10:09 p.m. on a Saturday night. I’m preparing to leave town for three weeks when my phone dings signaling that I’ve received a text message. When I pick up my device, I see it’s from my friend Eric. The two of us have been friends for a good thirty years now. Shared outdoor interests, common world views, and an appreciation of good craft beer made us natural compatriots. But it wasn’t just that. I have common interests with most of my friends. What made my relationship with Eric unique was his ever-present enthusiasm and willingness to actually “do stuff.” If I asked him whether he wanted to ride mountain bikes, the answer was always “yes.” Did he want to go hiking? “Of course!” How about we go to Lone Pine to camp? “Let’s go.” Hey, we should go to the Beer and Bluesapalooza festival in Mammoth. “Ok, I’ll get the tickets.” Whatever the situation, if it directly or indirectly involved outdoor recreation, Eric was all in without hesitation. In fact, if truth be told, at least half of the time he was the agitating force, not me.
Although things had fallen off some in the past decade for reasons that don’t need elaboration, we still communicated on an irregular basis. Just ten days earlier, we were texting each other to reminisce about the time we drove to Monterey, mountain bikes atop Eric’s Subaru, to ride in the Sea Otter Classic. As it turned out, Eric was ultimately unable to ride once we arrived because he was hit by a car the week previously while on his road bike and his body was still too ginger to take the punishment of a long, bumpy trail. So I rode Sea Otter alone in the pouring rain wearing a big, black garbage bag I pilfered along the course from one of the empty refuse bins. At the finish, tired, wet and shivering, I wolfed down the free meal of barbequed chicken, baked beans, and coleslaw given to the all those who completed the course. Then before we even made it back to our hotel room, I puked it all back up in the shrubbery on the hotel grounds. We laughed about that and spoke of a potential camping trip in the fall to Gooseberry Mesa.
When I picked up my phone to read the message, it was from Eric’s youngest son. He requested that I call him. Perplexed, I dialed Eric’s number. When his son picked up, he rambled on about something that he presumed I already understood. “Wait,” I demanded. “What are you trying to tell me?” That’s when he informed me his dad had passed away. Earlier that day, Eric had mounted his road bike and gone out for a ride. Somewhere along his route, he went into cardiac arrest. A passerby saw him collapse and called emergency personnel. They worked for 40 minutes to bring him back to no avail. He died on the side of the road with his much beloved bike at his side.
It was gut punch for which I was ill-prepared. Death is typically an unforeseen and unwelcome guest, but this was particularly stunning and sobering news. Although Eric was a handful of years my elder, he was active, fit, and healthy. As far as I knew, he had no history of heart or other medical problems other than sleep apnea. If I had to engage in the morbid activity of rank-ordering my friends based upon who would perish first and who would perish last, Eric would have been near the tail-end of the list. But the universe doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about what you or I think. It will check our haughty arrogance into humble submission whenever it pleases. And it will mercilessly bring us down simply as a reminder that we are not in control. Life and death happen on its terms, and its terms exclusively.
My dad died of cancer a few years ago. He was in his nineties. He couldn’t move about without the assistance of a walker. He couldn’t feed himself, clothe himself, bathe himself, or use the bathroom himself. The last month of his life he spent in bed, sleeping 20+ hours a day. About a week before he passed, the hospice nurses started him on a morphine drip. Then one day, he didn’t wake up. He just kept right on sleeping.
That was another emotional punch to the solar plexus, but looking at the whole sad affair dispassionately, at least my dad’s passing brought relief. Although he was still lucid and his mind razor sharp, dad despised his loss of independence. He bristled at the idea of continually being poked, prodded, injected, and harassed by the hospice nurses. And perhaps worst of all, he knew those things would never change. He would never reclaim his former self. So his death was a final release for both him and us, a liberation from his externally-imposed misery.
That was the positive that came from his passing. The proverbial silver lining. But where was the rusty upside to Eric’s death?
A good number of years ago, I was in a Las Vega casino, a vile and smokey establishment crammed with gray-haired retirees handing over their pension one quarter at a time to the one-armed bandits. As I walked through the gaming area, I saw that a crowd had gathered just up ahead. That wasn’t necessarily an unusual site as sometimes folks congregate around tables where big bets are being wagered or where some lucky gambler is taking it to the house. But as I got closer to the action, I saw a number of paramedics hovering around a body on the floor. The defibrillator was out and they were performing CPR on a blue-faced patron. The paramedics worked for a sustained period of time without luck. When it became evident that their efforts were futile, they stopped and pulled a white sheet over the departed.
That disturbing image has stayed with me ever since. What I can’t shake is the how and the where of that person’s last moments. As the light faded, their final vision was blinking neon, drunk and overweight tourists, and dirty, garish carpet. The last sound they heard was the clattering of coins, the ringing of bells, and the incessant Devil’s interval of slot machines. The last thing they smelled was sour body odor and stale cigarettes. They did not die well.
In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey wrote about an older gentleman who perished at Grandview Point among the disorienting undulations and gullies and fissures and potholes of Utah’s canyon country. Abbey, who was spending time as a ranger at what was then Arches National Monument, was part of the search party that ultimately found the missing man’s bloated body under a juniper tree on the rim of the mesa. Just over the lip of the rim, thousands of feet below the dead man was the White Rim. Still further down, the chocolate brown waters of the Colorado River mixed with the more placid Green River to form a roiling torrent as it headed for Cataract Canyon. In the near ground sat desiccated tablelands composed of cliffs and mesas. The blue distance was framed by the Abajos and the Elk Ridge, the La Sals and Tukuhnikavits, and finally fifty-miles distant, the Henry Mountains.
Reading his account of the grisly discovery, Abbey, as was his wont, comes across as indifferent, even callous. Nevertheless, he was favorably impressed by the lost man’s final resting spot.
“Looking out on this panorama of light, space, rock and silence, I am inclined to congratulate the dead man on his choice of jumping-off place; he had good taste. He had good luck – I envy him the manner of his going; to die alone, on a rock under the sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed. To die in the open, under the sky, far from the insolent interference of leech and priest, before this desert vastness opening like a window into eternity – that was surely an overwhelming stroke of rare good luck.”
Therein lies the “bright side,” the comforting prospects, the blue sky in the darkness that otherwise enshrouds Eric’s death. Eric didn’t go out lying supine on a hospital bed, juiced up on sedatives with tubes emerging from every orifice. He didn’t exit like Norman Chaney, fictional partner of the law firm McKenzie Brackman, slumped over a plate of uneaten food at his desk. Instead, he mounted his bike and pedaled away in the brilliant morning sun, never to return. Epic.
Eric lived like a warrior. And like the unknown man at Grandview Point, he died like a wolf. And what else can you really ask for? To die in the open as he did, under a cloudless azure sky while riding into the vastness that opens like a window into eternity – that was surely an overwhelming stroke of rare good luck. Edward Abbey would certainly approve.
Comments
Post a Comment