Living with Gliosarcoma
One can read all 10 installments of the Heron chronicle in chronological order on the “Heron” category page:
(Note that the query string “?order=asc” in the above link reverses the normal “most recent first” post order).
The individual posts are also linked here for convenience:
Via deep and peaceful sleep, the drama of my survival faded. The blind boldness; the failed roll; the strain and desperation and anguish and regret of clinging to life: it was all a mixed bag of “what happened yesterday.”
Recovery of the kayak was job number one. Noreen had worked in the Park for a while, knew it well, and based on my descriptions proposed a search of the shore just north of Great Head. I didn’t know whether local conditions there would tend to push the kayak one way or another. It was sure to be tumbled and damaged in the surf, I thought. It might have sunk.
Noreen called the Park, the Coast Guard and Bar Harbor P.D. to stem their worries of a missing kayaker, if any. There were none, but she took some abuse as proxy for the foolishness of the acts I’d recounted.
My wife and son arrived from Indian Point. In the afternoon, armed with Noreen’s annotated park map, we met up with my old friend Damon at a scenic overlook near Great Head. He lived on the “back side” of the island. I hadn’t seen him in years.
We continued along the road to the small parking lot at the trailhead, where I had emerged from the woods the night before. It was easy to see now that I had walked past the trailhead at least once in the process of doubling back to Sand Beach. The short spur to the parking lot is not marked as such on the trail.
My feet stung terribly in borrowed sandals, and I was very sore and stiff. Still we needed only three minutes to reach the rocky cove. We located the same side path I had climbed the night before, and I cautiously crept across the rocks to the slope with its fortunate handholds and footholds. Caught up in re-living the scene, I had yet to process the fact that the kayak was no longer in it.
I heard a shout from along the shore, about 25 yards to the north. I looked up to see Damon pumping his fists in the air. He’d found it. The shore in that direction was so broken and rough that I required a serpentine up-and-down route to reach him. The tide was lower now and revealed plunging cliffs and slimy pits of rockweed. The kayak had fetched up on a broad round boulder, right-side-up and bent over at the cockpit.
The rear compartment was filled with water from a torn hatch cover, and the other compartments were wet. The cockpit was flooded. The plastic hull was deeply scratched. We ferried gear over a treacherous route of slippery rockweed and steep rocks to a flat area near the path. Damon and I pulled the kayak off the boulder and I pressed out the sickening hull crease by standing on it. Solely by luck we’d arrived just in time to beat the incoming tide. The rockweed would be under water soon.
Finally, we climbed the trail to the parking lot with the kayak and the gear, stowed it on and in the car, and drove off to Damon’s house for dinner.
I wish I had been more prepared for the recovery, because I might have found my cell phone, my flashlight and my diving mask near shore. The local chart, which I had saved at Ship Harbor, was probably swept away as soon as I capsized. My foam sandals, pump and one of the Nalgene quart bottles probably floated out of the cockpit soon after the capsize and are almost certainly lost.
Amazingly, I found the other Nalgene bottle floating loose inside the cockpit, its tether broken. But many hundreds of dollars’ worth of gear was lost. One might point out that my life — my irreplaceable life — was saved, and with it a husband and a father and a son. Sure, I see that. But it’s not in dollars that I measure the loss.
For one thing, I didn’t finish the trip. Though technically my final landing point is within the town of Bar Harbor, it’s short of what I imagined, what I wanted.
I wanted to paddle up to the dock, at the bottom of the hill by the village, at the heart of town. I arrived there nearly 20 years ago to craft a future, and left to simply find one. Why there, if not to chase the ghosts of opportunities lost?
Even if I’d finished it, what then? I might have been disappointed, though not likely surprised, that pride shall not have been won in a week’s accomplishment.
For another, I’m haunted by the thought that I should have died, that it would have been better to die than to live only a short time longer and experience the horror of declining into helplessness at middle age. Was this voyage not heroic, nor even amusing, but an indulgence borrowed against regret? Shall it only be repaid with my life?
When I was a boy of about 12 years, I would ride my bike around the neighborhood. One day I rode my bike into the country, past the limit of pavement, by miles of inhuman quiet, farther than ever before, all the way to the end of the road, where stood a gate.
Strangely, the pavement resumed. Beyond the gate it climbed steeply around a corner at the foot of a mountain. A sign warned of “blasting” ahead: on the sound of two whistles, take cover. I was startled. I was fascinated.
I felt, for the first time in my life, the thrill of exploration: a map unfolding in my mind, blank but for that scratch of road scaling the width of the world. Over the years it grew, up to the mountain quarry, into the woods, down to the brooks and cellar holes. It seems so vast now but scarred with routine.
Thrill would not again taste so sweetly of growing up. Only a defiant struggle now can mask the sorrow that taints it, for in grasping the moment it is smothered by a memory too anxious to be made.