Lone Pine ER

In the morning I didn’t say anything to Test until we were all packed up and ready to set off. By that time I had decided to go down off the trail. We hardly knew each other, but still it felt a little like I was failing her…. But she said she thought I had made the right decision.

We walked together a mile to Cottonwood Pass, where a strong wind was racing over the saddle. In the lee of a boulder she shared some of her water with me and we said good-bye. Then I headed east and down, she headed north and up….

I dropped 1200’ in two miles, then walked three more miles along a valley bottom to Horseshoe Meadows, passing a few weekend backpackers along the way. I found a half dozen cars at the trailhead, but as it was early in the day people were arriving rather than leaving….

Eventually I walked another half mile down the road to a turn-off to Cottonwood Lakes. Here I’d have a better chance at a ride…. I sat down in the shade of a big Jeffrey pine and tried to read…. But when trying to get a ride it’s hard to think of much else.  I was also wondering what I should do next…. The trail was easy, just walk everyday as far as I could. But now what? A short break in Lone Pine? Jump ahead to some other part of the trail? Bail and go back to the Boise? Get the van and do other stuff? But I’d put so much into planning this hike…. But what was up with this chest pain?

After a half hour a set of three cars passed, but all were fully loaded with people and gear, and the drivers waved apologetically…. Another twenty minutes before the next car—but no, they passed on by….

Fifteen minutes later a brown Prius occupied by a couple appeared, and the driver pulled right over. I said I was hoping to get down to Lone Pine and they said, okay, we can do that. They both got out of the car, a man and a woman, both about seventy, their dog got out too, and the woman opened the rear hatch so I could put my backpack on top of theirs. They had been up in the mountains on a three-day walk, much of it off-trail and across country.

The woman sat in the back with the dog, and I sat up front. They introduced themselves as Dennis and Sydney, and I told them why I had come off the trail, and Sydney said, “Well, Dennis is a doctor.” Retired, but still volunteering occasionally at a prison. He began to quiz me about my symptoms, and Sydney participated too, her questions suggesting she also had a medical background of some sort.  They weren’t shy; at one point Sydney asked me if I was constipated.

The eighteen-mile drive down to Lone Pine was spectacular—a 6000’elevation drop, much of the road clinging in big, exposed switchbacks to the eastern front of the range. The temperature rose noticeably as we descended….

Besides my health, we talked of their hike and mine, of living and working in Inyo county…. They had lived in Mammoth, but it was a resort town, and now they lived in Big Pine, which Dennis referred to as a “real town.” They were both remarkably fit, Dennis small and compact and grizzled, Sydney with a gray bob and surprisingly low cut shirt. When we were talking about the effects of high elevation, Dennis alluded to Sydney’s experience at Denali and in the Himalayas, but she waved off further explanation. “That was another life time,” she said.

They asked if I would like to have lunch with them, and I of course said yes. We went to the Alabama Hills Café on a side street in Lone Pine, and Dennis and I both ordered the lunch special, a turkey and avocado sandwich on a croissant. Excellent, especially after several days of trail food, and the potato salad on the side was as good as homemade.  We each also had a huge mug of iced tea.

After lunch Dennis drove by the hospital to show me where it was, then they took me to the Mount Whitney Motel on the main drag. He wasn’t willing to diagnose me but said my chest pain could be from the elevation, or it could be some sort of reflux, or it could be my heart, though he seemed to think that latter possibility unlikely. But still worth checking out.  “Go before three,” he said. “That’s when the lab people go home. If you want to get results today, don’t wait.” Before I got out of the car, Sydney gave me their phone number and said if I wanted I could come stay with them, just call…. I kind of wanted to go home with them right then, but I figured I better first try to figure out what was going on…. They both got out to get my pack, and Sydney said, “I need to give you a hug,” and then she did.

The room was tiny and on the crappy side, but serviceable, and I showered and lay down on the hard bed and put a baseball game on…. I thought I might just spend the night in Lone Pine, see if the chest pain went away at the lower elevation (Dennis had said that sometimes with pulmonary edema people had to go all the way back to LA and sea level; but he also said I didn’t have most of the symptoms of edema).  But after an hour, with the pain still persisting, I walked over to the hospital, a half dozen blocks away….

The afternoon was hot, 99 degrees, and I sought the shade of the few tees as I walked down the side street to the hospital, a small, one-story building. I went in the Emergency Room door, but didn’t immediately find what I was looking for…. Down a hallway I came to a section that was a nursing home for the elderly, where someone directed me back the way I’d come…. A woman at reception took my i.d., told me to sit down, and a minute later a nurse appeared and took me into the Emergency Room, which was indeed one room, just big enough for two beds, a small work station for the nurse, and a desk for the doctor.

Tammy was about my age, dressed in a brown uniform, a little pudgy, chatty and competent, with reddish hair and red fingernail polish sprinkled with white dots. She had me lay down on one of the beds and commenced her work…. She wired me up for an ekg, put an i.v. line in my right wrist, took blood from my other arm, and quizzed me about my symptoms and medical history, asking questions I would be asked over and over during the next twenty-four hours….

Eventually a doctor appeared, a man named Todd Emerson, late thirties, shaved head, black jeans and running shoes. Later I learned that he lives in LA, works at Azusa Pacific University, but comes up occasionally to work for a week in Lone Pine. Other doctors from the coast do the same sort of moonlighting, for extra money. He said he wasn’t a hiker but he was thinking about it; he and his brother were going up Mt. Whitney in August. He asked me many of the same questions Tammy had, and more…. He had Tammy give me a nitroglycerin pill, to melt under my tongue, and they asked if it helped with the pain. I thought it did, maybe…. They gave me a second.

A large bearded man with a New York accent appeared with a wheelchair and wheeled me two doors down the hall for chest x-rays…. Back in the Emergency Room I lay on the bed, waiting, listening to the small talk between Tammy and Emerson and the occasional other hospital personnel that drifted in…. Tammy had brought me an old Newsweek and two 2009 issues of Reader’s Digest. I went through all three several times over the next hours, each time with enough extra narrative desperation to read articles I had dismissed before, until I had read everything, from the Middle East coverage to the diet stories to the tales of heroic dogs.

My initial blood test came back negative—my heart enzymes, or something like that, were normal. But the usual practice was to do a second blood test, four hours after the first. So I was going nowhere soon….

I’d thought I would be in and out of the hospital, that I would be spending the night in my hotel room. But I was wrong. The doctor had spent a long time looking at the ekg print-out, and later at the subsequent two Tammy ran…. He detected a couple small anomalies, and while they were probably nothing, he wasn’t taking a chance…. A couple hours in, he told me that I needed to go to the hospital in Reno. And how would I get there? By helicopter.

On the walk over to the hospital I had tried to call Naomi, for advice, but the cell reception in Lone Pine was poor to non-existent (“Sun spots,” Tammy hypothesized). I had managed to make a connection, but then lost it after just two rings. I kept trying throughout the afternoon, from the Emergency Room, but without success. This provided another source of anxiety.  Eventually Tammy’s phone started working, and so I was able to get through to Naomi, but only a couple hours after I had worried her with the first call….

Dr. Emerson worked the phones, sitting just a few feet away from me, and I listened over and over as he described to other doctors my condition. Eventually he got through to a cardiologist in Reno, who they had faxed the ekgs, and this doctor was less concerned. So, to my great relief, no helicopter. But it was agreed that I should be kept overnight for observation….

Turns out, though, that the Lone Pine hospital doesn’t have the machinery or whatever to monitor a heart patient overnight. Or something like that. The point was, I’d have to be sent elsewhere, and I would have to go by ambulance, and a nurse would have to come along to watch over me…. Options included going south to Riverside or north to Bishop, and I lobbied for north. But that was a matter of if they could get another hospital to take me. More phone calls, explanations…. At one point I asked the doctor to call Naomi and tell her what he’d been telling other doctors up and down California and Nevada, and he did.

Tammy’s shift ended and another nurse, Brian, came on. They called in a third nurse, Paul, for the ambulance ride. Tammy went over to the motel for my pack (she knew someone who worked at the motel, and she said she had gotten them to credit my card, but later I discovered they’d only returned $20 of the $66, the only folks in this whole episode who were less than ridiculously generous). The ambulance arrived from Lone Pine Fire and Rescue the driver, Carl, and his associate, Earl, were both in their late thirties with goatees and large mid-sections. I got onto the gurney, after Tammy gave me a hug good-bye, and Carl strapped me down…. He and Earl took turns picking up my pack and making jokes about the weight, entertained by the silliness of backpacking.

But the gurney and I got no further than the hallway. A heart monitor was required before we could leave, and Carl and Earl had thought the hospital would supply one; but the hospital only had the one and couldn’t take it out of the Emergency Room. Or they did have a portable unit but couldn’t find it.  After some discussion, Earl made a call to the station, and the woman there, Wendy, had to find the key to someone’s office, but she couldn’t at first but then she did, and after about a half hour a red pick-up screeched to a dusty halt in the gravel outside the doors of the hospital and Wendy jumped out, a portable heart monitor in one hand, a tall can of Monster energy drink in the other.

Wendy was about forty, a jumpy woman with a ravaged complexion and green braces on her teeth. She put the monitor down and took a big swig of her drink. Paul, the nurse, discovered that the monitor had no battery.

A fruitless search of the hospital ensued, and many jokes about incompetence were made. Eventually Wendy dashed off in her pick-up back to the station, soon after returning with an armful of batteries and a fresh can of Monster.

Just before he closed the back door of the ambulance, Carl said, “Don’t worry, I’ll just drive 90.” When he got into the driver’s seat he felt it necessary to call back, “You know I was just kidding, right?”

My heart did its usual work on the 65 mile drive up to Bishop, as registered by the monitor. Earl took my blood pressure every fifteen minutes, as Tammy had, and that was good too. The nurse Paul and I talked about the NBA Finals and he said he didn’t much like LeBron, and I said I did. I watched out the back window, as the last of the day’s sunlight crept up the White Mountains to the east.

At the Bishop hospital, which was a bit larger and right next to an almost completed new hospital, I was wheeled into the Emergency Room, but they had already reserved a place for me, and so Carl and Earl retraced their steps and took me to the end of another hall and into a double-occupancy room, but I didn’t have to share.  I moved from the gurney to the hospital bed; I wasn’t having any trouble walking, but I still had to ride everywhere, it’s just policy.

The nurse had brought a scale into the room first thing, and Carl and Earl used the opportunity to weigh my pack (42 pounds, without water). The nurse, Cynthia was tall and slim, about forty with brown hair and a gentle demeanor. She asked me all the familiar questions, any allergies to meds, and so on, and took my vitals, and another woman, the respiratory person, applied a stethoscope to my chest, and the doctor, an older man, Dr. Kamei out in a brief appearance. Just in the doorway, as he was leaving, he suddenly jerked violently and slapped at his neck, and some sort of big insect dropped onto the floor. Cynthia said, “earwig, those hurt,” and reached down with a tissue to capture the insect. The doctor smiled and said, yes, then departed rubbing his neck.

He came back later and we had a long talk, only about half of it about my health. For the rest, we chatted about hiking, and Bishop, and Minnesota, about our kids…. He was a short man, bald, a little gaunt, with a moustache and a friendly, genuine manner. Later I would learn, though, that he can be peremptory and demanding with the staff. When I told him that Naomi was a second-, almost third-year resident, he said they had a position open. “I came here for just a year, but that was thirty-five years ago.” He was a bit overworked lately, he said, with his private practice and being some sort of director at the hospital, but “I love my job,” he assured me.

After he had gone, Cynthia asked if I was hungry. “The kitchen’s closed,” she said, “but I can get in there and make you a sandwich. Turkey?” I said, yes, please, and though it was the second such sandwich of the day, it tasted very good. Cynthia showed me how to work the television, and I flipped between the channels before settling on baseball highlights…. At the end of our talk, the doctor had said he thought my heart was probably fine, but they would be doing further tests in the morning to make sure….

I felt comfortable, assured, if a little concerned about the cost of all this treatment (how much will my insurance pay?). It had been a long day, a bit worrisome at times, but everyone had been so good to me, so appealing and likeable and interesting….

A new nurse came on at eleven, Renee, younger and blonde, with the cute good looks of a wisecracking sidekick; and she smelled good too. She checked my vitals one more time, and said, “we’ll try not to bother you now, so you can get some sleep.” It had been a full day. 

A hot day up high

The first night camping, with James, I didn’t sleep at all; I simply rested all night. Tired as I was, I just couldn’t sleep (which actually is pretty standard for me the first night out camping). Last night I slept for the first few hours, but then woke and spent the rest of the starry night falling in and out of brief, light dozes. Both nights my chest hurt considerably, especially early on, a symptom I attributed to the elevation gain. I figured it would take some time to acclimate.

This morning I set off at 6:30. Test was still in her tent when I passed. The first four miles of the day were uphill, though not as precipitously as yesterday. Still, I took a long break at the ridge top, at 10,500’. I was sitting on a boulder reading Far From the Madding Crowd when Test appeared and set her pack down next to mine.

We ended up hiking together the rest of the day, not always within sight of each other, but taking the same breaks, getting water at the same spots, talking…. She’s from Seattle but grew up in Riverside. “People talk about the rain,” she said, “but I love it. I couldn’t bear that heat in California, I was glad to get away.” She’s maybe thirty with a round face, a bandana on her head, a short braid coming out the back. She’s been on the trail since late April. She’d never even heard of the Pacific Crest Trail until a year ago, never done any walk like this, but after 700 miles she’s a seasoned pro. Like the other thru-hikers I’ve met the last two days, she likes to talk and she has opinions.

A couple miles further along, we put down our packs and took a side trail a quarter mile downhill through the dry, piney woods in search of a stream…. But we found only a narrow, dry watercourse. Back up at the main trail Test discovered a note someone had left under a rock, indicating the stream had dried up. Would’ve been nice if we’d noticed that before….

Through this stretch there was no water on the trail, but supposed sources down off the trail, at spots. At the next opportunity we found another note, also discouraging, but then just as we moved on, we met two other thru-hikers—T-Rex and Sunshine—acquaintances of Test, and they said indeed there was water. So we doffed packs and walked down the steep slope, over dry ground covered with pine cones, and found the stream out in the middle of a sage meadow.

Afterwards, I went on alone, and the trail climbed up through an open forest of big Jeffrey pine, alive and dead, the latter stark and golden in the sun, spread out over slopes of fine white gravel punctuated by the occasional rough boulder…. The path made a faint line over the open ground, and the hot sun beat down, the temperature again up in the 80s despite the elevation…. I came to another off-trail water source and decided I needed more water…. But the stream I found was barely a trickle, an inch deep….

Test passed while I rested back up by the trail with my shoes off…. But I soon followed in her wake…. Unfortunately I missed a fork in the trail and walked downhill for a half mile before I realized my mistake. I knew the trail only went up along this stretch but I just spaced out for a time…. That extra half mile of climbing back was discouraging….

Eventually, I came upon Test again, just beyond Mulkey Pass. She had stopped to cook her dinner, on a big flat rock beside the trail, with a far view of the mountains rolling away to the south. I didn’t feel like cooking—I still wasn’t very hungry, though I’d been forcing energy bars down every once in a while—so I had muesli instead. I discovered that a mug of powdered milk is about the best tasting treat ever.

Moving on, we continued to climb steadily, from Trail Pass, up to Corpsman Creek, a lovely little stream…. We were aiming for Cottonwood Pass, actually a small tarn just beyond, but when we came to a good campsite on the north side of a large meadow, we decided to stop. Or Test did and I agreed. I was pretty much all in. I’d walked about twenty miles, gained nearly 3000’ in elevation, all under a hot sun the day long…. My long term goal was twenty miles a day, but I was still negotiating the break-in period, and those twenty didn’t come easy….

We put up our tents, I hung up my food bag, then sat on a boulder and washed the trail dust from my face and neck and feet and legs…. I got in the tent just after sunset, read a few pages before falling asleep and sleeping hard—for an hour. When I woke my chest was aching considerably, worse than it had before and not to be ignored. The sort of pain that pushes out all other thoughts and possibilities. I took long, deep breaths, thinking I needed more oxygen, but it didn’t seem to help…. I checked my pulse, but that was fine…. I’d been figuring that the chest pain was a matter of elevation, but shouldn’t I have acclimated by now? Shouldn’t it have been better at least? Of course, I couldn’t help but also wonder if it was my heart—a worrisome possibility, up at 11,000’ many miles from any sort of help.

I drank water at regular intervals, figuring I was a little dehydrated too…. I sat up and that seemed to help the pain, a little, for a moment…. For two hours I lay and sat, occasionally trying to knead the pain away, but it would not subside…. And I thought, what am I going to do? In the next two days the trail would rise higher into the mountains, until some thirty miles hence I would cross Forester Pass, at 13,200’ the highest point on the entire trail. What would happen if I kept going up?  My concerns became more immediate when the pain would suddenly collect and crescendo: what is going on? Am I having a heart attack? I was sweating in my sleeping bag, worried and miserable….

Around midnight the pain subsided to a dull ache, and the rest of the night I dozed on and off, trying not to think about what to do, leaving a decision for the morning….

Walking uphill is hard

Cow Creek was just a trickle, but James and I stopped and took off our packs. This was as far as he was going….

We had left our camp at seven and descended from Deer Ridge to Monache Meadow and a bridge over a fork of the Kern River. James walked north with me for a couple more hours, for about four miles, to the small creek. He didn’t want to go back, he wanted to keep on with me, and I wished he could have too. We do well together, even after all these years of living so far apart. We first backpacked together in 1980 on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia, just overnight. A friend named Tim Stapleton came along too, and midway through the first day I was surprised and impressed when Tim pulled a six-pack of Budweiser from his pack. Later James on I backpacked in Olympic National Park, along the coast, and one spring break in Zion with mountain bikes….

Before he left he hugged me and held on and said a prayer for me, to keep me safe and happy, and I just barely held it together. And then he was gone, running back down the trail (he planned to jog back to the car, fifteen miles; he’s in rather better shape than me).

I stayed by Cow Creek for a while, looking at the maps, eating some muesli….until another hiker came along, a gray-haired man in his sixties, his pack bristling with accoutrements. He introduced himself as Swiss Army, and he was a thru-hiker;  having started at the Mexican border, he was aiming for the Canadian, a 2700 mile walk. On the Pacific Crest Trail, the thru-hikers take or are given trail names, and they use them. I felt silly using the names, but I’d only been on the trail for two days…. I wasn’t a part of the fraternity, the people who had bonded on the long walk, 700 miles so far, across mostly desert over the last month and a half. Swiss Army tossed a long tube into the water and pumped a water filter attached to one of his shoulder straps; the water fed directly into a bladder inside his pack.

I would see him a couple more times during the course of the day. He was moving a bit slower than usual, he said; he’d just returned from the trail after two weeks off to nurse an infected blister. “It’s still a little troublesome,” he said, and then witnessed for the advantages of taking off one’s shoes at each break. I already do this myself, but most people don’t. “You gotta air ‘em out,” he said. The feet are the most vulnerable part of the anatomy for long-distance hikers….

The next five miles of trail was tough. I gained 700’ elevation in the first mile, 2300’ over the full stretch. The temperature had risen into the 80s, the air was dead dry, the trail dusty and hot…. I had to stop often to let my heart rate subside, to get my breath…. My chest hurt, I supposed because of the elevation, and I hoped I would acclimate soon…. I took me five hours to make the climb to a high ridge at 10,500’.

I felt a lot better going down the other side. Walking on a level is best, downhill is mostly fine though tough on the knees and toes sometimes; but uphill…. I guess I‘m a Minnesotan, because climbing is a struggle…..

I dropped down 1500’ to Death Canyon Creek, just a step-across trickle of less than savory looking water…. I’d come fifteen miles, and though three hours of daylight remained, I decided to leave the climb out of the canyon for the next morning.

Swiss Army had stopped at the creek, as well as two other thru-hikers. They were making their dinner but planned on hiking further after eating. One of them had already eaten and was about to move on. He introduced himself as Challenger, and when he asked me to stuff a hat in his pack (which he was wearing) I quickly complied. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, well-tanned, maybe forty, and with the striking good looks and charismatic presence of a movie star. The sort of person it’s hard not to stare at….

But he soon set off on up the trail (carrying a massive pack). The other hiker was a fortyish man named Cowboy, named for his headwear, yes, he said, but also because he had grown up on a ranch in Washington state; more recently, he had just retired from the Marines. He and Swiss Army spread out their cooking gear near the creek and made dinner. I felt a little shy, and they had taken the likely spots, so I cooked my dinner in the dirt by a nearby boulder. They had their cooking routine down, after hundreds of miles on the trail, but it was my first meal and my ministrations were awkward and inefficient.

I made couscous, and put in a packet of salmon, but I could eat less than half of the meal. Swiss Army said, yes, you don’t have much appetite for the first week or so; I was discovering that I had brought much more food than necessary.

I was also discovering equipment troubles…. The steripen I’d brought for treating water had stopped working earlier in the day (but luckily I had chlorine dioxide drops too, though I don’t like the taste), and then my stove stopped working just at the end of cooking the couscous. When I mentioned the stove troubles, Cowboy pulled out a small alcohol stove. “I’ve been carrying this around as a back-up, I don’t know why,” he said, and offered to me. I didn’t have any alcohol, but I did have a small empty bottle, and both men contributed some of their alcohol, filling my bottle. 

After he finished eating, Swiss Army cleaned his cooking pot, then put in some more water and shaved. 

Another thru-hiker arrived, a young woman named Just a Test (“You can call me Test for short.”). Swiss Army filtered some of the rather brownish water for her, and I got him to fill one of my bottles too.

Soon Swiss Army and Cowboy set off, but Test made camp a hundred yards up from the creek, to get away from the mosquitoes. I put up my tent in an opening lower down, amongst several big pale boulders.  I got inside just after sunset, exhausted again, and read for a short time before passing out.

Kennedy Meadows

James and I set  on foot in the heat of mid-afternoon, up a hot, dusty valley of ponderosa pine. We had driven up from the desert floor to a place called Kennedy Meadows, at about 6100’ in Inyo National Forest. My pack was ridiculously heavy. I had planned and worked for the last couple months on the gear, to keep my pack weight down, and yet in the end the weight was significantly more than I had hoped…. The base weight was probably around 24, 25 pounds. Manageable, but that number didn’t include food and water, and that’s where I ran into trouble.

My first re-supply spot was 150 miles down the trail, the longest stretch of the trip—so I had to carry quite a bit of food (more than I needed, as it turned out, but I didn’t know). Then, the water sources were far enough apart, and I was worried enough about being thirsty, that I felt it necessary to carry three liters of water (also probably more than necessary, along most stretches anyway)…. So, when I put on the pack it weighed about 47 pounds, or about fifteen more pounds than I had been naively hoping…. But I figured I could get used to carrying the pack, and anyway, the weight would drop each day as I went along….

Soon after we set off we passed a wooden sign marking the boundary of South Sierra Wilderness Area…. The path rose gradually, and after two miles we came to a bridge over a stream and had our first rest….

The path was sandy, and juniper trees grew among the larger pines. Occasionally the woods opened up to patches of sage, “meadows” that didn’t seem very meadow-y to me. A couple miles past the bridge we crossed Crag Creek and started climbing a little more steeply, up through a forest to a small saddle at 7500’, then out onto the broad Beck Meadows, another sage brush flat….

We thought to camp here but saw no obvious spots and so kept on, down an arm of the big meadow, admiring the horizon line of jagged mountains, eventually entering the woods again, up above the meadow on the south…..

We had been walking hard almost without pause for five and a half hours before we came to a good spot to camp, on Deer Ridge, at 8400’. The sun had just set, and in the last of the light we put up our tents. I was too tired to cook and not hungry anyway. I forced down an energy bar, and we hung a food bag in a nearby Jeffrey pine (most of the food was in a bear canister, which one simply places 100 feet from camp; if a bear wants to play with it, fine, it’s not getting in).

I got in my tiny tent and blew up my air mattress, pulled the sleeping bag from its stuff sack, put on another shirt, organized my stuff in the cramped space, a headlamp and bottle of water, book, hat and gloves if it got cold…. And finally lay down on my back and breathed a large sigh. I didn’t feel too well. A little de-hydrated, sore shoulders from the pack, a little anxious about the prospect of losing James’ good company in the morning. He could only go for one night before returning south for work….

At the beginning of any backpacking trip, at least for me, there’s the question, what am I doing? In some ways it’s an irrational undertaking, the decision to carry a heavy pack all day, sleep on the ground at night, eat dry or re-constituted foods…. One foregoes the usual pleasures and comforts—for the unconventional pleasure of living outside in a beautiful place. An adjustment is necessary, and it doesn’t happen all at once right at the start….

Just the night before I had slept in a soft bed with several pillows; in the morning I had showered and shaved with hot water; I had sat in the kitchen and eaten a breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs that James had made me; I had set off into the world in the passenger’s seat of the Range Rover, north across and beyond big Los Angeles….

And then I had walked with a pack into the mountains and come to a rest atop a ridge, where a night jar flew back and forth low in the sky calling out, and I lay in a coffin-like tent exhausted and wondering about the days to come.

Sometimes I do not enjoy air travel

[I’m flying to Los Angeles this afternoon…. Tomorrow my friend James will drive me up to Kennedy Meadows, on the Pacific Crest Trail, and I’ll start walking.

I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to post an entry again, or how much I’ll be able to write when I do get to a computer…. It’s going to be an adjustment, giving up this writing…. But I’m sure I’ll return to it as often as I can. ]

[Later: I came off the trail unexpectedly, earlier than planned, and so I went ahead and posted a full entry for this day, and for subsequent days….]

On the flight to Phoenix, a stopover on the way to LA, I was sitting next to a teenaged girl who was part of a group traveling to Australia. A big strawberry blonde, she wanted to keep to herself, but the guy on the aisle quizzed her mercilessly about the trip and the group, ignoring the hint of her terse answers, rambling off on an anecdote about some school trip he had taken to DC as a 8^th grader…. Finally, the girl got out her book and began to read. It was Fifty Shades of Gray, which seemed an odd choice but maybe not. In the Boise and Phoenix and LA airports, stacks of the books and its sequels were prominently displayed up front at bookstores and newsstands.

The temperature in Phoenix was 103, the sky hazy, and from above the brown mountains looked baked, the sprawling city scalded and untenable. The airport terminal was packed; long lines snaked from restaurants and bars and restrooms, all the seats at each gate were filled, and the people spilled out into the wide corridor, bodies and luggage taking up almost all the space. I shouldered my heavy pack and looked for room, weighed down by the emotional brutality of air travel….

I reached LA a half hour late, but James was even later. But I wasn’t sure if he was late or we had got our times mixed up….. I had the wrong cellphone number for him (though I didn’t know that), and I’d deleted a message he had left earlier, so I had no way to contact him. I waited outside the baggage claim, a roofed-in space where the air was concussed with the ear-damaging noise of automobiles and buses, and thick with the poisons of exhaust. I tried his home number, tried the cellphone numerous times, walked up and down the verge of the pick-up lane as the last of the daylight faded away, looking and looking for a little red Fiat, wondering what I should do….

Finally, after an hour and a half, James appeared and suddenly all was well. He had been driving up from a meeting in San Diego, and the traffic had been much worse than expected…. But it didn’t matter; I was in the car…. James’ meeting was with the president of Lamborghini (I think; someone high up in the company anyway). He, James, recently took a job as general manager at Symbolic Motors in La Jolla (before he was managing an Astin-Martin dealer in Newport Beach). They sell Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and other high end cars. They recently sold a Lamborghini to Kim Kardashian.

We drove to Long Beach and ate dinner at a restaurant while the end of second game of the NBA finals played on a tv over the bar. After, we went to his house and stood in the kitchen talking, with his wife Trish too, leaping associationally all over the place as people who haven’t seen each other for some time do….

Their younger son, Jordan, had graduated from 8^th grade earlier in the day, and following the ceremony, the kids had had a dance or party at the Petroleum Club, a posh meeting place built by and for Long Beach’s oil barons a half century or more ago. I spent my first four years in Long Beach, and one of my earliest memories is of a black oil derrick, the big arm plunging down and popping up, like a huge mechanical bird.

Knots of girls in prom dresses and boys in suits gathered in the lobby, sweaty and disarrayed by dancing and hormones and parental attention. They hugged and performed their emotions and posed for photographs, while parents chatted about the upcoming weekend and 10K races. A group of girls clustered around Trish, and she matched them in tone and excitement and laughter, and they promised each other get- togethers in the weeks ahead. James said, “They all love Trish.” After a while Jordan awkwardly embraced one last friend and then joined James; the two stood waiting patiently for Trish, who talked on, took pictures, found more girls and mothers to hug and gush over. I examined the oil paintings of decades of club officers, bald men in suits, each with the expression of a person who expects to be obeyed….

Trish finally finished, said her goodbyes, and the four of us went out to the Range Rover. On the way to the club, Trish had said something about Jordan having a new girlfriend. In the lobby, James had wanted Jordan to point her out, but Jordan had acted like he didn’t hear.   

Rylee will someday be a star

It’s gotten hotter here, almost ninety yesterday, and I emptied the van of all my gear and stored it in the basement. I’ll be parking the van out in the backyard next to a row of sumacs, which will hopefully offer at least a little protection from the sun….

In the afternoon I mailed my first two re-supply packages, so now I’m committed to walking after them.

Grandpa was in physical therapy when I arrived, so I sat in the lobby and read the newspaper…. Back in his room, he dozed off. He finally slept through the night last night, aided by the larger dose of doxcepin. But it had left him groggy.

The television was tuned to Animal Planet, with the sound off, the captions engaged. I watched an animal control professional drag a huge burmese python from some bushes at a golf course in Florida. Grandpa woke up and said, “What?”

I changed the station to Turner Classic Movies, where a 1940s short film about a zoo was playing. Grandpa dozed back off and I watched a lion walk across a double-tightrope while keeping his gaze in the middle distance, as if to ignore his humiliation. Grandpa woke up again and, referring to the tv, said, “What is going on?”

He didn't seem up for talking, so we sat side by side and accepted what came on the screen. A film started, Fingers at the Window, I think it was called, from 1942 with Lew Ayres and Laraine Day. Basil Rathbone plays the bad guy, a doctor who recruits insane people to commit ax murders. Pretty grim….

After a while I asked Grandpa if he went to the movies much, back in the late thirties.

“Well… yeah, we did, before we got married. Maybe once a week…. We had to go over to Ontario” (a larger town just across the nearby border in Oregon). “They had a movie in New Plymouth, but Ontario was better….” The drive to Ontario got him onto a particular car. “I had this Ford, with a V-8…. That was one of the first V-8s…. Chuck used to drive it over there”—Chuck was his younger brother—“and he liked to…. What do you call it?…. He had a…big foot?” He liked to go fast. “Yeah.... and the police got to know that car, and any time it showed up on the road, well, they’d follow him all the way to the river,” until he crossed over into Oregon.

“When you came into Ontario there was a ….”—he used his hand to indicate an incline—“ a little sort of…hill. And the theater was on the main street, all lit up, and when you came over that hill it was always … ex-citing to see what was playing.”

Grandpa shifted in his seat uncomfortably, grimaced. He fell silent, and after a couple minutes his eye lids drooped, his mouth fell open and he drifted off…. I watched the movie….

Later, I had to say good-bye. It hadn’t been our best visit. I want him to be stronger, more alert, but his recovery is slow and uneven….

I went with Rosemary to her new house for a walk-through; she closes on Friday. The house has lots of large closets and an above-ground pool in the backyard. The seller, a recent retiree in a Harley t-shirt and goatee, boasted that he had textured all the walls and rounded off corners throughout the house himself.

Afterwards we went to dinner, the whole family, nine of us, at Smoky Mountain Pizzeria and Grille. We sat on the back patio, where a friend of Rosemary’s was performing, with acoustic guitar; lots of 70s ballads, especially Eagles songs.

I had a truly mediocre caesar’s salad and engaged in we-only-talk-once-a-year conversations with my cousins. That’s okay; they are people I like….

Six-year-old Rylee went up on the small stage and sang “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” An hour later she did it again. Her mother rolled her eyes and said, “She is such a ham.”

Back at the house, I cut up a cloth napkin and ineptly sewed a small case for my camera…. I had lots of other last tasks to do, but I put them all off until morning, and instead watched SportsCenter.

Grandpa was a teenager in the 1930s

Grandpa said, “I’ll sure be glad when I can get rid of this tired butt…. I just can’t get comfortable, I keep wiggling around this way and that”—he demonstrated, in the wheelchair—“but nothing seems to work.” He was angry. And tired. He hadn’t slept again.

Outside in the parking lot when I arrived I ran into Rosemary leaving. She’d been trying to get his sleep-aid med organized…. “He takes diox[something] at home, and he wanted me to get him some here.” She sighed, frustrated. He assumes if he wants something, it should be given over without question, even if his daughter is not a pharmacist. “Well, the morning nurse was going off, the afternoon one coming on….” Difficulties ensued, but Rosemary eventually discovered that they are already giving him the sleep med. She shook her head and laughed humorlessly. More consultation with Grandpa, and it comes out that, yes, he knows he’s getting the sleep-med; however, the pill and thus the dose is smaller…. He wants his usual pill. But his heart rate is up over the last couple days, and that’s a concern….

“But he can’t see his heart doctor until the 25^th,” Rosemary said, “unless there’s a cancellation, which they’re hoping for, but I called his office and the receptionist told me he’s on vacation till the 25^th…. So now they’re looking for another doctor…” More negotiation about the sleep med ensued, and finally the rehab center agreed to up the dose. “I just told him--he’s in doing therapy--and he seemed relieved. Maybe he’ll relax some now. I think the heart rate could have to do with his anxiety, and that’s at least in part because of the lack of sleep….”

Inside, I sat down in his room and read sections of last Sunday’s paper for the second time, until Grandpa came back from his physical therapy. A woman I hadn’t seen before followed him in; he was using his walker. She helped him sit down in the wheelchair.  He certainly can be curmudgeonly with the staff (but then they can be patronizing), but he always says “thank you” last thing….

We sat across from each other, and he complained a bit about his morning before we moved on to other topics, tsuch as he wildlife in his backyard, the squirrels, for example, and the ducks and geese from the irrigation ditch, their broods of young ones….

He asked me about my motorcycle, which I rode to Idaho twice but the last time in 2001. The subject got him onto relatives in the town of Mojave, who used to ride dirt bikes. He did, too, when he was visiting them regularly forty-some years ago. They also occasionally rode horses out there in the desert, and he told an anecdote about falling off once, when he failed to tighten the saddle girth. “There I was laying on the ground looking up at that horse, and it turned its head and looked down at me…. Like it was thinking,  what are you doing down there?” He struggled to remember all the family names (these from my grandmother’s side), the brother and sister-in-laws, their kids, their kids’ kids…. I helped where I could. “Those Scotts,” he said, “they were torn apart by heart trouble.”

He had the television tuned to the Turner movie channel, and soon our attention drifted to a 1938 film, Men Are Such Fools, with Priscilla Lane and Wayne Morris, a married couple in conflict over her desire to continue working in advertising. According to Wikipedia, Morris  “spanked [Lane] 47 times in a scene for which she declined a double.” They subsequently part, but later Ms. Lane uses Humphrey Bogart, in a minor role as her suitor, to leverage her husband’s jealousy. Re-united at the end, the couple laughs on the wharf as the duped Bogart sails off on a ship to Europe (where he thought he was going with his false paramour).

Grandpa said, “TV came into the picture and it changed everything.” He told about early televisions at his Penney’s store in the 1950s, displayed in a small basement room, and how when he closed the store it was his job to go down and “reset” them. I couldn’t figure out what that meant. He often can’t think of the correct word, sometimes can’t think of any word for what he wants to say, but usually he finds a substitute….

Next a “Vitaphone Musical” short came on, Use Your Imagination, from 1933 with the dancers Hal Le Roy (in the lead as a daydreaming/ tap dancing elevator operator) and Mitzi Mayfair. Highly recommended, especially the scene in which Mitzi is dressed and dances as a barber’s pole.

Grandpa said, “I always liked Westerns best … the shoot-em-ups.” He didn’t want dinner, and he pressed his lunch on me, a ham sandwich still in the mini-frig. But I declined. On the way back to the house I stopped at Panda Express, the third time this week; it turns out that three is the magic number, and I can’t imagine again eating at a Panda Express, not soon anyway and maybe never.