CHAPTER 1
DREAMING BIG
CLAWS AND JAWS.
I'm concerned about both. I only see one: claws. Not friendly, kitty-cat claws. These are fear-inducing grizzly bear claws and I'm holding them. I'm not bumfuzzled or bold. I'm an outdoor journalist with the dream job. Well, my dream job. Most other women don't consider the squalor of the stinky wild dreamy, but I do.
Bears do stink and they do hog the top spot on my bucket list. Especially when I'm on assignment and the bear is out cold. The sleepy-time shot to its shoulder has it under a spell that makes it possible for me to safely shoot close-up footage while researchers examine this four-year-old bear.
A bear's teeth are tucked in when it sleeps, but its claws are always out. That's probably why I take so many pictures of claws. They don't retract like a cat's. It's like trying to pal around with Wolverine when he's mad — blades out and ready.
The visual intensity makes my hands rattle, but I work through it. At least I think I do. Most of my shots for this story are steady while I lie on my belly nose to nose with Grizzly No. 1,225. His breathing is slow and deep. Mine is quick and shallow. My hyped rhythm races to hysteria when the bear's eyelids flip open.
"He's up!" I say with blurted surprise, while also peeing my pants. A lot. It's true, but at least that's all I did.
Eye twitch is normal, I'm told. The ticker tells us we still have ten minutes of sedation. It's just enough time to bolt on the GPS collar, so I keep working on footage.
I'm filling frame with the beautiful beast's signature shoulder hump when the bear lifts its head. I lift mine in alarm.
"No!" I say. "He's really up!"
I rise to run. The bear rises to chase. The fall comes twelve paces after the chase starts.
I wake up freaked out, fur still filling my head. But the fear is fading. Falling dreams are the worst, the quick tensing of every muscle in your body painfully jerking you from sleeping to waking in an agonizing instant. You acknowledge the ache right away. Recognizing the dream is secondary.
That's right, I was dreaming. No bear, no chase, no fall. I didn't even get up for a potential fall, but I have to get up now.
"I'm fine," I say, rising from the couch, straddling my body with crutches and moving through the kitchen. "I'm not having a come-apart."
My head hits the door.
I'm not fine. I'm having a come-apart.
My head hits the door again.
"I thought you just said you were fine," my husband says from the kitchen table, with his morning mug of liquid magic that I love to smell but hate to taste.
"But the door is closed," I say with a sob. Not a whine, a sob.
My husband leaves his coffee cup and reaches me in two strides. My head is still leaning on the door. My eyes are down, tears dripping onto my swollen purple toes.
"I'll get the door for you," he says with a chuckle. He quickly follows this with "I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing with you."
"But I'm not laughing," I say, switching from sob to sober. "I'm about to shit myself and the door is closed."
My leg is broken in three places. I'm heavily sedated and couch bound. I haven't done serious bathroom business for more than a week. This is a significant moment in my recovery and I'm stopped at a closed door. It's a swinging door, separating kitchen from laundry room and half bath.
Swinging doors don't have knobs. They don't need them.
Just give a nudge with your hand or hip and what's closed easily swings open in either direction. Perfect for when your hands are full — full of anything but crutches.
My bruised palms are gripping crutches. There's no nudging the door open with hand or hip. Between the crutches are my grossly mismatched lower limbs. The left leg is beefed up like a brute dead-lifting all 125 pounds of me. The right leg, the one that's all wrong, is shriveled and useless. It's broken, so there's no kicking the door open either.
The reality of a disability, even a temporary one, is humbling in so many ways that it becomes unnerving. Friends check in on me and say, "I miss you." I miss me too. I'm reduced from living life amplified to stopped at a single door, exhausted by the thought of getting through it.
The only thing I can push the door open with is my head and that takes forever. I'll never make it. I'll poop in the shorts I've worn for a week and my husband will have yet another thing to do for me since I can't do a single thing for myself.
Smiling, he swings the door wide, silently props it open, and then politely steps aside so my crippled gait has plenty of hobbling space. I pass him, the washing machine, and the dryer. Next, coats, boots, and baskets full of beanies and gloves. One more hop and I'm in the half bath. It has a sliding door. I force my sore left armpit to suction cup the top of my left crutch. I release my left hand from its bruising hold on the middle handle of the same crutch. I slowly slide the door closed with my stiff fingers, lean both crutches on the counter, and then lower myself one-legged onto the toilet.
I made it. I'm shaking and sweating, but I made it. And I'm nearly lucid, so I'm not dizzy as my left leg settles into seated position while my right leg extends straight out, bloody and bruised with every color but healthy. It hovers two inches above the bathroom rug. My husband hovers two feet outside the door.
Even in my hallucinogenic state, I think he's handsome, maybe more so. Drugs do that. He's handsome, not handy. I've always said hire handy, marry handsome. And that's exactly what I did.
Women raised my husband, so he doesn't leave the toilet seat up. He knows how to cook and he has great fashion sense. When we were younger, his dark hair was so groomed, it was glossy. He wore it longer then. Now it's short and textured with the color of age, but no less appealing. It still complements his sharp cheekbones and his lips, perfected with a slight pout. The whole façade is confidently roughed with a short-trimmed, almost stubble-length beard. I love that beard. Crazy to think I once feared beards and now I'm married to a marvelous one.
"See, no poopy pants, babe. You made it," he says from the other side of the door. "And I'm still right here when you need me."
With him it's never if you need me. It's when. When. Not if. Always when, and for this when, I'm taking him for all he's worth.
CHAPTER 2
SKATING AWAY
MY HUSBAND COACHES youth hockey and so do I, but that's not what we do for a living. He's a behaviorist who works with special needs students in the public school system. I'm a journalist who works with wild things in wild places. When we're not wrapped up in what dominates our professional lives, our two boys who play hockey dictate our personal time.
A week ago my husband and I were both on the ice, but he was standing on it and I was lying on it. Neither of us grew up playing hockey, but we'd rather be on the bench than in the stands, so we learned to skate then learned the game. I coach our youngest. My husband coaches our eldest. We aren't head coach material — we leave that to the guys who grew up on the ice. They know hockey. We know kids. It works now. But the first year, it didn't.
In our first year of coaching, my husband walked into the coaches' locker room, found unoccupied space on the bench, and sat down to change from shoes to skates. When I first walked into the coaches' locker room, I found an angry hockey player in not-so-tighty whities yelling about how he wasn't having any of this. I was the "this."
He was trying to humiliate me. It worked. He was the one standing in public in his underwear, yet I was the one humiliated. I didn't want to be, but I couldn't rein in my initial reaction. Humiliated — shocked, too — but mostly humiliated. Stripping down to nearly naked on the pretense of a normal occurrence in the men's locker room was his way of telling me he didn't consider the coaches' locker room coed. His skin statement meant he didn't want me around. Frankly, I didn't want to be around. Who would, for that? I hated how he raised the response he'd expected, humiliation, but I made sure I didn't give him the result he'd expected: surrender.
He was as defensive as anyone in briefs could be. I was as offended as any other woman in our coed locker room should be. Wait. There weren't any other women. It was coed by regulation, but not by ritual. I left the locker room, laced up my skates in the lobby, and started coaching. Undies on the Defense laced up his shoes, left the rink, and stopped coaching.
Fast-forward a few years and I'm still the only woman in the coed locker room for the age group I coach, but more moms are following suit in younger divisions. I purposely sit by the locker room door so anyone coming in knows right away this particular hockey program is coed in writing and in reality. Panty parties, defensive or otherwise, are not allowed, and the rapport between coaches is respectful, if not also hilarious. We're a funny lot unless one of us goes down. This time it's me that goes down. I took a puck to the shin last week. The impact did more damage than anyone anticipated.
Five minutes into practice and halfway through our six-month-long season, my right leg crumbles when I hockey-stop. I mean, it just crumbles. Like back-of-the-cupboard stale, crusty, bottom-of-the-bag cookies that taste as bad as they look so they're better off in the garbage than in your mouth.
Or maybe the other kind of crumble. The spectacular Vegas-building-blowup kind: picture the implosion of a hotel casino as it collapses. That's what the bones between my knee and ankle do. Implosions spread, too, dust and debris billowing out the bottom of the crumble pile. My leg does just that, sending pain beyond tolerable reason tingling down to my toes and up past my knee.
I lie there post-implosion. The men, including my husband, stand there. Dust dropping, tingles fizzling, crumble settling. Me looking up, them looking down. The scenario is similar to the first story I wrote in journalism school at the University of Utah, titled "Glass Floor."
The story was about the limits of career-oriented women being capped by a glass floor instead of a glass ceiling. My argument stated that a floor, not a ceiling, separates genders in the professional realm. Women are under a floor of glass gawking up at a million pairs of finely polished Sunday shoes. The shoes belong to businessmen climbing the corporate ladder while barefoot, pregnant women who want careers, but have kids instead, stare from the basement through the glass floor overhead.
I wanted to punch that glass, steal those shoes, and climb that ladder with a camera in my hand and a kid on my back. Both. It's both. It's not one or the other. No or. It's and. And it is possible. Watch me rise. When, not if.
I'm deep in that crusade when a bout of vomit immediately brings me back to the present, the present state of a pathetic girl sprawling awkwardly on the ice. The men stare down at me, confused. There's no cap on me here, there's no division between us, no gender struggle. There's no businessman halting my progress, holding me back, stopping my go by stepping on me with recently shined Sunday shoes. There are only skates, ice, and faces as I look up in agony.
The pain of such a sorry state is so overwhelming, sour juices of adrenaline rise from my gut. I'm still wearing a helmet and my helmet includes a mask of crossbars designed to protect my moneymaking TV face from pucks. Puking inside a face mask has no benefits, so I swallow excess spit and squeeze my eyes shut.
No one pushed me down. I fell, that's all. I fell and mercy, this fall hurts. The queen mother of all cuss words breathlessly slips like cold mist out of my mouth, and they're still staring, you know, like men do when the hood is up on a car that has a smoking engine?
Their helmeted faces, some bearded and some not, huddle above me, silently assessing for a split second then realizing no one knows why I won't get up, so everyone starts spouting questions. Questions for which I have no answers, because anguish is stealing my awareness. Then little faces push into the huddle and I find my voice. I find it fast.
"Get the kids off the ice," I say, through gritted teeth. "All of them. Off. Now."
I'm the coach who doesn't yell and doesn't cuss. I need to yell loudly and I need to cuss hard, but I must delay both until all the kids are off the ice. The tether keeping my back flat on the blue line and my mouth closed within the cage of my helmet is dangerously thin, shredded from strain. It's going to snap and I'm going to lose it.
The kids get off as more men enter the huddle. Hockey dads shouldering in with hockey coaches to look at what's lying limp at the wrong angle under the proverbial hood. No one knows how to fix me.
Ambulance it is, but I can't tell you a single thing about the ride. I don't remember it. I wasn't mentally there, but my husband was. Between panicked punching and bouts of breath holding, I yelled and cussed all the way to the emergency room. He told me I did and he knows because he stayed.
CHAPTER 3
STAYING DESPITE LEAVING
THE NEXT THING I remember is a heavy skate. It's flopping around on a table, blade stabbing close to all the hands helping in the ER. They're trying to get the skate off my fat foot attached to my disconnected leg and it's not going well.
Hey! Did you say "disconnected?" I'm beyond worrying about kids hearing me cuss now. How in the hell am I going to chase wildlife with a disconnected leg? Shattered parts don't make it outside. They die outside or stay inside. I'll die inside if I can't be outside. Disconnected, busted, broken, useless. None of it is for me, but I'm pretty sure it's my leg they're yanking because I don't feel good at all.
My husband doesn't feel good either. I can tell because he's looking at my face instead of my feet. He's telling me to breathe. "What? Breathe? I'm not having a baby! I'm holding my breath because this ordeal hurts way more than having a baby. Now put my leg back on and let's get the hell out of here," I tell him.
My demands — or maybe the scene — is so unbearable, my husband steps away from the operating table, takes off a few layers of clothing, holds his head for a few seconds, then steps back in with tell-it-like-it-is resolve.
He says it's worse than when I tore a ligament in my left knee during a mountain bike wreck with my yellow Lab, Caddis. It's worse than when I threw up on him in bed multiple times. And worse, way worse, than watching me have both of our boys. I agree on all accounts.
I mean, parts go weird ways when birthing babies, but they go right back after pushing. All the pushing in the world isn't putting any of my leg back. A needle pokes my lower spine. Morphine lubes my veins. Panic and pain fade to black.
A few hours later, I startle myself out of a falling dream with a holler. My husband lets me know he's in the room and the surgery is done. He can't look at my leg anymore, so he's in a chair on my left side, nearly behind my bed. Even when he doesn't speak, I know he's there by the sound of his body shifting in the uncomfortable seat. Hospital chairs aren't meant for staying, but my husband stays. My dad doesn't.
He arrives with three orange roses in a red vase, kisses my forehead, and says there's nowhere else he'd rather be than with me. Pretty sure that's what he says, but that's not what he means.
In all fairness, medicine makes me lose my mind and I have an unreliable memory during extreme pain. I don't pass out, but I don't remember most of the moments within it either. The moment must be emotionally rough to be remembered, and just ten minutes after my dad arrives, it's emotionally rough indeed. I know it is, because I remember it.
He looks at the clock.
"Nearly noon," he says, still wearing his coat. "I have to leave."
His wife needs a ride home from work. In Utah. We're in Idaho. He drove three hours with three roses to stay for ten minutes? He's leaving? Already?
He does win points for showing up. Let's say ten, one point for each minute. He's ten points ahead of everyone else in my family. My sister asked how she could help from here, with here being Utah. My mother is MIA and my brother mailed me a bell, like a dinner bell or service bell. I am to ring it when I need something. Pretty funny actually, but for some reason when I ring, he doesn't appear. That part isn't funny, actually. He must not be able to hear the bell across the border of our neighboring states. All right, I get it. Everyone has more important people to tend to and I'm not dying. I just feel like I am. Excessive pain makes me a bit dramatic, but in all seriousness I am sad that the family who made me isn't here for me.
Trouble is, my husband thinks my dad is here to help. I think my dad is here because I matter most, but we're both wrong. The realization is beyond awful. It's emotionally rough. My dad leaves the hospital. My husband leaves the room. Time and tears pass. My husband returns with a wheelchair and kindly says, "Let's go." My dad is off his radar as fast as medicine erases my memory.
