Saturday · June 26, 1999

There's a guy at outpatient named Moss. He's in his forties, a T12, hurt in a fall off a roof eight years ago, arms like a gorilla, and he is the only person in the building who isn't nice to me, which is why I like him. He heard I used to run a lift and he said, "You ski?" I said I used to. He said, "Used to, my butt," except not "butt."

Then he took a picture out of his wallet. It's him in a monoski. That's a sit-ski: a molded bucket seat on a metal frame with a shock absorber under it, all bolted to one regular ski. He's holding two short crutches with little ski tips on the ends, called outriggers, and he's coming down a blue run with snow flying off him like anybody else. Like anybody else.

There's an adaptive program up at one of the resorts that's been around for years, and in the summer they do everything else: handcycling, water-skiing, rafting. Moss wrote the number on the back of a gas receipt. I carried it around in my wallet for a week, next to his picture, which he told me to keep.

Yesterday I called. I'm signed up for a handcycle clinic in July and a river trip on the Arkansas at the end of the month. On my river. The woman on the phone asked if I had any rafting experience. I laughed so long she asked if I was OK.

Sunday · June 6, 1999

Last night we went to a party at the apartment of a guy Julie works with, second floor. Two guys I'd never met carried me up the stairs in my chair. Strangers are always weirdly excited to do this. I'm like a keg to them.

Later I was in the kitchen doorway and I heard a woman in the living room ask Julie, not quietly, "So are you going to stay with him?" Like I was a job she might quit.

I didn't hear the answer. I backed the chair out of the doorway so I wouldn't, whichever way it went.

We didn't talk on the way home. Then at one in the morning, in the dark, I asked her. I said if you're staying because you feel bad, I'd rather you didn't, and I'd understand. I've been rehearsing that since December. It came out almost the way I rehearsed it.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said she's staying because it's me, and she'd leave if I turned into a jerk, and I was being kind of a jerk right now, so watch it.

We talked until three. About money. About the next five years, which neither of us can see. About how she misses the mountain, which she's been hiding from me so I wouldn't feel bad, which made me feel bad. About whether she should go back up and teach this winter. I told her she should. I think I meant it.

Saturday · May 15, 1999

I drove today. Alone.

With what the insurance paid and a loan from my parents that I'm paying back whether they like it or not, I bought a '91 Honda two-door with a long driver's door, and a shop in Aurora put in hand controls. It's a lever by the steering wheel. Push it forward to brake, pull it back to go. There's a knob on the wheel so you can steer with one hand. You take a road test with an OT in a car that has a brake on her side too, like driver's ed, and I passed on Tuesday.

Getting in: I transfer from the chair to the seat, pop the wheels off, fold the back down, and haul the frame across my lap into the passenger seat. It takes about a minute now. In March it took ten, and I'd have given up if anybody had been watching. (The new chair came in April, by the way. Black, rigid, light, no push handles on the back, so nobody can push me without asking. I named it the Sled.)

Today I drove west into the foothills, nowhere really, and parked at a pull-off where you can see the high peaks, still white, and sat there with the windows down for an hour. I'm not going to lie and say I didn't think about some things. But mostly I sat there thinking: I drove here. Nobody drove me. I drove here.

Wednesday · April 21, 1999

I was going to write about my birthday. I turned 27 on the 9th and Julie made a cake shaped like a mountain with a little chairlift made of pretzel sticks. It was a good day.

But not today. Yesterday was the shooting at the high school in Littleton, which is twenty minutes from here. I was at outpatient when it started. The TV in the waiting area is usually on some talk show nobody watches, and yesterday everybody stopped and watched, therapists, patients, the guy who drives the van. One of the PTs lives down there. She went home early. Today the gym was quiet. Nobody made jokes. Nobody complained about anything, including me.

That's all. I don't have anything smart to say. I just didn't want to write about cake like it wasn't happening.

Sunday · March 14, 1999

I threw a coffee mug at the kitchen wall on Thursday.

Not at anybody. Nobody was home. I was trying to get the peanut butter off the second shelf with the grabber, the long stick with the claw on the end, and I knocked the jar and it rolled under the stove, and the mug was in my hand, and then it wasn't.

Then I had to clean it up. From the chair. There were pieces of mug in every direction and I can't reach the floor very far without hanging onto something. It took forty minutes. I got most of it. Julie got the rest when she came home and didn't say anything, which was worse.

The psychologist at outpatient is a guy about my age who wears hiking boots with a tie. When I told him about the mug he asked how it felt. I said it felt great for about one second and then it felt like forty minutes. He wrote that down. I think I'm going to be in a book.

Here's the thing. Everybody's watching me for sad. I'm not sad. I'm angry. I'm angry at the ice and the car and the plow that didn't come by, and at the guy whose birthday dinner it was, which is not fair and I know it. I'm angry when a waiter asks Julie what I want. I'm angry at the peanut butter.

He says angry is normal, it's energy, and I can use it. I said, for what? He said, that's the question. I wanted to throw a mug at him.

The clamshell comes off in two weeks. That, I'm not angry about.

Saturday · February 20, 1999

Two weeks home. "Home" is the ground floor of an old brick fourplex in Denver, near a park, with a kitchen Julie calls cozy, which means small. She found it and signed the lease in January while I was still in rehab. Mom flew out for the move, her second trip since November, and cleaned the apartment twice. It was already clean.

Then there are the steps. Three concrete steps up to the front door. Beaker drove down from Frisco and built a ramp out of plywood and two-by-fours in one afternoon. It was so steep it was basically a ski jump. I went down it once with him spotting and hit the sidewalk doing about fifteen miles an hour and nearly ended up in the street, and Beaker yelled "SEND IT!" which for the record did not help. Then the landlord came by and said the ramp can't stay anyway. Insurance.

So now, to get in or out, somebody tips me back and bumps me up the steps one at a time, like a hand truck full of beer. I hate it more than I can fit in a sentence.

Outpatient is three days a week. Julie drives me or I take the van, which comes "between 8 and 8:30" in the same way the mountain opens "on Thanksgiving."

Julie got a job at an outdoor gear store here. She quit ski school in December to be down here with me. She won't talk about it. She says, "They're three-year-olds, they'll live." My old straight skis are on the wall over the futon again. I asked her to take them down. The next day I asked her to put them back up.

Friday · February 5, 1999

Last night in rehab. Tomorrow Julie drives me to an apartment in Denver I've only seen in Polaroids. It has three steps up to the front door. Everybody keeps saying "three" like it's nothing. I stood at the top of cornices for three winters and I was never as scared of any of them as I am of three steps.

I'm going to miss the night nurse. I'm not going to miss anything else.

Sunday · January 31, 1999

Broncos again! Thirty-four to nineteen over Atlanta. Back to back!

We watched in the lounge on the unit. Maybe fifteen of us, half in chairs, a couple of guys in beds the nurses wheeled in, one guy who can only move his head who called every play before it happened and was right about half the time, which is better than the announcers. When Elway ran it in, the whole room yelled, and a nurse came running because she thought something had happened. Something had.

People are saying it's his last season. I hope he stays. I hope everybody gets to stay at the thing they love a little longer than they thought.

After the game the night nurse turned the lights down and said, "OK, champions. Meds."

Sunday · January 24, 1999

My PT is named Annika. She's about five foot nothing and she can put me on a mat like a sack of dog food. This week was transfers: bed to chair, chair to mat, chair to car. The car is the front half of an old sedan bolted to the floor of the gym, and it is the saddest car in Colorado. At first you use a sliding board to bridge the gap and scoot across. By Friday I did chair to mat without it.

Then wheelies. You learn to balance on your back wheels, because that's how you get up and down a curb. Annika holds a strap tied to the back of my chair so when I tip too far she catches me. I tipped too far eleven times on Wednesday. She caught me eleven times. On Thursday she told me she'd let go of the strap for my last three tries and I hadn't noticed.

Pressure reliefs: every so often you lift yourself off the seat or lean way over, because you can't feel it when you've been sitting too long, and your skin will give out without telling you. I have a watch that beeps every twenty minutes. The whole gym beeps. It sounds like a room full of smoke detectors with low batteries.

The chair I have now is a big gray hospital loaner with armrests and push handles. Everybody calls it the shopping cart. They measured me this week for my own. Rigid frame, light, no handles on the back. That's the first part of this whole deal I've been excited about.

Saturday · January 16, 1999

Hi. It's me. I'm typing this myself in the computer room on the second floor of the rehab hospital. There are two computers and a sign-up sheet and a guy who types with a stick in his mouth faster than I type with ten fingers, which I'm choosing to find motivating.

Here's what happened, once, so I don't have to tell it again.

Thursday, November 19th. I'd been in Breckenridge at a birthday dinner for a guy on lift crew. Driving home to Frisco on 9, around ten-thirty. I was sober, before anybody asks, and people do ask. There was a curve where the road was glazed, and the back end came around, and the car went off the road and rolled. I don't remember the roll. I remember headlights on snow, and then a woman's voice telling me not to move. Then a helicopter, which I also don't remember, which is a shame, because I always wanted to ride in one.

That's all I'm going to say about that night.

The medical part, since people asked. I broke my back at T10, the tenth vertebra of the part of your spine with ribs on it. Around the level of your belly button, more or less. They did surgery the next day in Denver and put in two rods and a bunch of screws, so I'm part hardware store now. The injury is what they call complete, which means the cord doesn't pass anything along past that point. Below my belly button I can't move and I can't feel. Above it I'm the same guy. Arms, hands, mouth, all fully operational.

I'm a paraplegic. I've typed that sentence four times and deleted it three. Leaving it this time.

I've been here since the beginning of December. I wear a plastic brace from my armpits to my hips called a clamshell, and I look like a Ninja Turtle. Every day is PT and OT, physical and occupational therapy, plus classes about my own body that I did not sign up for and will not be describing here. You're welcome.

Thank you to everybody who wrote. Julie brought in a folder of printouts two inches thick. A guy in Norway sent a picture of his dog on skis. A nurse in Ohio who works on a spinal unit wrote me three pages about what's coming that I've read about thirty times. Two lifties from Utah I've never met. Shay from guide school. Mitch. You people.

Julie has been here every day. Every single day. More about that when I can figure out how to say it.

New name for the page. "No friends on a powder day" is a good rule for a powder day. It turns out to be a lousy rule for everything else, and my friends didn't follow it, so I'm retiring it.