The Hill

February 15, 2021

Climbing hills, if steep enough and if you stretch your stride, can cause your heart to pound and pulsate, your lungs to heave, your shoulders and thighs to seize up. Two months ago I was looking beyond scans, surgery, blood draws, and an inside-the-chest tube (well, not that). I knew what was coming, or thought I did. A week before the operation I ran and hiked nearby trails with plenty of up and down. That got it out of my system for a while.

The plan on arriving here was to see and explore this part of the country. Until that surreal last day in Virginia, when the doc showed me the dark spot on my scan, I thought I was done with cancer.  I wanted to see the mountains and the wilderness that stretch north and west from this corner of South Carolina, into Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and the few small towns scattered through the wild country, some pretty and picturesque, others not so much. Then, maybe, farther west. That’s still the plan. I call this “On the Road” for a reason. Now there’s covid and treatment.

The road trip and the mountain trails are part of our dream world. In the real world, the dreary, cruel world of health care, doctors, or some of them, are counseling their patients to get regular exercise as essential to a healthy life. Those who do know that for some patients it’s a waste of breath. Some patients ignore it, others become hostile. Other doctors never mention it for the same reason. They know that the curses of high blood pressure or hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, obesity have become embedded in American culture. We see the victims every day, struggling to walk, enduring chronic pain and shortness of breath. They come to assume that the pain, the appointments and tests, the lists of prescriptions, are part of life.

Some folks in that place find themselves facing problems that aren’t only physical. They start to recognize they’re standing on a kind of cliff, and that doctors don’t have the answers they want and hope for. They find themselves at the brink of a choice: either depression and despair—or maybe a way out. The way out means change, it means extricating themselves from poor diet and trying some level of exercise—walking, maybe. The choice may have nothing to do with their doctor. But it’s there: despair or hope; death, or a chance for a better life.

We all can find ourselves in that kind of a fix, looking at that choice. When you’re living with acute, relentless pain you can lapse easily into metaphysical darkness. You may have had the idea—it can’t happen to me. Then it happens to you. You may fall back on your spiritual resources, your understanding of God and His will. Or not. You may find your own way. You may have a name for where you are, the poor mees. But you get to that place you know you have to escape. Not easy. You can start climbing.

The driveway out of this apartment complex is a steep quarter-mile slope, maybe a 25 percent grade. The complex is built on the side of a hill. Our building nestles into the grade. The driveway isn’t wide enough for two vehicles to pass. To the left, the east if going up, is the thickly wooded side of the hill, a three-acre chunk of land posted with No Trespassing signs. To the right, the west, is a stretch of scrap woods and another apartment complex, maybe a little nicer than ours. From the base of the hill you can make out the thick plot of decorative shrubbery at the top that marks the intersection of the driveway with the main thoroughfare, Pelham Road. You can start at the short driveway to our building, which sits about two hundred yards up from the base of the hill, or hoof it down and face the full climb. I took the longer route. I needed to get past that quick stab of pain I get from stretching my legs with no warmup.   

Typically I stare down at the surface, measuring my stride. The first 20 yards are easy, but there’s always a stiff breeze created by the wind-tunnel narrowness of the road. I start feeling the grade and the growing strain on my lungs, and I gasp a bit. I know my conditioning is shot. The memory of the radiation sessions two years ago returns, the image of that rotating lens staring at my chest, the beam penetrating to the windpipe and lungs, doing what it was intended to do, kill the tumor—but also slashing my respiration capacity.

Sucking air, I look up. The mass of shrubs, my reference point, is still a dot where the curbs come together at the top. A car pulls by, I move left, the driver waves. I bend forward again, stretching my stride, feeling better, seeing the first lamppost, the one-third point. By now I have a rhythm, favoring my right leg and pulling forward, seeing the asphalt pass beneath me, foot by foot. I’m striding nearly flat-footed in “granny gear,” the term coined by trail-running champ Scott Jurek when he wrote about winning the Western States 100-mile race seven times.

That alien reference makes me smile as I hoof it up an asphalt driveway in the suburbs of a mid-size city. This ain’t no mountain trail. Memories rush back of all those trail adventures, in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Montana—Montana a bunch of times, when I would have thought of the idea of hiking a driveway an embarrassing joke. Yet here I am.

I pass the last lamppost, my lungs heaving. The shrubs are to my right, I lengthen my stride to finish, with Pelham Road now in front of me, traffic easing by. The stress on my thighs surges as I come out of my hiking crouch and jog a few steps to the street level, then curl around the shrubs and the big “Beacon Ridge Apartments” sign. From the top the descent looks long and steep. My legs feel like rubber. Downhill is for recovery. Maybe a second go-round? I wonder. Repeats are training. Let’s see how it feels at the bottom.