Last Time Around (cont.) | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Last Time Around (cont.)

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine 2003

Page:

Last Time Around (cont.)

HE WASN'T ON THE BRIDGE. I jammed my head over the railing on the gorge's upstream side: nothing but the pretty stream burbling over rocks and between snowbanks 70 feet below. I rushed to the other side—and saw a figure in a blue parka and tan corduroys sprawled in the creek.

"There he is!" I shouted.

With Parker now taking the lead, we raced off the far end of the footbridge and tore down the steep embankment through cottonwoods and hip-deep snow. The sun had just broken through clouds over Ajax Mountain. We found him lying faceup in the shallow, crystalline water, eyes open but unseeing, looking like my father—not smashed up, at least outwardly—but definitely dead. His arms were outstretched, his legs more or less together, his feet up on shore. The snowbank showed splash marks but no footprints. My first reaction was anger. I remember pacing back and forth over the hard bank, kicking at the snow.

"Goddammit, Dad! I can't believe it! Why did you do this?"

My mind raced over what I could have done—should have done—to prevent it, and what I could do now. I pressed his neck for a pulse. None. His skin felt cool. I left him lying in the icy water. If there was a chance of reviving him, the frigid water was his best hope.

If you define yourself only by your exploits and travels, your feats of physical courage, when the time comes that you can no longer live such a life, you've lost the standard by which you measure yourself.

It's the last lesson I learned from my father.

Even as Parker called 911 on his cell phone and sirens started wailing somewhere up above, my anger began to dissipate in the sparkling, sunlit gorge. The medical rescue team charged down the embankment, pulled my father from the water, and with cool professionalism went to work. I was now a spectator. Part of me hoped they'd manage to revive him and part of me hoped they wouldn't. The prospect of brain damage, paralysis, oxygen bottles, a wheelchair—any of those would have been a living hell for everyone, but most of all for him.

I stood at a distance and thought, He'll be 76 in two weeks. What's wrong with dying now? "Do you mind telling me just what it is I'm supposed to be sticking around for?" he'd said to me at one point last fall. I didn't have a good answer for him.

A young Aspen police officer named Chip Seamans walked over to check on me. "Your dad must have been quite a guy," he said. "For someone his age, he was pretty chiseled."

How he would have loved to have heard that!

At 11:13 a.m., the emergency doctor on duty at the Aspen Valley Hospital pronounced him dead. I later realized, from the way I found him lying in the creek, that he probably had done a back layout off the bridge. He'd died as he'd lived—with a bold gesture, a flair for the dramatic, adamantly refusing to become a frail old man. More than his death itself, what unleashed cascades of tears from my mother, my siblings, and me was to think how he may have suffered mentally on his way there.

Therein lies one of the pitfalls of an adventurous spirit. If you define yourself only by your exploits and travels, your feats of physical courage, when the time comes that you can no longer live such a life, you've lost the standard by which you measure yourself.

It's the last lesson I learned from my father.

Page: