RISE: An Anthology of Change

Rise!

An Anthology of Change

1

Follow The Hula Girl

By Becky Jensen

My stoic father never wanted to be a burden to anyone, in life or in death. Yet here I am, carrying this former Marine on my shoulders through the Rocky Mountains.

His ashes fill a snack-sized plastic baggie stowed in the top of my backpack—a zippered pouch called the brain. It’s where I keep my valuables, including cash, driver’s license, Colorado Search and Rescue card, and a one-hundred-calorie portion of my dad.

My father was a dead ringer for a young Charlton Heston, handsome in his dark blonde crew cut, with a strong jaw, broad shoulders, and powerful calloused hands the size of dinner plates. Dad worked hard to put food on the table, and when he walked into the house after a long day at the metal fabricating shop, we mobbed him at the door. He would stagger through the kitchen, laughing, with kids hanging off his neck, clinging to his back, and hugging his legs.

Although I grew up hiking with my dad, we never did much camping, so tackling a five-week solo backpacking trip through the Colorado Rockies is new for both of us. I know Dad would have loved roughing it like this, and, unlike me, he would have been fearless. At night I’m convinced every twig snap is a mountain lion padding through camp to break my neck as I sleep. And when my imagination runs wild, I unzip the brain and pull out Dad’s ashes, a talisman to drive away my fears. Tonight is no different. His cremated remains are light-gray powdery ash, like the soft fluff at the bottom of a cold campfire ring, mixed with hard, skeletal bits of my dad that refused to burn. As I burrow into my sleeping bag, I rub a piece of Dad’s bone between my thumb and forefinger through the double-bagged plastic, a child with a security blanket.

I think about my flesh-and-bone father and the tattoo on his left bicep: a topless hula dancer whose bare feet peeked out from under his short-sleeved work shirt. Dad got the tattoo in Honolulu before he shipped out to Midway Island at the end of World War II. The hula girl held one hand behind her long hair, the other arm outstretched in a graceful line, forever poised and ready.

Make her dance, Daddy! Make her dance! I’d squealed in delight as a little girl, and my dad always obliged by flexing his arm, making the hula girl’s grass skirt bounce and sway over his muscles. My mom despised that hula girl like an old trashy girlfriend, the topless exotic dancer forever under Dad’s skin, beckoning him back to the days before a wife and kids and bills had tied him down. Back to the bold days of his youth when he had slept on the deck of a troop ship at night, a breeze cooling his sun-kissed face, as he sailed across the Pacific. The hula girl was his constant companion, an indelible mark of independence and adventure, dancing with him beneath starry skies.

The tattoo artist, Dad told me, had used needles to draw the hula girl on his skin.

I furrowed my brow. Did it hurt, Daddy? I asked, tracing the outline of her bare legs with a finger as I sat on his lap.

I suppose it did, Beck-a-boo, but it was so long ago I don’t remember.

Come back to me, I imagine the hula girl whispering to my duty-bound father every time he moved a muscle, her blue-gray ink fading with each passing year. I like to think my dad heeded her call when he moved our family west from Iowa to Colorado the summer after he turned fifty. I was eight years old.

Dad’s first job in Colorado was on an assembly line in a windowless manufacturing plant, and he quit after three days. I felt like an animal trapped in a cage, he said as he threw the uniform’s bow tie into the garbage. My dad joined a construction crew and worked as a trim carpenter until the market bottomed out and he was laid off. Eventually, he was hired at a cattle breeding facility north of town, where the barns were full of massive, valuable bulls for stud—beasts measuring over five feet at the shoulder and weighing close to 2,000 pounds. He looked after the huge animals during the night shift, and the bulls were so isolated and full of testosterone, they would often smash their steel pens in frustration. They could easily kill a man, and when my dad entered a pen, his only protection was a little blue heeler dog that nipped at a bull’s back legs if it got out of line.

My mom brought my sisters and me to visit Dad at work one night. He took us on a tour, and then we did a little stargazing up into the cold, black sky. See that up there, Beck-a-boo? Dad pointed to Orion, one of the most conspicuous winter constellations. That’s ‘OR-ee-uhn,’ the Hunter.

I rolled my teenage eyes and sighed, It’s ‘Or-EYE-uhn,’ Daaad. A bull bellowed in its stall.

Or-EYYYE-uhn, he said slowly, drawing out the second syllable as he smiled at me. Good to know, smarty-pants. His gaze returned to the stars. Can you see the knife on Orion’s belt? He’s raising his club and holding a shield, Dad continued unfazed, drawing his finger a short distance across the night sky. Those stars below and to the left are Canis Major and Canis Minor, the big dog and little dog, and guess what animal the Hunter is facing?

I shrugged.

It’s the constellation Taurus, the bull! Dad burst out, hitching a thumb toward the barn. Can you imagine facing one of these guys with just a club, a shield, and two dogs?

You’re kidding, right? I asked, dumbfounded. You only have one little dog, Dad. Aren’t you scared? Ever?

He turned away from Orion and looked into my eyes. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go, Beck, Dad answered. But it’s not my time to go just yet. I’ll be fine. One little dog is all I need. On cue, the company cattle dog trotted over and sat at Dad’s feet. Well, come on, Canis Minor, he said to the heeler. It’s back to work for you and me.

The memory inspires me to pull on my down jacket and step out from the safety of my tent into the cold, black mountain night. Once my eyes adjust, I look up at the mass of stars. Layer upon layer of white pinpricks twinkle through clouds of hydrogen gas where Dad told me new stars are born. I search in vain for the fearless Hunter, but Orion is on the other side of the world, hidden from me. Frightened to be alone in the dark, I climb back into my tent, kiss Dad’s baggie goodnight, tuck it in the brain, and crawl into my sleeping bag.

When I wake at dawn, the air is crisp in my alpine camp. It’s the last Sunday in July, and I’ve already hiked more than 350 miles on the 500-mile Colorado Trail, a path that runs through six wilderness areas, eight mountain ranges, and six national forests between Denver and Durango. The CT is kind of like the Appalachian Trail only shorter, with more wide-open landscapes and much taller mountains. So tall, in fact, that in the five weeks it will take to hike the entire CT, I will gain the same elevation as climbing Mount Everest, sea level to summit, three times.

You don’t go on a journey like this without a reason, a fellow traveler told me. My reason was a matter of life and death.

Six months before, I sat hugging my knees, naked and sobbing on the cold, wet floor of my shower, thinking of ways to kill myself. No single drama or trauma led me to that exact moment of desperation. It was years of steady social conditioning that nearly did me in. Cultural norms tell women from birth that appearance matters, perfection pleases, and we should be all things to all people, often at the expense of our own well-being. When I realized I would never measure up and there was nothing left of me to give, I sank into a groggy depression, my imperfect, exhausted body mired in a pit of joyless quicksand. There was nowhere to go but down.

My doctor suggested antidepressants after I sobbed my way through a routine wellness exam, but I declined and she never pushed back. And talking to a counselor was out of the question. I was raised to be tough. When we skinned our knees as kids, we were told to rub some dirt in it. I learned by example that you don’t ask for help or accept a handout, that was for sissies and taboo in the family pride department. So I self-prescribed the Colorado Trail as a tough-love cure for what ailed me, a proving ground where I would learn if life was worth living. A gift of radical self-care. A chance to rub some dirt in it.

Temperatures at camp are close to freezing, and I’m slow to crawl out of my tent to relieve my bladder in the willows and to cook the oatmeal I’ll need to fuel today’s nineteen-mile hike. The long day ahead of me will be a roller coaster of climbs and descents, up and over the alpine spine of the mighty Continental Divide. Most of the hike will keep me above tree line, and the exposed tundra landscape is no place to get caught in an afternoon electrical storm. The weather is holding as I break camp and start hiking, but the clouds are already building.

The trail contours several mountains for miles before descending through tall stands of spruce trees. I fill my lungs with the clean, earthy smell of a living, breathing forest. Birds swoop and glide above purple delphinium flowers that tower over my head. All too quickly, the trees come to an abrupt end at a place described in my guide book as "the last forest-sheltered area before Spring Creek Pass." Translation: if a storm rolls in during the next eight miles of exposed hiking, I’m toast. Actual charred human toast.

A friend of mine was struck by lightning in the mountains a few years ago. He was lucky it only put him in the hospital instead of the grave, but it took him a long time to learn how to walk again, and he suffered permanent nerve damage. Electrical storms build fast in the Colorado Rockies, where mountain ranges make their own weather and people die by lightning strike every year, typically in the afternoon. I kick myself for getting a late start this morning.

What should I do, Dad? I ask the sky, but there’s no response.

I pull a piece of dried mango from my hip belt and chew, wondering what my dad might have been doing on this same day when he was my age. He had probably changed out of his church clothes and was weeding the garden or pitching horseshoes on our farm in Iowa. It would be his last day of rest before Monday, when he would be up before dawn to feed the pigs. If I woke early enough, I could talk to him while he packed a sandwich into his metal lunch box, and wave as he drove his old battered pickup truck down the long dirt driveway to his second job as a steel cutter. I would have been too young to realize that my dad was starting to feel trapped and restless, like something was missing from his life and he needed to go find it.

I focus back on the task at hand: getting to Spring Creek Pass trailhead, and catching a ride into the remote mountain town of Lake City, before the weather hits. I do the math and realize I will reach Snow Mesa—a flat, featureless, four-mile plateau at 12,785 feet—by early afternoon.

My gut tells me to stay put. Late July is primetime summer monsoon season, I’ll be hiking when thunderstorms are most frequent and severe, and I will be the tallest lightning rod for miles. From where I stand on the trail, it’s impossible to see what I’m walking into, and I know better than to take one more step ahead. But it’s been eight days since my last taste of civilization, and I’m seduced by the promise of a hot shower, a cold beer, and a warm bed in town.

Let’s do this, Beck-a-boo, I say and start walking again.

After a few miles, the fluffy clouds begin swelling into cauliflower thunderheads and a knot tightens in my belly. When Snow Mesa finally comes into view, the clouds are closing in at a rolling boil. I cling to blue patches of hope in the sky and cross my fingers that the worst of the weather will miss me like it has before. Even so, I pick up my pace. I’m at the point of no return where I’m closer to the trailhead than I am to that sheltered spot in the trees I left miles back, and nothing about either option feels right.

A memory of my father enters my mind. It’s nearly a decade ago, and he’s standing at the kitchen sink, a knife in his hand, making lunch. Don’t let anybody put me in a nursing home, Beck, Dad instructed as he sliced through fresh tomatoes from his garden. And don’t spend good money to keep me alive if I’m a vegetable.

Bladder cancer is a terrible illness for anyone to endure, let alone a former Marine hellbent on dying with dignity. Toward the end, Dad had worn a path in the carpet, slowly shuffling back and forth between the bathroom and the living room, using a metal walker. He became a shell of his former self, wrapped in a cardigan on the loveseat, swallowing a steady diet of oxycodone and morphine. It was not the journey he had planned.

Black thunderheads continue to build as fat raindrops hit the brim of my baseball cap. The temperature drops, and with it my morale. I stop to secure the waterproof cover over my pack and put on rain gear, including a rain skirt I made out of a drawstring Hefty bag. The electricity in the air makes my stomach sour and pulls at the hairs on the back of my neck. I hike faster across the flat mesa.

Several months after his diagnosis, Dad was determined to die on his own terms. And as soon as Mom left the house to run errands one day, he closed the garage door, taped a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, and, taking the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition. The exhaust fumes started to burn the back of his throat. And then his chest, filled with cardiac stents and atrophied arteries from a heart attack years earlier, grew tight and painful from lack of oxygen. This wasn’t supposed to hurt, he grumbled as he turned off the ignition. Disappointed and coughing, Dad opened the car door, looking for a better way to die.

A flash of lightning connects to the horizon, and my metal gear begins to hum. I scan my surroundings for any kind of depression in the terrain where I can hide, and I spy a small, dried-out gully. Forgetting about the weight of my pack, I jump into the shallow trench and land with a grunt. I fumble to unbuckle my hip belt, shove my metal-frame backpack under an overhang of tundra grasses, and run down the gully to hunker under another scoured grassy bank to ride out the storm. I look at the carbon fiber trekking poles in my hands and spring to my feet, chucking them javelin-style toward my backpack right before a simultaneous crack of thunder and lightning hit nearby. I shriek and scurry to my hiding place as the skies unleash hail and bone-chilling sheets of rain.

Under the embankment, I can see my poles and pack abandoned up the gully and worry that Dad’s ashes might get wet. I imagine the hard-driving rain finding its way under the waterproof cover of my pack, seeping into Dad’s plastic baggie, coating all the important things inside my brain with a thick, gray sludge.

Oh, Dad, I mumble through numb lips, crouched inside a trash bag in the mud. I don’t want to die today, not like this.

He walked from the garage into the kitchen and spotted the knife block. Determined to see his plan through, Dad draped his hand over the sink and sliced one of his wrists open with the serrated blade of his tomato knife. As blood started to flow out of his veins and down the drain, his survival instinct kicked in and he drove himself to the emergency room.

By the time I reached the hospital, Dad was in a windowless room in the basement, imprisoned in the glass coffin of a pressurized hyperbaric chamber, wrist stitched and bandaged, breathing pure oxygen to counter the effects of the car’s poisonous fumes.

Well, if it isn’t the Last of the Mohicans, he croaked, using the nickname he had given me as a little girl, the youngest of his ten children. As a white, thirty-seven-year-old, divorced mother of two, I knew the pet moniker was offensively appropriated and absurd, but I loved it. Dad’s voice was weak and muffled from behind the walls of the chamber, raspy from his self-inflicted sore throat. I pressed a hand flat against the clear lid, and he reached up with his fingers to touch mine on the other side.

Eight years later, I’m huddled in a hailstorm on top of a lonely mesa, tempted to run the gauntlet over to my backpack, grab the baggie, and hold it close to me. I’m scared and I want my dad, but logic tells me to sit tight. I tuck into an upright fetal position, balancing on the balls of my feet, cold and miserable. Hugging my knees and squeezing my eyes shut, I rock back and forth, willing myself small as the storm rages overhead. Rain and hail pelt down, and another thunderclap splits my ears, as water flows in branching veins on the ground at my feet.

I left the hospital and drove over to my parents’ house where I let myself in through the side door. My mother was staying overnight with Dad, and I had offered to lock up their house. It was a good excuse to escape the hospital basement filled with sick people, weak yet alive, trapped in doctor-prescribed caskets under artificial lights. As I stepped into my parents’ quiet kitchen, I saw the knife in the sink and studied the room like a crime scene before reaching for the bloody handle. I washed and rinsed the blade, and slid it back into its block. Then I scrubbed the sink with bleach and wiped the counter with a clean washcloth, putting everything in order the way Dad liked it. I stared out the large picture window over the sink into blackness.

When I visited Dad in the hospital the following day, he motioned me over to his bedside. As I walked up to the side rail, he grabbed my wrist, startling me. Didn’t you think I was brave, Beck? he asked, searching my face.

Do I think you were brave? You never said goodbye, I choked out, making a fist and twisting my wrist free from his grip. And you didn’t give me a chance to say goodbye to you, Dad.

His eyes pleaded with me. "But didn’t you think I was brave?"

The hula girl’s bare feet and legs, limp and motionless, peeked out from under the sleeve of his hospital gown. Dad closed his eyes and I backed away.

The deluge on the mesa lets up after twenty minutes, and I emerge from the wet clay, muddy and shaken, but grateful to be in one piece. I retrieve pack and poles with trembling fingers and clamber back onto the trail, whimpering thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you in time with my footsteps as I hustle stiff-legged down the path. It rains steadily, and I keep hoping the next slight rise in the landscape will be the last and I can get off this damn mesa. But then another rise pops up. And another.

My muscles and mental stamina, so tightly coiled and adrenalized for hours, finally release their tension. I am cold and exhausted. The shivers rumble through me in fits and starts, and then strike a steady percussion through my arms and legs and chattering teeth. I’ve hiked fourteen miles, and have five more to go to the trailhead, but my legs are spent. I have nothing left to give and my body crumples to the ground, wet and vulnerable at the bottom of another cold shower. I need to pick myself up by my bootstraps and get the hell off this mesa. I need to stand and start walking. I need to . . . I need . . .

I . . . need . . . hellllp! I break down and wail, saying the forbidden words out loud, through ragged, gulping sobs, alone in the middle of this barren plateau.

As if in reply, a flutter of wings catches my attention, and a brownish bird lands on the trail in front of me as I smear my nose across the sleeve of my wet coat. The bird looks at me and takes a few hops along the path. I remain fixed to the ground, slouched and sinking into the mud, drained after the storm and my cry. The bird won’t leave, and it bobs its tail and cocks its head as if to say, Aren’t you coming?

When I was young, I followed other birds, clever killdeers that pretended to be injured, dragging a wing on the ground a short distance to lead me away from their clutch of eggs. I don’t have time for games right now, and I want to tell the bird I don’t care about your fucking nest. Can’t you see I’m trying to get my shit together? But the bird isn’t faking a broken wing. It looks me in the eye.

When it’s time to go, it’s time to go, Beck, I hear my dad say. But it’s not my time to go just yet, I whisper to the bird, and slowly stagger to my feet. It may seem too convenient an explanation, or a bunch of New Age horseshit, to think that this bird is my dead father in animal spirit form here to guide me off a mesa on the edge of the wilderness. But I know it’s my dad. Step by step, I follow him down the trail, and when the rain finally tapers off and the first rays of sunshine break through the clouds, he flies away.

Dad lived for one year after his suicide attempt, and during that time I quit my job so we could spend more time together. We dug in the garden, played countless hands of gin rummy, weathered several of his cancer treatments, and had a proper goodbye.

Make her dance, Daddy, I said to my eighty-one-year-old father as he lay dying in his hospice bed. He lifted his frail arm, flexed his muscle, and the hula girl danced.

Before I left home for the Colorado Trail, a study was published by University College London that explored the effects of suicide on friends and family. Research showed that people who experience the sudden death of a friend or family member are 65 percent more likely to attempt suicide themselves if their loved one died by suicide rather than natural causes. They call it suicide contagion.

Although Dad’s suicide wasn’t successful, his attempt normalized suicide as an acceptable exit strategy for me, as if committing suicide had Dad’s stamp of approval as a legitimate way to end my pain.

I would have done it neatly and quietly with pills, none of that kitchen knife bullshit, and I had no preconceived notion that killing myself was noble or brave. I just couldn’t see a way out of my depression and was exhausted by the daily struggle. I couldn’t see an end to