Sunday · September 26, 1999

Here is the plan.

Saturday, December 11th. The adaptive program, up at the mountain. My first lesson in a monoski, on snow. Moss is coming. Julie is coming, but she is not my instructor. We agreed on that in writing, on a napkin, which is on the fridge. My instructor is a guy named Pete who's been doing this for fifteen years and who told me on the phone that the first day I'm going to fall more than I've ever fallen in my life, and the second day a little less. I said that's what skiing was like the first time, too. He said, "Exactly."

How it works, since a bunch of you asked: you transfer from your chair into the bucket, they strap you in at the thighs and hips and feet, and you're sitting on one ski, about knee-high off the snow. You steer by leaning and by where you look, same as always, and the outriggers help you balance and turn. For the chairlift there's a lever that pops the seat up to chair height, the lifty slows the chair, and you slide back onto it and ride up with your ski hanging under you like everybody else's. For the first few days an instructor skis behind you holding two tethers, like reins, so you don't go screaming off into the trees.

I've loaded a hundred sit-skiers onto my old quad. I slowed the chair for every one of them and never once thought about who they were or what it took to get to my line. I wish I could go back and say something to each of them. Nothing big. Just "nice day."

After that, Christmas week, I'm riding my old quad. As a customer. Mitch says he'll load me himself and that if I fall in the unload area he's stopping the lift and making everyone watch.

After that there's no plan. Julie says that's fine. Julie says I never had a plan before either, and that's how she knew I was the real thing.

Eleven weeks. Think snow.

Wednesday · September 22, 1999

It snowed on the peaks.

I saw it this morning from the top level of the parking garage at the gym. I drive all the way up there because nobody else parks up top and you can see the whole Front Range. There was white on the high stuff, Evans and the peaks behind it, the first I've seen since spring. A thin clean line, like somebody drew it with chalk.

Last year I pulled over on Fremont Pass and got out of the car and stood there grinning in a T-shirt. (It's on the 1998 page. I read it this morning. I shouldn't have.)

This year I sat in the car with the engine running and one hand on the lever. Not grinning. Not crying either. Just looking at it for a long time, the way you'd look at an old girlfriend across a restaurant. Then I laughed, because it's snow, and I love it, and nothing that happened is its fault, and I've been mad at it for ten months, which is the dumbest grudge in the history of grudges.

Then I went downstairs and did my workout.

Sunday · September 19, 1999

Julie got her job back. Kids' ski school, weekends, starting at Thanksgiving. She'll drive up Friday nights, stay with Beaker's girlfriend Lena in Frisco, and come home Sunday night. It was her idea, and it was my idea first. We've had it both ways around a couple of times.

She was nervous to tell me she'd gotten it. She told me with a face like she was telling me the dog died. Then I whooped, a real whoop, and she started crying, and then I had something in my eye again. The same eye as Titanic.

Here's the honest number: I'm about seventy percent OK with it. The other thirty is the part of me that wants her home on Saturday nights, and the part that's jealous. Not of any person. Of the mountain. The mountain gets her and I don't. I told her the seventy and the thirty both. She said the thirty is allowed as long as it doesn't get a vote.

Watching the Broncos without Elway is like watching somebody else's family have Thanksgiving. Moving on.

Sunday · September 12, 1999

Graduated from outpatient on Friday. Annika came over from the inpatient side to see me off, which she didn't have to do. She made me pop a wheelie and hold it while she counted to thirty in front of everybody. Then she hugged me and said don't be a stranger. I said, "Where would I go? You've seen my steps."

So now I'm on my own. I joined a regular gym. The kid at the front desk looked at the chair and said, "Uh, we have... bikes?" I said I'm here for the arm stuff. Now I go four days a week and the big guys by the bench press nod at me. They nod at me. I have been accepted.

Work: starting in October I'm answering phones and doing rentals at a ski shop in Denver, three days a week. I wanted the tuning room, but the benches are all built for standing. The owner said, "We'll figure it out." I'm holding him to that. In the meantime I've been reading the tips on Ridgeline Snowboard & Ski Tune, which lives right up the block from me here on GeoCities, like I'm studying for the SATs.

Money is tight. The disability check covers the rent and not much else, and Julie is paying more than her half, and we don't talk about that, which means we're going to have to.

Monday · September 6, 1999 · Labor Day

Went up to Frisco for the first time since the night it happened.

Beaker threw a barbecue at the old condo, the four-guys-in-two-bedrooms condo, which now has five guys and a dog. It has four steps up to the deck. Four guys picked me up in the chair before I could say anything and set me on the deck like a trophy. Fine. This time I let them.

Everybody was talking about the season. Who's on which lift, who's going to Chile next summer, whose knees are shot. For about an hour I was just there, one of them, arguing about wax. Then somebody said, "Man, remember when Jordan..." and stopped. And everybody went quiet. And I said, "Remember when Jordan what? Finish it." It was the story about me skiing into a tree well on a powder day with a sandwich in my mouth. It's a good story. I finished telling it myself.

We didn't go home by way of 9. I'm not ready for that road. Maybe never. That's allowed, too. We took the interstate through the tunnel after dark with Julie asleep and her feet on my dashboard, me with one hand on the lever and one on the knob, which is my new ten and two.

Sunday · August 22, 1999

Got fitted for a monoski yesterday.

The program keeps its gear in a big garage in the foothills, and in August it's about a hundred degrees in there and full of sit-skis hanging on hooks like sides of beef. The tech, a woman named Rhea, measured my hips and my legs and how far I can lean without tipping over, which isn't far. At T10 my stomach muscles only sort of show up for work. Then she put me in a bucket and packed foam around me until I fit tight, snug like a ski boot, which is the whole idea. Your body's the boot now. Straps at the thighs and hips, knees up, feet in a cup at the front.

Then Rhea said, "Rock," and I rocked side to side, and the whole thing tipped over onto the mat, and I lay there on my side, still strapped in, like a turtle. I laughed so hard she had to wait. She said everybody does it. She showed me how to get back up with the outriggers: plant one close to your hip, push, throw your weight over. It took six tries. The seventh time I did it in one move.

Sitting in that bucket was the first time since November that the thing under me felt like mine to steer.

December. December.

Saturday · August 14, 1999

At the grocery store today a woman I have never seen in my life took hold of my chair from behind and started pushing me toward the checkout. No handles, remember, so she grabbed the frame. I said, "Excuse me," and she said, "I'm just helping, honey!" and kept going.

I grabbed my wheels and stopped. Hard. She almost went over the top of me.

Then I said some things. Not swears. Mostly. Loud enough that the checker stopped scanning. The woman said I didn't have to be rude, she was only trying to be nice, and she walked off, and I sat there next to the gum and the magazines with bananas and frozen burritos in my lap, shaking.

Here's what I can't get anybody to understand. It isn't about help. I ask for help twenty times a day. It's about being moved. Somebody picking you up and putting you where they think you ought to go. You wouldn't grab a stranger by the belt and steer him to the register.

The psych guy at outpatient asked if I used the energy. I said I used all of it. He said maybe next time use some of it on a sentence. Fair. Five words: "Please let go of my chair." I have been practicing them in the mirror. I look ridiculous.

Sunday · August 1, 1999

Three steps. I did them.

Down and up, by myself. No Beaker, no Julie, no ski jump. Going down, you pop a wheelie and roll off each step forward, balanced on your back wheels, slow, and try not to think about physics. Going up, you turn around and go backward, one hand on the railing and one on the wheel, and haul, and the back wheels bump up one step at a time. Annika drilled me on the practice steps at rehab all of June. The first time I tried it for real, in July, I got stuck halfway and had to holler for the guy across the hall, who came out in his bathrobe.

Today Julie was at work and we were out of milk and I just went. Down, store, milk, up. Nobody helped. Afterward I sat in the doorway with the milk in my lap for about ten minutes, just breathing. Then I put it in the fridge, because, milk.

Best day since the accident. Better than the river. I didn't expect that. It's three concrete steps.

Sunday · July 25, 1999

Yesterday I went down Browns Canyon in the middle of a raft.

The adaptive program runs the trip with one of the outfitters in Buena Vista, and guess which one. My old boss was in the parking lot. Hollis, who I guided with all last summer, rowed my boat. It's an oar rig, with a seat bolted to the frame; they strap you in loose so you can get out if you have to. Life jacket. Helmet. (Mom, I wore a helmet.)

Hollis did the safety talk. My safety talk. He stole the bit about how the river doesn't care about you and the bit about how he does, and he looked right at me when he did it, and I yelled "THAT'S MINE," and everybody in the boat laughed: a woman with MS, a blind kid and his dad, and me.

Then the river. It was loud and brown and it sounded like it always does. On the first real rapid a wave came over the front and hit me full in the face, and it was cold, it's still snowmelt, it still hurts in July, and I felt it on my face and my arms and my chest, and where I can feel, it felt like everything.

I read the whole river from the middle of that boat. I told Hollis where to go before he went there. He told me to shut up about eight times. On the bus back he told everybody I was a nightmare passenger. Best compliment I've had all year.

Julie asked on the drive home how it was. I couldn't answer for about thirty miles, and she didn't make me.

Saturday · July 10, 1999

Handcycle clinic this morning at a park down by the Platte. A handcycle is a three-wheeled bike you ride leaning back, low to the ground, and you turn the pedals with your arms. I did six miles. My shoulders are on fire and I have blisters in places I didn't know had skin. Moss did twenty and wasn't sweating. Jerk.

Then this afternoon we watched the women's World Cup final at a sports bar, the U.S. and China, nothing to nothing for about a year, then penalties. When they won the whole bar was on its feet. I was on my wheels. Close enough. It's the first time I've been in a room full of screaming people since the Super Bowl in rehab, and the first time all year I forgot about the chair for two hours straight.

Coming home, the pavement was so hot it burned through my gloves on the push rims. Denver in July. Nobody warns you about the pavement.