which is why he works so much. We took up the subject of higher education too, because of my work, and he told me his daughter had graduated from USC, and now she worked as an administrative assistant somewhere in L.A.—“I really don’t know what it is she does”—and when she’s home she likes to fish. He told me he was on the local high school board, and he had a friend who taught third grade, which “has to be the perfect job.”

He had planned on doing a series of heart tests, including injecting me with some solution or dye, but he decided these more invasive tests were unnecessary, that we would settle for a treadmill stress test, later in the morning.

My new nurse, in the morning, was Heleen, a tall thin woman in her early forties, her pale red and gray hair pulled back tight. She quizzed me, as had so many others, but she was a nurse interested in diagnostic questions, as well as matters of my comfort (most focus on the latter). I asked about my pulse rate, and she gave me a longish and useful explanation….

I engaged with yet another woman, Wendy, the hospital’s liaison person, a nurse too, but she wore a purple dress because she wasn’t caring directly for patients. She found me info about the local bus and rental car options, gave me a map of town and explained how to get to the library and a good coffee shop; later we chatted about her husband, a deputy sheriff, and her three young children, and the good life in Bishop. She’d grown up in town, but went off to Santa Barbara for school and a decade of what she called “the wild life” before returning and settling down.

For the stress test, I was taken, by wheelchair, to a trailer outside the hospital, where I lay down on a table and two other women attached a series of electric (?) lines to various spots on my torso (after shaving some patches for the sticker things). When Dr. Kamei appeared I stepped onto a treadmill, my first experience with such a device…. My lines were plugged into a machine, and I began to walk…. The speed increased every three minutes, and each time the cuff on my upper arm automatically inflated to check my blood pressure…. Dr. Kamei talked all the while, describing what was happening and what they were looking for, but also veering off on other topics, such as the restaurant scene in Bishop….

By the third or fourth speed increase I was moving at a slow jog. I reached 90% of my heart’s capacity, the goal, and the doctor said, “Okay, you can stop any time now, but try to keep going as long as you can, or as long as you want to….”  I cried uncle at 94%.... All indications were that my heart was strong and healthy. “As I expected,” the doctor said.

In the end he decided that the chest pain was the result of something called costochondritis, which as far as I could tell was an imperfectly understood condition. The sternum and ribs are inflamed? Subsequently pain radiates across the chest? Probably from the stress of carrying a heavy pack, and the elevation may have contributed too….

I didn’t need to stay at the hospital any longer, but the discharge procedure took a few more hours to complete. I’d been denied breakfast, pre-stress test, so when I got back to the room Heleen brought me eggs and potatoes and toast. I was halfway through the meal when she came back and said, “This might sound a little odd, and don’t feel like you have to say yes, but you could come stay at my house with my husband and I, up in Starlite. We have an extra room.” Heleen and I had been talking on and off through the morning, about hiking, about living in Bishop, living in Minnesota, so the offer didn’t come out of nowhere. But I was still surprised. I hesitated…. I had planned on getting a motel room…. But clearly this offer was more interesting, not to mention more economical. I said, yes, thank you.

After signing numerous forms, I was finally discharged in the early afternoon. Heleen was in the middle of a twelve-hour shift, but she signed out and we drove a half mile down to Main Street, to Perry Motors, where her old Nissan pick-up was ready, after some minor repairs. I drove the pick-up, and followed her to the public library. The plan had been that I would drive the truck back to the hospital and walk back to the library, but Heleen said, “Why don’t you just keep the truck, that way you can look around town if you want to…. And if you want to go up to the house, the key’s on the ring and I can tell you how to get there….”

I’d met Heleen about six hours previous, and now I had her automobile, and the run of her house if I wanted it. I opted to stay in town, and wait for her to get off. “Okay,” she said, “but you can change your mind if you want….”

The afternoon was hot, up near 100 degrees, but inside the small, 50s-era library the air was frosty. I checked email and searched transportation options, bus and plane and rental car…. In the adjacent children’s section, a woman spoke in a loud patronizing voice to her five-year-old: “No, spiders are not scary. We have talked about this. All creatures have a place, they are all good.”

On Main Street I ate a bean burrito in the empty El Ranchita Restaurant, interrupting the cook’s own lunch which he was eating sitting at the counter watching Mexican television…. I walked up and down the scorching main street, a stretch of U.S. 395 with big motel and restaurant signs, remnants of a pre-Interstate glory…. And ended up at the city park, where I found a patch of grass in a shady spot between the public pool building, a softball field bordered by an irrigation canal, and a concrete skateboard and bmx bike park. I lay and read and dozed off to the sounds of a swim coach calling out encouragement—“Good job, Jessica! Good job, Courtney!”

Yesterday in Lone Pine I was worried that I had some sort of serious heart problem that would change my life…. A day later, lazing about in the long, hot afternoon, I wondered, what was the big deal….  Now I was out of the hospital and apparently well, walking around on my own again. But it felt odd to be off the trail and out of the mountains, to be adrift in Bishop without a vehicle of my own, without yet a plan of how to proceed or where to go or how to get there…. But I did have a place for the night, and come evening I would learn more about it, and about my hosts.