"But Maybe Everything That Dies, Someday Comes Back"
Mountains are as close to a holy as any space I know. It is from the top of the mountain that I gain perspective. It is from the top of the mountain that I come closest to finding something that makes sense. It is from the top of the mountain that I can see the monsters coming.
I climb my first summit three months after my father dies. It is in July. Mount Olympus in the Wasatch Range near my home. A bifurcated giant on the skyline, clearly visible from almost any fixed point in the Salt Lake Valley.
Stumbling and gasping for air, I trudge up the summit. I am far from anything like mountain climbing condition, but determined to see the valley home I have only witnessed from the ground…the valley floor that I have always taken for granted…the valley floor that now seems as overturned and confusing to me as the interior map I had compiled and charted for my life.
Hand over hand the last half-mile. A vertical summit composed of loose duffel-bag sized rock and slippery scree. A pile of crumbling bones that reveals a mountain in decay. At the top I stop, close my eyes, and let the thin air cool my overheating body. Opening my eyes again I find the view that I hoped might live up here. A horizon that stretches out as far as my eyes can see into the chaotic void of the Great Basin. An impossible expanse that holds my city, the Great Salt Lake, and a million secret places in between. I breathe deep and take in the panorama of perspective.
On the summit of Olympus the memory of my father’s death seems simultaneously as raw and irritated as an exposed nerve and as remote as the cold memories of another life. His loss is a watershed moment. I have come here not because I feel it will bring me any closer to his spirit, but because I want to find a place where I can dig in my heels and discover something like strength…a strength that runs deeper and more eternal than fragile human life.
I sense and hope that there are ancient and vital things in the world and that whatever that eternal mystery is courses through the history I share with him. Without the advice of my father, circumstances have forced me to look elsewhere. I have come to search for deep perspective in the world. I have come to gain some sense of what might be coming. I have come to find refuge and defense from the sound and smoke of approaching monsters.
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A pale moon hangs over us as we make slow progress on the interstate heading east. Moving incrementally slower on the road toward Lexington, Kentucky. This journey across the American continent is being made to honor my grandparents on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Having just turned sixteen, I am tasked with sharing driving duties with my parents on the lonely roads of the Midwest.
Exit signs float through the night. Lincoln…Omaha…Des Moines. In a flair of the shrewdly pragmatic (a trait he wears like a badge of honor) my father reasons that with three drivers in the car we can save money on hotels by pulling long driving shifts late into the evening. The only stipulation on this arrangement is that the driver must always have a wakeful spotter. I notice the rule isn't heavily enforced for him or my mom, but for me one of them keeps constant vigil.
As children my brother, Nick, and I grew accustomed to consistently checking in with our parents. We let them know when we arrived safely home from school. We let them know when we safely arrived at a friend’s house. I was given a bicycle for my eighth birthday. When I asked if I could ride it to school I was told yes, but only under the condition that they be allowed to follow behind in the car (childhood embarrassment be damned).
Tonight on the open roads of middle-America it is just me and my dad. My mother and brother sleep quietly in the back of our car. Their bodies are periodically illuminated in pools of soft incandescent light steadily flowing from overhanging street posts.
“It's too quiet, let's put on some music. What'd you say?” he asks me.
“Sure, put in whatever you want?”
“How about this?”
The haunting melody of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska soon fills the silence of our Ford Escort.
“Everything dies, baby, that's a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back...”
I am hooked. Slowly our night conversation becomes an opportunity for father to pass on rock and roll wisdom to his awkward (but receptive) son.
“Well, if you liked that try this one out. I've always loved this guy.”
Bob Seger and his Silver Bullet Band are soon carving out a place in my memory of this night.
“A gypsy wind is blowing warm tonight. The sky is starless and the moon is bright...”
Over the course of hours our guest lineup of musical acts rotates in and out.
“I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?”
Tonight something shared and important passes between us. The deep wisdom and power that inhabits music. In the ensuing years our interests grow further and further apart, but come hell or high water we are both devotees of the First Church of Springsteen. On this night I get some glancing sense of how much he loves me.
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A place as big and wild and limitless as the Buckskin Gulch (on the Utah-Arizona border) seems immune to damage, at least in any way my human mind can understand. Walking through the slot canyon of the Buckskin Gulch I can sense time, water and wind as the only forces of change that hold certifiable contracts here.
It has been three years since his death. I am still trying to make sense of the world, and piece together some new reality out of broken fragments. In the span of time that he has been gone there hasn't been a day that I haven't thought about him. A day I haven't wondered if he would be proud of me and the life I am struggling to create. Extended time spent hiking in solitude, coupled with an almost manic obsession to manage my health, has resulted in a loss of eighty-five pounds. People I love tell me I am getting too skinny…that they worry about me…but I don’t listen.
I am in the desert because it is quiet. I am in the desert because it is harsh. I am in the desert because I hope that it has something profound to offer me. Some insight to the connections between body, mind, and environment that I can clip out and store for future reference.
Dropping into the Buckskin Gulch is like falling into the void of the Earth itself. As the slot canyon deepens and narrows the canyon walls grow in size. Giant slick rock sentinels who hold their own sense of deep time emerge and hold their own council.
We walk all day with heavy packs on our backs. In what feels like late afternoon I see a hawk descend into the canyon and catch a small mouse attempting to scurry for safety beneath a rock. The hawk climbs into the air only to drop the mouse from a distance near the top of the highest canyon wall. The mouse’s body crashes to the Earth, killed immediately by the force of talon and impact. The hawk descends again, picks up the mouse and flies out of the canyon with its prey locked limp in its harsh claws. This should give me pause.
Long haul backpacking is the most physically punishing act I know. It demands a desire to journey to inhospitable places that can only be accessed by foot. It demands the tenacity to press on and move forward no matter how much the body wants to succumb to pain and fatigue. By the end of our first fifteen mile day in the Buckskin Gulch I am broken. At camp, food and water taste like nothing more than the banality of calories.
Beginning our second day I am physically exhausted, but moments of sporadic sleep have renewed something of my spirit and will. Beyond the confluence of the Buckskin Gulch and Paria River our trail turns north towards a trail head called Whitehouse. The sentinels of the canyon reduce in size and soon we have passed beyond their embrace into a world of wide washes and early summer sun.
This is what it feels like to be utterly reduced and working on the most primitive software my mind holds: one foot in front of the other…keep moving…don't stop…drink water…find shade…take a short rest…walk again…
By the time we reach Whitehouse my consciousness has evaporated into hardened clay. Only with the small miracles of rest and water does my conscious mind begin to reassemble itself.
Sitting cross-legged on a bench in the Whitehouse parking lot it occurs to me that for two days he hasn't pressed heavily on my thoughts. For two days my mind hasn't lingered on past or future but instead lived completely in the present moment.
Now in the relative safety of shade I think about how much he would have liked hearing about this adventure. He would have loved it not out of any special attachment to the place or activity, but because it has brought me a moment of relief.
Emerging from the deep canyon, my life picks up and continues to march on, but not without another glimpse into that deep place where times moves differently…that place where it’s quiet and free from the noise of monsters. Another sacred space worth holding my ground and fighting for.
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The shadows of my monsters remain large and frightening because they haven't quite rounded the corner yet. As my frame of reference expands the bellowing of these monsters seems to grow louder. Huge, beastly things that conjure and cast shadow images in my mind.
I am not entirely sure what I fear, I only fear that it is coming. I climb mountains and wander deserts with some hope that rooting myself in the ground will give me traction when the mad rush comes. That it will give me perspective.
There are heroes, but the world takes on a different shape when they inevitably fall short. Not long after my twentieth birthday he is diagnosed with chronic renal failure and the dialysis treatments begin. I struggle to balance the life of a college student with a new route being provided by this unexpected dark map. Diabetes is a word and a monster that has been too familiar for too much of my life.
I decide to live at my parent’s home, focus on school, and do what I can to help lighten a suddenly heavy load. Schedules are coordinated between my mother, brother, and I. My Tuesday and Thursday afternoon ritual is picking him up from dialysis treatment.
The dialysis center has the smells, sounds, and palpable despair of a micro-hospital. Within weeks it is a place I hate stepping foot in. Before long, I am a quasi-expert in his treatment after watching the nurses remove tubes and stints from his withering body.
Ritual soon becomes a comfort. It becomes a standing tradition for him and me to take a late lunch when I pick him up. Growing up I never had any doubts that he loved me, but over the course of years our interest have grown further and further apart. With circumstances rendering his daily existence a struggle it feels natural to make space for the small, but vital, act of breaking bread. This small act provides some new sense of needed structure, for both of us. Opportunity born of circumstance might be less than ideal, but it is still a space for something to grow. In this too brief moment he and I grow closer than we have ever been before.
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In my mind, I attempt to keep a catalog of collective truths and wisdom. Some comes from the accumulated human wisdom found in books…other has the stamp of earned experience. I try and train my ears to listen for knowledge. Often it is handed to me by people who have my best interests at heart. The gracious acts of others who kindly try to cover a hole in my soul that can never be filled. But for as valuable as all that collective wisdom has been the deepest lessons I have uncovered are spoken daily in the various tongues of the natural world. One of these lessons is that life takes, but it also gives back.
In the years after his death the desert becomes my home away from the mountains. I sojourn there whenever time will allow. But in all these wanderings I have no sense of how pivotal the austerity of the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin will come to mean.
When I meet Sarah we start out as friends exchanging emails across the great divide of Utah. She lives south in Kanab and I am in Salt Lake. Over three hundred miles of desert and basin and river and rock separate us. We only know each other through our words.
It is the January of my twenty-ninth year and life has once again been ravaged by an encounter with another monster. My aunt, a woman who I have seen as ageless and like a second mother, has finally lost a particularly cruel battle with pancreatic cancer. Emotional coals are raked up inside of me and I feel lost. In an attempt to cheer me up Sarah emails me ridiculous self-timed photos of her playing air guitar in her living room, jumping off of furniture, making a passable Pete Townsend impersonation. I decide that I need to escape. I need the solitude of the desert to quiet the noise and fear coursing through me. I ask her if I can visit. She says yes.
Our first night together is spent on the back porch of her pink modular home. It is late and we are enamored with the limitless sky of a desert in January, as well as each other. Humming light pours down through the chilled air, filling the spaces in between our words. I get the sense that deserts and mountains can open us up but not in the same way as a kindred human spirit. Her experiences uncannily mirror mine. Both of us left without fathers at an early age…both of us discovering some semblance of comfort and deep strength in the natural world.
Every subsequent event we share together that year comes in wide-open spaces large enough to hold the intensity of the love that is building between us. She admits to having feelings for me on the eastern side of Zion National Park. Months later we climb Angel's Landing when a California condor rushes over our heads and lands in a tree ten feet away. Moments later, on the sublime edge of Angel’s Landing, she tells me she loves me.
In the summer, we visit the Pacific Northwest. After a day spent wandering the redwood forests we take a short hike to a rocky shoreline overlooking the Pacific. While I hold her in my arms a whale surfaces down near the foot of the high cliff on which we are sitting. In this moment, I know that she is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Within a year, I propose to her on the same spot in Zion that she first admitted her feelings. Six months later we are married in the High Uinta Mountains.
I have come to learn that lives do not take shape in a vacuum, but with those we love in the places we love. With Sarah I feel like the future has regained some semblance of shape and order. With her I feel strength. With her I feel like I can face the dark and whatever moves there.
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Taking my dying fathers hand on this cloudy Saturday life has begun a transformation into something new. Weeks earlier, my mom had called me on the phone in a panicked rush.
“Jim, it's your dad. He's been admitted to LDS hospital. He had a heart attack.”
This news is far too surreal. Heart attack? But he has low cholesterol and good blood pressure. His concerns are the blood sugar and insulin injections of the diabetic. Ritual daily abuse on a body that has forgotten its most basic metabolic processes. How can a heart attack even enter into this equation?
Things quickly become more disjointed and confusing at the hospital. Not only a heart attack, but evidence of some sort of traumatic brain injury. Over the course of two April weeks that bleed into May life is flipped upside down.
“Yes, you can visit your father, but he is confused. He keeps getting names and faces mixed up.”
This all seems an extremely cruel fate to inflict on someone who has already suffered so much. Years earlier, on one trip to the hospital for a simple out-patient procedure a bed sore develops on his left foot and refuses to heal. His life quickly becomes a case study in the intimate ways systems are connected in the body. The veins in his extremities have narrowed. Blood cannot get where it needs to go. Suddenly small wounds deprived of the healing power of oxygen starve and turn black and rotten. When one life sustaining system fails, others follow in quick succession.
The hospital has become the unfortunate home of my monster. He is scheduled for exploratory surgery to see if his left leg can be saved. A biopsy of the area is taken and a decision is quickly reached that the infection is too far gone. They take his leg at the knee. As he slowly awakens from surgery the mood in his recovery room is grim and tense. Groggily he cuts through it with the scalpel of his humor.
“Well, it looks like my marathon days are over.”
But whereas that past abuse had some semblance of hope and recovery, this new post heart-attack world feels much more alien and grim. This is the darkest part of the monster…the unknown. Struggling day to day, with nothing but fear and anxiety of the millions of potential outcomes that stand poised on a shadow horizon. Sometimes heroes fall, and when they do the world is fundamentally changed.
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He dies on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in May. Days later we bury my father as silver sheets ripple over Salt Lake Valley, pregnant with the promise of spring rain. The service is held in the same nondescript LDS chapel that my brother and I grew up attending with our mother. Its modest familiarity provides an unexpected level of comfort after a week spent caught in an unceasing storm of grief and raw emotion.
My remarks at the service are jumbled and not fully formed. Something about being left with one final lesson from him and his pain. A lesson that life can be mean and unfair, but never worth giving up on. After the service my mother requests that the hearse make a detour and carry his body past the home he grew up in before its final stop in Mount Olivet cemetery.
I pass through the gates of the cemetery and wander to his grave. From a distance I can see the herd of mule deer that move quietly through this place feasting on the flowers that my mother insists on leaving whenever she visits. I can almost hear his laughter on the wind, making some joke about not bothering with the expense of flowers when they are going to get eaten by the deer anyway. A joke without much heft since he always loved flowers, and birds, and animals.
Stepping out of my car, the deer eye my presence before bounding off to other parts of the cemetery, and other gourmet flower stands. As I stand over my father's grave, I reflect on this small spot of Earth. I have read that many indigenous tribes ascribe ultimate value to a place when it becomes the final resting place for your dead.
Years earlier, shortly after he moved to Berkeley, Nick and I try to make peace with our fathers ghost at the Day of the Dead celebration on San Francisco's Mission Street. We leave a photo of him on a shrine, light a candle, and try to apply for supplication to an end of the disconnected feeling and sense of the unknown that has been torn open with his death. That frightening, dark place where the monsters move.
Standing over his grave I can see the headstones of his parents. Two generations of the Kichas family have now passed since their flight from Greece. People I never knew, yet who I am intimately connected to through the sacredness of history and blood. People who made their own journey west into the Great Basin, fleeing from their own fears and monsters.
Grief and emotion well up inside of me. I share his name. I share his appearance. We share our history. A light breeze picks up and I raise my head. On the southeast horizon, clearly visible from the foot of his grave the recognizable north face of Mount Olympus towers above me. A parallel view from the one I found months after his death. And there, for one brief moment, in the shadow of Olympus I feel some semblance of my strength. For one brief moment in the shadow of Olympus, the sounds of monsters are silenced. For one brief moment in the shadow of Olympus, I feel rooted in a deep and ancient strength. For one brief moment in the shadow of Olympus, I feel rooted in the power of my place, ready to weather the storm.