I met my new neighbor yesterday. I took her some flowers from the garden and sat with her for awhile while her son ran an errand. He was working on the house before she moved in, and I stopped to welcome him to the neighborhood. He told me his mother “has some weird, rare brain disease with some really long name that makes her fall…” 

“PSP?” I asked.

He said, “No, it’s not some sissy disease, it’s really awful.”

You can imagine that I took umbrage at him suggesting that PSP is a sissy disease, so I cleared that up for him, and as I threw out the major symptoms and told him the full name, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, he said “Yeah, that sounds like it, I know it’s got ‘super’ in it.”

Later I met one of her caregivers, the wife of the team who lives with her. I told her my mother had died of PSP, and we talked about the manifestations. “Is it bad?” she asked. “Yes,” I nodded. “It’s bad.” We left the conversation there and turned back to the party, with my assurance that I would help however I could.

When I went in to meet Joan, I saw Elizabeth’s mother, and my own mother, a little gray-haired lady with frail limbs sitting in a chair, leaning stiffly forward, squinting up at me with one eye shut, her sluggish voice dragging past a drooping, swollen lower lip, her hand slowly coming up to shake mine. I trimmed the flowers and arranged them in two glass vases from her cabinet, put them in two places where she’d be able to see them, where she didn’t have to raise her eyes. 

“Supranuclear Palsy” refers to a diagnostic weakness in the muscles and nerves that move the eyeballs up and down. If you hold your head steady and look up into your forehead, or down toward your cheeks, and you can’t move your eyes, you’re in for a really rough time. The disease is a multi-system atrophy much like ALS, which initially manifests like, and is often misdiagnosed as, Parkinson’s. Miss Joan told me she was diagnosed a couple of years ago, and in the past year has been getting worse quickly. I know what this means. I wonder if she does.

When I asked if she had been told what to expect, she gave me a confused account of where and when she had been diagnosed, but she didn’t answer the question. I thought I saw a tear below her dark glasses a few minutes later. 

“I have three sons,” she told me, and added a little wistfully, “...no daughters.” Her husband is dead. I wonder if she has anyone to really talk with about her life, her feelings, her physical decline and approaching death. My heart breaks for her, and for her family, her sons and her caregivers. They don’t know what’s coming. If I can be a guide to this family that’s going through it now, let me. People did it for me, they just did it on a computer forum. I just happen to be across the canyon in real time from Miss Joan.

I left shortly thereafter to go to yoga class. Before I left I told her how my mother and I had come to embrace the concept of “the new normal,” how things go along for awhile, then some aspect gets worse or a new symptom arises, and that becomes the new normal, and you figure out how to live with the new normal, until there is another new normal. I took her hand again to say goodbye, and she placed her other thin hand on my arm as we looked long at each other. 

I am forever entangled in my mother’s disease. It is an integral thread of my life, whether or not I will it. It’s true that the everyday horrors of the new normal have receded into the general haze of memory. Is that because even at the time the everday horrors were mingled with the plentiful, unbearable daily moments of tenderness and connection? 

Yet I live with “a new normal” anxiety: I will never know if that disease will come and rob me first of one capacity, then another, until finally all. I cannot live my life in wondering, but I can be aware. I can practice rolling my eyes upwards daily, and notice if one day they won’t go, or if one feels weaker than the other. I can practice yoga and balance, monitoring my muscular coordination. But what can I do if I see a sign of PSP in me? All I can do for now is draw on my experience with the disease, and help a neighbor live and die with it.

One way, perhaps, I can help, is to finally sit down and finish the book I began to write the year after my mother died, about her struggle with PSP. Here is how it begins...

Killing Mother

The year I turned 45 I was forced to seriously consider killing my mother. In the end, despite my best intentions, I did not do it. I did move from the ragged interior of the country to the urban east coast that year to help her die. 

When I drove away from my sanctuary hidden in the high desert, I believed that if she asked me to I’d be able to end her life. I also believed, even more strongly, that if I had the disease she’d been diagnosed with, I would wait as long as I still could, drive to the edge of the Black Canyon, videotape a short goodbye including apologies to those who’d have to clean up my remains, and take a flying leap off the rim of the 2000 foot chasm. I’d fly. I’d soar as I plummeted to the bottom. Theoretically I’d be dead of a heart attack long before I reached the bottom, but I’d try to stay conscious as the jagged boulders holding the river rushed to meet me. I’d spread my arms, try some of the freefall spins and moves I’ve seen skydivers do on tv, and cry out to god all the while offering thanks for the splendor of the life I was ending.

However, after several months with my dear mother and her rapidly degenerating brain stem, I had no certainties left. None at all. Not about my ability to assist her suicide, not about my own conviction to end my life if I end up with the same disease. Only after she finally did die, did I realize I’d lost my faith as well, somewhere during the long, quick ordeal.

I never thought, when I was growing up, that I could live farther than an hour from a coast. I thought I’d die of claustrophobia stuck inside the middle of the continent. Who could have imagined then that I would end up finding peace of mind here in the rural West. I’m within a day’s drive of anything I could ever need in life: the deserts, red and pink, apricot, sand and rock, of Utah and Arizona; the ghostly hills of New Mexico and O’Keefe’s paintings of them in Santa Fe; any number of rushing untamed rivers, wild in all or in part, accessible by foot or raft or canoe; the wild terrain of puma and bear, elk and mule deer, badger, coyote, bobcat; the most cold and barren peaks stateside, alive with alpenglow, and lower, the miracle of tundra; all these places a reliable vehicle and my feet can carry me and my longing within half a day’s journey. I do not miss the sea.

I love the sea, but perhaps I do not need it in the way that I need the spare wildness of the desert, or the sight of mountains, or the embrace of slickrock canyons. My mother helped me purchase land here, near the edge of a cliff overlooking a small canyon. She encouraged and supported me while I built an adobe house on the land. I have a magical greeting card she sent me while I was building the house. Inside it she had recorded her voice so that when I opened the card I heard her say “We love you, and we’re so proud of you.”

I kept thinking, over the years, to record over it a new message to send back to her. Always something held me back. When I found the card yesterday, cleaning out a drawer, I opened it to hear my own mother’s voice offering priceless, eternal words of encouragement and esteem. I am lucky to have those words in her voice where I can hear them any time I want. For I have been wanting, wanting to hear her voice again, from beyond. I have wanted her to speak to me in my dreams, or to speak to me in the garden, or to show herself. She both has and hasn’t confirmed her presence with me, but I only heard her whole voice once, in a dream, in which she was outside a window and I was talking with my father; I caught a shred of something she was saying from afar. And then she was gone. Today I have again her whole voice, telling me she loves me and is proud. 

Elsewhere, I have hours and hours of her voice degenerating. They call this disease “progressive,” but there is no positive direction to its course. I recorded hours of testimony to the awful destructive power of the disease as it gradually, hastily consumed her voice, her swallow muscles, her eyesight, her mobility, but left intact her awareness. I recorded, perhaps, the astonishing struggle between her desire to die and her will to live. 

The intensity of her will to live is part of what kept me from being able to kill her. Despite egregious bodily discomfort, and a lifetime of rage at one circumstance after another, still she managed to laugh, and to dress, and to go through the motions day after day. Until, one day, her desire to die finally overcame her will to live. 

 

Discovering PSP

Three years before she was correctly diagnosed with PSP, my mother Ali was misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. That summer, we took a trip to Alaska, her long-held dream of a cruise down the inside passage. She’d already fallen once by then, but nobody thought anything of it. You get old, you fall. Our first night out we were walking back from cocktails on deck, staggering in the ocean air along the narrow corridor between the deck railing and the ship’s wall, giggling and laughing at how we staggered, swearing it was the ship and not the drink that made us weave like weathered drunks back to our cabin. Possibly, in her case, it was partly the PSP. I blame my staggers on being seasick.

She fell again on a shore walk in Ketchikan, though it seemed clear that time that she’d tripped. We were walking over driftwood and smooth boulders and seaweed to see some petroglyphs along the shore.  She had passed on several of the proffered shore tours but, ever the art appreciator, not this one. She was bruised and sore afterwards, yet undaunted. In the end, we were so glad we’d gone to Alaska when we did. She knew at the time it would be her last trip. She didn’t even come visit me again, but she did begin to fall more often.

When she fell, she fell straight back. Just dropped, no blackout, no light-headed warning, she just fell back. Once she hit her hip on the corner of a granite table in the lobby of The Home where she lived with my father, the Colonel; twice she hit her head on the apartment floor and required stitches. While falling was her most dramatic symptom, the most insidious might have been her double vision. I’d visited three years earlier when the Colonel had appendicitis, to help her with his recovery. I flew in and met her at Walter Reed in DC, the army hospital where her grandfather the general had finished out his life. After I’d visited with the Colonel, she and I went down to the car in the parking garage. I offered to drive but she said she was fine and so she drove into the bright light of the ramp leading into the heart of downtown traffic. I glanced over and noticed she had one eye closed.

“You’re driving with one eye closed!” I shrieked. “Why are you driving with one eye closed??” 

“Double vision,” she replied. “I only see one if I close one eye. It comes and goes.” By then the light was green and let us out and I couldn’t insist that she pull over. The hotel was only a block or two away, but after we arrived I took the keys. Eventually her eye doctor had prescribed special glasses to try to help the double vision. Prisms, she said. It didn’t occur to me to ask any questions, as long as Dr. Schefkind was doing something to fix it; after all, he was the doctor.

She’d also been seeing Dr. Williams, a neurologist who’d diagnosed the Parkinson’s. Where did he come from? How did she end up in his hands? I think he was on some list The Home published for their residents. Dr. Williams recommended that Ali read a book about Parkinson’s, and so she recommended it to me. I ordered it from Amazon and a few days later began to read. On page 11, Chapter 1, What Is Parkinsonism? I found this description of one of several diseases often mistaken for Parkinson’s: 

Progressive Supranuclear Palsy is the most common of the ‘Parkinson Plus’ syndromes. The initial clinical presentations may be like Parkinson’s disease. For this reason, it is often first diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease. The correct diagnosis is usually made several years after the first symptoms appear or not until after the patient dies and the brain is examined at autopsy. Patients with PSP complain of falls, gait disorder, visual problems, speech difficulties and swallowing abnormalities… Tremor is usually absent, and there may be a rigidity of the neck muscles that keep the head in extension. Patients have a wide-eyed ‘astonished’ stare that sometimes can be differentiated from the masked face of typical Parkinson’s disease. The diagnostic criterion by which PSP may be recognized during life is the inability to look down voluntarily…. As the disease progresses, other eye movement abnormalities may occur.

I read a few more pages, but I kept coming back to that paragraph. It described Ali’s symptoms to the letter. The first symptoms I noticed, not knowing they were symptoms, were her slump and her slowness, years before Alaska. She was sitting at my table sipping a drink. Her shoulders were hunched forward and her head hung so she was looking at the table rather than at me. She held her glass in one hand and raised it in slow motion to her lips. I told her to sit up straight, open her heart, lift her eyes. When she was reminded, she was able to square her shoulders somewhat, and hold her head up, but very shortly she’d forget and droop again. She also had that astonished stare. There’s no other way to describe it.

I made it to page 33 before I determined that Ali had PSP so why bother reading about Parkinson’s. This was in July, 2003. I suggested she bring up the possibility to Dr. Williams. So she told him, at her next appointment, opening the book to page 11, “My daughter thinks I may have this disease.” Naturally, being a highly trained neurologist, Dr. Williams said “I’m the doctor!” and that was the end of that discussion. I suppose I wanted it to be Parkinson’s and so I let his opinion stand. By that time I’d read more about PSP, and definitely didn’t want it to be that. 

But we started then trying to get her an appointment at Johns Hopkins, and did not get one scheduled until January 14. That November I visited for a couple of weeks, and I knew it was bad. I returned from my travels just before Christmas, and after the holidays found myself at loose ends, wondering about my purpose and value in life. I felt so lost and down that I prayed fervently for some work more meaningful than the job I was doing. And I had thought I was doing what I wanted to do. But it felt empty. 

My brother called from his cell phone on the way back to the hotel after mom’s visit to Hopkins and said “You were right.” This deep sense I’d been having since November that I would have to leave home for a long time to go care for my mother was validated with his words. I had received the mission for which I’d prayed, and in a strange way I felt relieved. Though I did caution myself that getting caught up in a “good rush” is just as bad as getting caught up in any bad rush: pursuing a benevolent or heroic path motivated by Ego is as spiritually ignorant as a life addicted to fear.

An hour and a half in the hands of a stellar young neurologist who knew what to look for and knew, above all, that the disease existed, and my mother had her answer. It turns out that many neurologists don’t even know enough about PSP to diagnose it. That day I looked up Dr. Katherine Widnell at Hopkins, and found a photo of a woman young enough to be my daughter. I also telephoned the Society for PSP, which I found listed in the back of that infamous book I stopped reading on page 33. I told the nice woman there about the diagnosis and the symptoms I’d noticed for years, and said “I guess I’ll finish up some work here and then move out there, maybe in the fall.” 

“That may be too late,” said this unknown woman on the other end of the phone line, and so I resolved to move in spring. It was that simple.

I told mom on the phone a few days later that I was going to start winding things up here so I could move out there in spring. “Oh honey, I don’t want you to do that,” said my mother, “I want you to come when I’m dying dying, you know ~ I don’t want you to give up your life and come out here now.” I thought ‘but you are dying dying now, don’t you know, don’t you see?’ So I wound up the projects I was working on, and prepared to move out there at the end of March. 

During the course of those two months I often visited the PSP Forum online. When I’d spoken with the Society in January, the woman had told me about the Forum and suggested I visit it, but “maybe not just yet,” as she feared its content would be too intense for me to handle right away. Within two weeks after diagnosis I visited the Forum and became a regular reader. Every night that I logged on and read the threads of accounts of various wives, daughters, husbands, sons, and a very few parents struggling with PSP’s ravages on a loved one, I ended up bawling before I logged off. 

PSP is fatal and usually kills between one and ten years after diagnosis. PSP gradually takes all a body’s motor functions, voluntary and involuntary, while leaving the mind’s awareness virtually intact. Most PSP patients die of aspiration pneumonia after inhaling their own saliva or their dinner. 

PSP is about 1% as common as Parkinson’s Disease. Estimates suggest that perhaps as many as 20,000 people in the US actually manifest symptoms of PSP, but only a couple of thousand are diagnosed correctly; most are misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s. However, about 25 percent of people diagnosed with PSP end up, upon autopsy, having had something else, either Parkinson’s or one of the other rare, weird brain diseases that kill these days. I have to wonder if the human brain simply has not evolved as fast as our human strategies to outrun death far into old age. 

On the island of Guam there has been an unusually high incidence of a disease nearly identical to PSP, which some experts suggest is the result of a pathogen derived from eating fruit bats. Nobody knows what causes PSP. Eating fruit bats might contribute on Guam, but elsewhere? What little research there is suggests that there is a genetic component to PSP and there is also some kind of environmental trigger or triggers. The genetic component has been identified as the H1H1 haplotype on a particular gene, but nobody can figure out what the environmental trigger or triggers is or are. On the PSP Forum family members are trying to link it to exposure to certain chemicals, or to some sort of physical trauma preceding the first symptom, or to any tangible source they can identify. Yet the cause of PSP remains a mystery while the effects ravage thousands yearly, one family at a time. 

Dear Teahouse Community,

 

Beth asked me to post my holiday letter, so here it is. This virtual world is still vastly uncharted territory for me, so I don't get into it as often as I'd like to -- there is so much actual territory I'm responsible for... I don't see how y'all do it all. 

 

Dear Friends and Family,

It seems silly to suggest that I am writing an annual holiday letter, since I haven’t written one for years. I’d like to catch you up on the past year, but what a daunting prospect, since I have years to catch up on… and I fear that if I begin to write I will never stop. You will never get the letter, and I will be found months from now dessicated from lack of food and drink, mummified over my keyboard, an unfinished 27,000 page Christmas letter choking my hard drive… but, because it is 20℉ outside and the snow is a foot deep, and I would like to connect, I will set myself to trying to summarize the past year.

 

2008 started hard. My beloved 16-year-old Mocha dog who had suffered chronic renal failure for the past two years finally declined to the point that I had to have her put down. Dr. Vincent came out to the house one Sunday morning in early January. A couple of hours later some friends came over, and we buried Mocha in a hole in the frozen garden along with Michael’s cat Luna who had died the day before. I had bought a bunch of bags of garden dirt the week before since everything was frozen and under snow. We stood around the grave dripping blue candles onto the snow as more flakes fell, and remembered those fine animals and all the joy and beauty they had brought to our lives. It speaks to Mocha’s exquisite nature that half a dozen humans attended her funeral…

Before any time at all passed, in early February, I took the remaining dogs Brick and Raven off in the Mothership on a journey east to visit friends and family, and to pick up a new puppy, who was born the end of January. We managed to weave between storms the entire five week trip, enjoying ideal driving conditions, camping in some lovely state parks across the south and the east coast. Among the favorites were Copper Breaks SP and Atlanta SP in northern Texas, Clarko SP in Mississippi… I also ate the best donuts ever at a Southern Maid shop north of Shreveport. Three generations of women worked the little slice of a shop, the mother in back pouring bags of flour into the giant mixer, grandmother in the middle dipping racks in and out of hot oil and drizzling glaze, and daughter at the register, where a line of people backed up to the door buying donuts as fast as the women could make them. I asked if they had chocolate, and the elder said “Ah ken chocolate yew some.” 

The Mothership is a great way to travel. I prepared a week’s worth of meals, including vegan stuffed shells with red sauce, and chili con carne, and froze them in small tupperwares, and filled the fridge with bean salad, mashed potatos, juices and sodas. Driving six to eight hours a day, I stopped only to fuel the tank and to walk the dogs at various parks and wildlife refuges along the way, and pulled into some fine state park well before dark each day to enjoy a gin and tonic and a homemade, healthful meal. It turns out I prefer to be a hermit even when I’m on the road. I arrived in Brooksville, Florida to make the acquaintance of the new puppy, who was then two weeks old, then made a quick turn north, visiting friends in north Florida and cousins in North Carolina on the way to see my father, friends, aunt and uncle in Virginia. The Colonel got on very well with the dogs, though he did describe Raven as “downright primal” in her play with Debbie’s little dog Banjo. I guess he said that because Raven chased Banjo around the room and when Banjo leapt onto dad’s lap to escape, Raven followed her... In quieter moments, though, they enjoyed watching television together…

Come March, I spent a week getting to know young Stellar, and thoroughly enjoying the hospitality and the weather at Dog World in Florida. Back home snow continued to drift over my driveway making difficult access for the caring friends tending the cats and tortoises. Did I mention that in January I missed yoga three weeks in a row because I was snowed in for three or four days each week?

So it’s no wonder that sitting under the sugarberry tree just leafing out, relaxing with Chris and Dave, basking in the sun like a lizard, felt terrific. And, there were puppies! Stellar and his sister Moon grew more adventurous by the day, and soon made the acquaintance of all their older relations, including big sister Raven and grumpy Uncle Brick.

Soon enough, though, I was retracing my route through the hospitable state parks with the little black and grey puppy, who trotted at my heels every time I took him out for a pee break, and cried like he was dying every time I put him back in the crate, then fell quietly asleep within five minutes. He’s been such an agreeable little dog all along.

By April, most of the snow had melted and the garden was beginning to green. Weeds sprouted and I pulled them. The little dog started learning the lay of the land, delighting in his big sister’s constant attention, yet seeking companionship with the alpha male, who did not like him and tried to pretend he wasn’t there. I knew there would be trouble between them eventually, but hoped they would learn to play together, and for now was glad whenever Brick let the puppy get close to him.

In May, a botanist came to take samples of Thelypodiopsis juniperorum, a rare native mustard that some years grows in profusion in the old-growth juniper forest where we live. May is the best month for forest wildflowers here, and they grow in all colors of purple, pink, yellow, cream, blue, red and orange, peeking up delicately from the brown forest floor among the sagebrush, lacy topped native grasses, shred-barked juniper trees, and fallen silver pinyons.

The puppy continued to grow, gaining an average of ten pounds a month. He was initially cautious about going quite to the edge of the canyon on our daily jaunts, which was probably a good thing. In June while I was irrigating my neighbor’s field, the farmer next door commented “The puppy still hasn’t got his coordination yet, has he?” Well, it was true. But around the same time he began venturing to the edge regularly, and by now of course he runs everwhere, but remarkably, for a young male catahoula, he comes every time I call, right away.

Late June is also the time that the garden peaks in its fullness of bloom. The penstemons are all going off on their tall spikes like pastel fireworks, cornflowers, gallardia, prince’s plume, salvia, elderberry and so many others are busily proclaiming to the insect world their availability and delighting human senses. Every day in summer I work hours in the garden, pulling weeds, tending soil and soul, planting, moving rocks and plants, fine tuning the beauty that runs rampant through the yard.

By July the amusement park of my life was in full swing. I was going to say the rollercoaster, but it felt like so much more than a rollercoaster. Like lots of rides, one after the other, the rest of the summer was a whirlwind. Cousin Melinda came from Kentucky to play, and having finished all essential garden and work projects prior to her arrival I took a vacation too. We took lots of walks in the woods, took a breakfast picnic to the Black Canyon, poked around the antique stores in town, harvested the first onions, and with little Suzi sampled the local wineries one long, slow day, and went cherry picking on the Fourth of July. 

Lots of snow last winter (remember the driveway) kept the irrigation ditches running the whole summer. Sometimes hay farmers up here on Fruitland Mesa only get three weeks or six weeks of water if there’s not enough snowmelt to fill the reservoirs. This year people got two or three cuttings of hay from July into September. My house is the tiny green pointy roof in the very center of this photo:

But the most important thing that happened here in July was this: Melinda and I had walked down to the canyon with the dogs, and she had urged me to take a tripod because we were trying to get some film of the fledgling redtail hawks we’d been watching all week taking their short ragged flights from tree to tree. So I had the camera set up and instead of hawks I ended up filming two mountain lions. I had been waiting fifteen years to catch one fleeting glimpse of a mountain lion, and on this remarkable day we saw two, and we had the camera on the tripod. If you’d like to read a full account of this adventure, and some other things I’ve written, you can go to my blog on the Virtual Tea House.  

I also posted video of the lions, and a fledgling redtail, and the hummingbirds we watched hatch and grow, on youtube. To see the lions you can click here.

 

The big project for July into August was the creation of the new pond, adjacent to, fed by, the original little pond at the north end of the garden. The neighbor for whom I was irrigating owed me, had offered to trade my work digging little ditches all over his field for his work digging me a new pond. It took him eight days of hard work, but it was a magnificent hole in the ground:

 

By the middle of August, just when the monsoons blew in and every afternoon became cloudy, cool and rainy, the pond was full. Still, determined to christen it properly, neighbors came over for cocktails one evening, and Mary and I took our drinks into the water. It’s not finished yet. I worked all fall rocking the edge, landscaping the stream that flows out from the ponds to the woods, pruning trees, and planting bulbs. Next summer, i’ll finish the rock work, and the pond will serve as a fine dipping pool whenever garden work gets hot.

Amy came from Virginia in mid-August to spend a week’s vacation, and I took another vacation. We hiked up into the mountains hunting mushrooms but found cows instead, created a mosaic table from an old army trunk and started a mosaic birdbath, threw a huge patio party, and took cocktails and snacks to the Black Canyon, a spectacular National Park six miles from home wherein the Gunnison River has carved a gorge more than 2000 feet deep (twice as tall as the Empire State Building) and half as wide. Here after a gin and tonic, Amy earned her new name, Runs With Scissors.

 

Meanwhile, back in Virginia, my dear uncle Ford died after a long decline. During the course of his last month, I researched once again the options for helping him out. I had looked into ways and means of helping my mother end her life when she was dying, very uncomfortably, four years ago. The answers were the same this year as that, but Ford ended up not needing assistance. Still, I had relearned the methods, which came in handy, unfortunately, a couple of months later. (Reflection on death hardly seems appropriate for a Christmas letter (or maybe it is), yet can hardly be left out of a year-in-review. Death is a subject of constant contemplation for me ~ I just seem to be wired that way. I struggle daily to make peace with the fact that we’re all gonna die.) 

In September, Margo came from Florida for Render the Rock, a Crawford art festival in which people come from all over to paint, or otherwise represent, Needle Rock, our town’s other geologic landmark and a key piece of the view from my deck. Have I mentioned yet how very fortunate I feel to live in such a gorgeous place?

We practiced painting plein air the day before along Buck Canyon, and then in the evening at the Black Canyon. The next day we painted all day then went to the reception/auction in the evening to find that Margo had won first place, and I had taken an honorable mention in the Fine Arts category. (Can you see, by the way, how for me to recount just the adventures of a week, much less a whole year, could be a project?)

After that August day in the mountains, Brick wasn’t quite right. Various vets thought it was a digestive ailment, so we put him on one yummier food after another until by October all he would eat was raw hamburger. By then I knew it was bad, and an ultrasound revealed a tumor on his heart. He lived three weeks after that, and I put him down beside the pond on October 15, with a cocktail of sleeping pills and morphine. And, I hate to say it, a plastic bag. But he never woke up, and he didn’t have to go to the vet, and no strange ominous person came to give him a shot, and all in all it was a peaceful thing. He gave me a great gift in his dying that is hard to explain.

 

Those last several days with Mr. Brick were among the most extraordinary I’ve ever experienced: the love and gratitude that passed between us was uplifting. Me and a dog. A dog who had not been all that cozy for all his life, always by my side (except when he was out chasing deer or otherwise occupied on his own terms) but rarely seeking touch or affection. So there it was. He was dead, rather suddenly, in the prime of his adulthood. The other dogs came and sniffed and understood and left him alone. The Ranger, who had dug the pond, came and dug a fine grave and helped me lay him into it and cover him up. In his last full week alive, I took Mr. Brick out in the mountains in the yellow aspens and rushing creeks, I took him out in the high desert and let him run alongside the car (he would not have it any other way), and I took him through our own woods as long as he was able to walk. The day he could no longer walk was the day I helped him out. Raven seemed to know how it was with him, and one morning a couple of days before he died she gave him a thorough wash, both ears, both eyes, his whole face she licked and licked.

November brought the most amazing rainbow I have ever seen here, and in late summer and fall we have an awful lot of rainbows. It arced almost straight up from inside Buck Canyon, high into the sky, a full double rainbow, and came down again in the canyon ~ from my point of view it spanned “my” land. I had been working inside preparing for some girls to come over for dinner as the rain pelted the metal roof, when I looked up and thought “there will be a rainbow now,” and went outside to an astonishing spectacle. People were talking about it for days all over the greater Crawford area. Though it will not do it justice, I cannot help but include a picture of it here:

 

November continued unseasonably warm, as it did last year. I spent the month gathering firewood for winter, cleaning up the yard of all the clutter that accumulates during summer and that you don’t want to get buried by snow and find frozen, rotted, rusted or broken the next spring: shovels, picks, pruners, clippers, knife, buckets, duct tape, hats, rakes, gloves, and other tools; plus dog toys that some might consider trash, like old lengths of PVC, old water filters, plastic bottles (one of their favorites for the wonderful crunching noise it makes), cardboard and so on; hoses, of course, which must be drained and coiled daily for some weeks of transition, when, if it’s dry, you might need to water the trees again, after it’s started to freeze at night but before it never gets above freezing… With the continued balmy autumn weather, (and, I might add, a spectacular aspen display that lasted weeks and rolled yellow down the sides of spring-green mountains, tangling with reddening oaks, dark evergreens and tawny rocks), I stayed busy outside topdressing with compost the various garden beds and mulching with straw, deep-watering and pruning trees, and doing other autumn chores outside. I could hardly bear to spend an afternoon inside working, with winter looming and the endless Indian Summer bound to end suddenly any day. And then it did.

 

Meanwhile, back in New York, Aunt Nelle died after a long struggle with emphysema. My father will turn 90 this April ~ he smoked for 40 years before quitting one day. (Literally, one day, or so I hear.) I know the death of his “little sister” must have come as another shock to him after losing his decade-younger wife of fifty years four years ago. He continues to persevere with his indomitable spirit. 

I’ve already started making plans to travel east in April to celebrate both his 90th birthday, and the wedding of my goddaughter Melody. And now, exhausted by both the past described and the future anticipated, I find myself at the end of December. Snow descended the week after Thanksgiving, a sudden blanket, that deepens with each ensuing storm. Week after week more snow comes. The lows this week have been down to 0°. I’ve kept the paths shoveled to the car, the woodpile, the generator, the bird feeders, and the back gate. Most mornings when it gets above 20° we ski out the back gate and tour the forest, the good dogs running ahead and around, bounding through snow white-faced and laughing, me gaining strength and learning to move anew each day. 

The little puppy has grown into a big dog, weighing 85 pounds at 10 months old, and he remains the most agreeable dog ever. His now-little sister Raven at 20 pounds less has transformed from a tough tomboy into a delicate flower in the course of mothering him since he was five weeks old. The two of them will spend all day outside playing in the snow if the sun shines, then come in to take turns sleeping on the pillow before the woodstove, which hums like a little furnace as I feed it logs of aspen, apple, cherry or oak throughout the day and evening. The tortoises have holed up in the laundry nook and only Desmond comes out sometimes when I do wash. There’s a foot of snow outside, but when the sun shines the house is bright and warm, the sunroom full of glowing greens and flowers. Deeper and deeper I go into hibernation as the holiday season winds down and I approach my fiftieth birthday. It seems a good time all around for introspection. Like the cats I curl inward. 

But do you see, I have just barely scratched the surface of all that happened here this year? Where are the accounts of the friends who came to dinners or salons, the details of the garden harvest, the peach picking and jam making, the yoga classes and the cross-country skiing? How does one summarize a year in a few pages without leaving out hundreds, thousands of pertinent facts?

I have been blessed with an amazing life. Each day holds more plenty than I could imagine or describe. Each day holds more lessons, painful and enlightening, than I could hope for. Each day of being human in a human world, in a wild world, in a mixed-up world, is full of challenges, of life and death matters. Every little thing counts, every choice, every thought. May we all find some measure of peace amongst our challenges in the coming year. May we all enjoy being human on this lovely spinning globe, this ultimate carnival ride through the universe.

With love and gratitude at the beginning of this new year…

Rita

 

 “We have a lion problem in Spring Canyon,” my neighbor Keri says to anyone who will listen -- neighbors, strangers, wildlife officers. We do not have a lion problem. We are blessed with the presence of mountain lions in the canyon behind our houses. It’s a fairly deep canyon, 200 feet, and two miles long. There are plenty of deer in the canyon, the forest, the farmland around the canyon, for the lions to eat. I’ve hoped to see a mountain lion each day of the fifteen years I’ve lived here, but, though I’ve seen a few tracks and some scat, an occasional kill along the driveway or in the woods, the blessing of seeing an actual lion has been denied me. Until recently.

 

zoom photo of 'my' lion

 

The problem with telling people you’ve seen a lion is that the news spreads; before you know it the state bounty hunters will come running with their dogs to tree the lion, and their guns to take it out. I saw two lions last month, but I haven’t told many people. Meanwhile, holding my joy close, I’ve heard four accounts of different sightings since then. A neighbor to the south, Pete, drove a young lion out of the field when he was cutting hay. I heard about this one first from the ditch rider, Tom, who also told me the same neighbor accidently mowed over two spotted fawns while cutting Tom’s hay. 

It was awful. Tom had seen the doe get up from the field when Pete started cutting at the top, and he’d walked down to see if there was a fawn, but he missed them. The first few days they’re hardwired to stay put no matter what the threat. The mower decapitated one and mangled the other. “The only bad thing about haying season,” Tom said. He found them later in the day when he saw the doe sitting back out there, grieving. He moved them down to the edge of the canyon, knowing something would come take them. The next day one was gone, the other a few days later. 

I heard about the same lion sighting from Dave at the Post Office, who lives up here too. “It was a big one,” he said, his eyes wide. “Our neighbor called to let us know, so the kids don’t go playing in the woods alone.” “That’s a good idea anyway,” I said, “you never know when they might be around.” Then I added something about how it really makes you feel alive to live where there are lions, but he got a dark look on his face and moved on to the next customer.

Tom told me a couple of weeks later that a woman across the canyon had called a rancher down the road in a panic because a lion had killed a doe in her field and “What should I do?” The rancher told her to stay away and let the lion finish eating its kill. That was a relief, not something you expect to hear from a person who routinely complains that any deer a lion takes is one less for the hunters. 

A few nights ago at a dinner party the hostess told us she’d seen two lions on her road in the past week. Her response was mixed between awe, delight, and fear that they’d get into her husband’s herd and take a cow. By any standard since I’ve lived here that is a lot of lion sightings in one month. Then I heard just this morning that Albert, who lives up canyon, saw a lion a couple of weeks ago. Albert was sitting on his patio in the morning drinking coffee, with his dog lying beside him. All of a sudden the dog was on point, and a lion came up over the rim and stood looking at them. Albert stood up, the lion lingered, then turned and sauntered off. Casual and calm as could be. 

During this month, I had been watching a nest of redtail hawks fledging in the canyon. I’d tried shooting a few videos but they were always on the other side of the canyon, always a little too far away for the camera not to shake on full zoom. That morning my cousin Melinda, visiting from Kentucky, suggested “Don’t you have a tripod?” I do have a tripod. I was just too lazy to dust it off and carry it down to the canyon. So she carried it. 

At the rim, I spotted one of the young hawks, set up the camera on the tripod, and lost the bird when it flew across and into some brush. I was searching with my binoculars for a long while, then lowered them and rested my eyes by scanning back to the north along the canyon. There on a big rock ledge I saw two figures walking side by side, one just slightly ahead of the other. “Dogs? Coyotes? Lions!” went my mind, and I whispered “There’s two lions,” to Melinda just as they disappeared into the oaks. She got up from the bench where she sat with her binoculars and strode to the edge -- “sssshhhh! Don’t move!” I hissed. She froze. I turned on the camera though I could no longer see the lions, and stood to join her a few feet away. Somehow the lions crossed an open expanse without our seeing them, but the dog uttered a low guttural noise unlike anything I’d ever heard from him. “Sssshh,” I whispered to him, “it’s okay.”

Then another noise, a mewing cawing yowlish chirping noise, and we saw the second lion, rounding the far edge of a bunch of oaks, heading downhill, talking. I moved back to the camera. They saw us. They were both under the oaks near the edge of the creek, looking up at us. The talking lion stood frozen, looking up; the other lion already lay behind, in dappled shade, looking up. I found them in the camera. Here, after fifteen years of longing, were not one, but two lions, and I had a camera, and I had a tripod. The standing lion stood for awhile then lay down, never taking its eyes from us. Everyone who has seen the video agrees, this front lion is a young lion. The back lion’s age and gender remain in dispute. Some “experts” believe it is a sibling to the first, some argue based on possible differences in appearance that it is the mother. The truth is, it’s hard to tell. Being there, in the moment, I’d say they were identical. In the video, the rear lion looks a little heavier, a little darker, and could be an adult. At the time, I told Melinda they were last year’s cubs, striking out on their own.

Melinda, the dog, and I watched (and filmed) the two lions for about twelve minutes. Then, it seemed, we had mutually evaluated each other and concluded there was no threat. Honestly, I was hungry. I suggested to Melinda that we move along and get breakfast. At that same moment the young lion turned its head, then shifted its weight, got up, turned, and walked away through the oaks, as if in agreement. 

I wasn’t only hungry. Melinda had said, about halfway into this experience, “My question is, where’s mama?” I replied with unwarranted confidence, “Oh, she’s over there somewhere. She’s not over here stalking us, I’m sure of that.” For the next six minutes or so, I mulled that over. I wasn’t sure of anything. Perhaps she was over here stalking us. The uncanny calm of the two lions below got me wondering, where is mama? 

“And later,” Melinda added a minute or so after asking about mama, “we need to talk about mountain lion etiquette.” “Yes,” I replied. And we did, later. I told her, “Whatever you do, don’t run. Make yourself big, pull your shirt up around your shoulders, make noise, shoo it away. DO NOT TURN YOUR BACK. Do not run. Call the dogs.” Mountain lions tend to attack from behind, with wild speed and silence. Their teeth and jaws are perfectly adapted to separate the vertebrae of their prey, severing the spinal cord swiftly. 

It’s one thing to know, theoretically, that you live where there are lions. I have known this since I moved onto this rugged land. It is quite another thing to have seen them, calmly watching you from 150 feet away. “Too calm,” said one friend when she saw the video. After hearing of all the other lion sightings in the area this summer I know what she means. Those lions we saw were too calm. All these lions are misbehaving. If they do not develop a reasonable fear of humans, they are done for.

Can you believe there are actually still bounty hunters in the American West? Is this an archaic concept or what? Humans have encroached so mercilessly on the habitat of our planet’s top predators it’s a wonder you don’t read about it every day: “jogger attacked by mountain lion,” “hiker mauled by grizzly,” “man loses arm to alligator,” “toddler bitten by fox,” or wolf, or tiger, or shark. Come to think of it, you do hear about a fair number of such unfortunate encounters, unfortunate for both participants, as whatever the outcome for the human, the wild animal usually gets killed one way or another. Whence derives the mentality that presumes humans matter more than other species? What entitles us to build and pave, build and pave, over acres, miles, of territory that’s been wild for untold generations of other species?

It’s bad enough that we encroach, destroy, gobble up. Then we send the big guns, the bounty hunters, after the new keystone species, when they cross the line. (The old keystone species had other criteria, primarily of sensitivity to our handiworks.) Now our science has finally figured it out: if you protect the large predators in an ecosystem, to the point that they (appear to) have genetic viability as a species, i.e., they won’t interbreed or otherwise drive themselves to extinction, you also de facto protect all species upon which they depend, plant and animal. 

If these lions that are gracing our neighborhood this summer do get out of hand, if they actually attack a human, I might concede that “we have a lion problem.” I can see both sides. Would I sacrifice myself or my dog to a lion if it would ensure survival of their species? Absolutely. Would I sacrifice my child, if I had one? Doubtful. We know there is not just one lion at large, for I saw two at once. There could be three, or four, even more. It feels as though they’re all around. As I said, it’s one thing to know, theoretically, and it’s another to have seen them, to feel them in a visceral way, to know you are potential prey. 

The next morning Melinda and I walked the dogs as usual, and the next. She was leaving in a few more days. She said, when we talked about the lions the next day, that because we’d been out looking for birds, because we’d been looking at and for and talking about birds since she’d arrived a week before, when I said “there are two lions” she thought I must be using some shorthand for “lion hawk,” or “lion sparrow,” or “lion wren.” (I especially like the last one, lion wren. The idea delights me.) So she stood up and walked to the rim with her binoculars expecting some new bird. While the significance of the encounter enveloped me in the first second, it took minutes and then hours to really dawn on her. 

I could not shut up about it. “Lions…” I’d breathe every so often for the next few days, “mountain lions… two of them…,” and so on. I was high as a kite, high as a soaring redtail, high as a lion wren. Still am, weeks later. Whatever the outcome, this was the gift of a lifetime for me: not one, but two, and the camera, and the tripod. And we were all so calm, so present, so connected in the moment. While my cousin was beginning to wonder “where’s mama?” i.e., what is the threat to me?, I was still simply breathless at their beauty, and utterly focused on them, on watching them, and keeping them in the camera. 

The third morning after, Melinda slept late. I had to face the canyon, walk the dogs, alone. I could have waited for her, but I wanted to get back on the horse. In a few days she’d be gone. If I didn’t go back to my usual routine, my fifteen year long routine, going out alone every morning with the dogs, I thought I might get yard-bound, stay in the fence, think too much about those powerful paws. Though I doubt I’ll see them again. Why should today be different from any other day of the past fifteen years, when I have known, theoretically, lions live here, and I have not seen hide nor hair of one.  

When I saw those lions last month I had not heard of any of these other sightings. Now I am sore afraid for the lions. Is our young lion in Spring Canyon the same one that Pete spooked out of the hayfield a couple of miles south? The same one that panicked the rancher’s wife, that greeted Albert over coffee? Are these the same two lions Sam and Betty saw ten miles away? Certainly they could be; lions can have a home range of more than 30 square miles. Or, they could be seven different lions, all moving through, all miles away by now. But my question is, why are we seeing so many lions this summer?

Human trespass was rare in this canyon until all those new houses were built three years ago. Lion sightings were rare until this summer. Did our reverent observation that morning, our communion with the two lions, deceive them about human nature? Were they already that bold, or did our calm encourage them to be unwary? Or is this a case of self-fulfilling prophecy? Has Keri, walking, stalking up and down the canyon now for three years with her pack of dogs, slashing and burning native cover, cutting trail wherever she pleases without regard to people’s boundaries, or lions’, acclimated them to humans and dogs, so that now we do have a lion problem? Or is it simply that it is a good year for deer, and therefore a good year for lions?    

I did not tell the dinner party about our two lions, or Dave at the Post Office, or Keri. Since our sighting I have shown the video to a handful of people, all sworn to secrecy. “Lives are at stake,” I said. Despite my utmost precautions, however, these lions might do themselves in through being too bold, too fearless, too calm. It’s out of my hands. All I can do is watch and wait, keep my secret from my neighbors, and count my blessings.

 

 

to share the excitement, go to this YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y4PMxwILZo

 

Two Months Later:

 

A month after my cousin and I saw the lions in Spring Canyon, I heard of several more sightings. A neighbor across the canyon lost a chained dog (a lion hunting hound, ironically) to a lion. The dog was pulled out of its collar and partially eaten not far from the other dogs. Another neighbor south of the canyon called to tell me that her next-door-neighbor had been awakened one morning by a lion pacing and hissing outside his dog pen. For 35 minutes they watched as the lion hissed, and drooled, and lunged at the fence. This raised the possibility that the lion was rabid. It happens. For awhile I kept my gun in my garden basket, on the off chance. I heard a really weird noise one day while I was down at the pond, a noise moving through the brush right outside the fence. I was glad I had the gun, just in case, but the noise moved on. It's also possible that the rancher who lost the dog may have poisoned the carcass, and caused the lion to hiss and drool at the next dogs south. Anyway, another month has passed, with no further accounts of lion sightings. Maybe they've moved on, dispersed to the high country. Maybe it's the end of the Summer of Lions. It was a glorious time. Walking through the woods with the dogs, irrigating the Ranger's field across the canyon, landscaping in the yard, the knowledge that the woods were full of lions gave every moment outside a delicious, wild edge. There's nothing like knowing you could be potential prey to heighten your awareness of being alive.

 

The other day I saw a boy rolling across a parking lot on those sneakers with wheels in the heels. He was loving it, taking a few steps to get momentum then gliding forward with his right leg in front, a few more steps, a glide leading with his right. I watched him cross in front of me and smiled at his pride and delight. But I wanted to catch him and say “You need to switch your lead from time to time. You need to use your body the opposite way and not only the way that comes naturally.” I have long lamented the fact that nobody ever taught me how to walk, that nobody teaches children the mechanics and symmetry of their bodies, that children who do not do sports in school can end up virtually crippled by middle-age, simply from lack of balance and symmetry in the way they use their bodies.

 

I spent most hours of my childhood years curled in a chair with a good book. I always sat the same way, with my knees bent and legs pulled up to my left side, torso twisted the same direction to see the book that rested on the knees. Nobody ever said, “Hey, that’s going to make you cockamamie, sit the other way now and then.” Or better yet, “get up off your bottom and run somewhere.” In the past 15 years, with the assistance of various teachers including yoga and Brother Psalm, I’ve become gradually aware of how crooked I am. Brother Psalm used to walk around the town where I lived with his hands pressed together in Namasté, bowing to people he met or embracing them on both sides. He preached the benefits of “right-side-left-side” casually when someone offered to shake hands, and from the pulpit with his poetry at open stage. For Brother Psalm, the right-handed left-brained dominance of the military-industrial complex, which he called Babylon, could be mitigated by everyone using both sides equally.

 

Like any spiritual path the road to health and healing requires both discipline and acceptance. I’m not good at either, but I did hear the wisdom in Brother Psalm’s words and actions, and began to explore using my left side equally with my right. Ever notice how almost everyone reaches into a hug toward the right, putting left shoulders and cheeks together? We are a right-handed culture. We drive on the right and hug on the right. I started small, trying to hug to the left, brush my teeth and write with my left hand. I became proficient in the latter but only if I wrote cursive backwards, so that it could be read through the back of the page or in a mirror. It took many more years of noticing the subtlety of my right-sided dominance before I became aware that it was nearly impossible for me to sit with my knees bent toward my right side.

 

I’ve suffered chronic pain for years. I’ve tried purification diets, Tai Chi, and yoga off and on for years. Tai Chi helped, there’s no doubt about that, but when my teacher moved away I lacked the discipline to find another. Yoga means unity, we are taught, and perhaps it has been my lack of discipline in not doing a daily asana practice that has caused me to still have daily pain. Yet yoga remains a steady source of comfort and has kept me from feeling worse than I do, while the diets, which always feel terrific, never last. I am a carb junkie and I love a martini in the evening. I also enjoy cannabis more than I ought, and have suspected for years that it might be contributing to pain in my joints (no pun intended). Chinese and Ayurvedic traditions would likely concur with this hypothesis. Most major joints on my right side and some on the left have swelled, ached or been incapacitated at some time over the past 35 years, and my right hip has been giving me fits for the past three. Intuition suggests that the source of this problem originated, or the first symptom appeared, in my right ankle when I was 14 years old and trying out for the track team.

 

A sharp persistent pain accompanied by stiffness was diagnosed as osteochondritis dessicans by a Greek doctor who prescribed a cast to the knee for one month, followed by a permanent excuse from all P.E. classes through the rest of high school and college. A small triangular tip of bone in my ankle was dead, he said, and showed the gray spot on an x-ray. It did not get blood supply. Why, I wanted to know. It just happens sometimes, was his answer. He said, “If you overdo with this ankle the bone will break and you will have to have surgery to have it removed, and your ankle will be weak forever.” For seven years I favored that ankle. I quit running and jumping and I danced only cautiously. I didn’t roller skate or ice skate with the other kids. I was gleefully relieved at no longer having to participate in field hockey. Of course, the irony of his prescription was that it made my ankle weak forever anyway, and my whole right side even more out of kilter. But I did not begin to understand this until recently.

 

Ten years ago at the age of 38 both my knees blew up to the size of a football two days apart. The first knee I took to my friend the doctor, who drove me to the ER and drew off 80 cc’s of fluid, then x-rayed it and told me I had the knees of an 80-year-old. The next day the right knee blew up. I iced it and stayed off it for a week, then spent the next six months learning to walk again. For awhile I went up and down stairs on my ass. Later I carried lawn chairs out into the woods so that when I walked the dogs I could stop and sit every few hundred feet. A few sessions of PT taught me that I’d been hyper extending my knees during an assiduous program of forward bends, but at $6 a minute I quickly let go of the PT and turned back to yoga to strengthen my quads. It worked. It helped, anyway, and my knees became functional again.

 

Since then I’ve been told by various therapists, yoga teachers and doctors that: my lumbar curve is backwards, I have a touch of scoliosis, there’s a little arthritis in my hips, my thoracic curve is backwards, my right leg is a little longer than my left (and that it isn’t), my left hip is canted back, and several other malfunctions I’ve forgotten. A massage healer and friend I used to see sometimes pointed out that the tissue of my right thigh felt distinctly more dense than that of my left (which I had noticed), and (which I had not noticed) that I did not swing my left arm when I walked and that I stood always on the same leg when doing dishes. I began to consciously swing my left arm and to stand on each leg alternately or on both while at the kitchen sink. Now I can’t remember, was it the left leg or the right leg that held the weight for all those years with the opposite hip cocked out?

 

Still, despite a conscious effort to practice right-side-left-side for more than a decade, I am plagued with the pain of asymmetry. I offer these tiresome details only in the hope that they may mirror someone else’s and thereby be of help. I’ve been on a discouraging odyssey of doctor visits and medical tests for the past year, after yoga and valium failed to solve this persistent hip pain. Every doctor wants a patient’s problem to be his or her own thing – until it isn’t. They’ve all said “I think it’s X, let’s try Z.” Nobody suggested “It could be this, or this, or this, or this… let’s explore all the possibilities.” I saw Dr. J in the local clinic in the summer of 2005, and she said “Take it easy for a few weeks.” She gave me Vicodin for the pain and Valium to make it possible for me to back off the gardening I was so intent upon accomplishing. It got better. I went back to gardening. It felt like joint pain, so I pursued it with my yoga teacher, whose instruction helped alleviate the discomfort. I thought I was on the right track, but it came back. It diminished and increased, seemingly according to which yoga postures I emphasized.

 

A year ago I went to see Dr. D, an osteopath. Five treatments and nearly a thousand dollars later he asked me the question that severed my relationship with him: “How many days a week are you in pain?” On the surface, a good question, but since I’d filled out a 12-page intake form detailing location, intensity and frequency of daily pain, I lost all faith in him. Having broken with Dr. D, I went to an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. K. Dr. K recommended an MRI right off the bat. The MRI revealed nothing wrong with the structure of my hips besides the beginnings of arthritis, but did show ovarian cysts. Dr. K couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. “I don’t know anything about these internal things, I’m just a bone doctor,” he said, and recommended Dr. M, a gynecologist. An ultrasound and a blood test later she offered a hysterectomy. I had high hopes that surgery would solve my hip pain.

 

“A hysterectomy for hip pain?” you may ask, incredulous. Only surgery could confirm whether or not the cysts were cancerous (which they weren’t), but Dr. K, who’d requested the MRI, two other doctors I haven’t even mentioned, and lots of hits on the internet suggested that women with back and hip pain often find relief after a hysterectomy has been done for some other reason. Dr. M was happy to report in the recovery room that my left ovary had been fused to my left pelvic wall, “and that,” she said, “could have been the source of your hip pain.” She never had gotten quite clear that the pain was in the right hip. But maybe that was the source, I encouraged myself; often back pain on one side is caused by a problem on the other. For the first three days after the surgery I was ecstatic. I had no more hip pain! Then I started cutting back on the codeine and discovered that indeed, my hip still did catch when I stood, hurt when I walked, ache when I slept.

 

I was again discouraged, and fear came back into the equation. My mother died of a rare brain disease which causes multiple system atrophy, meaning all the muscles shut down, from the limbs to the esophagus. Most patients die of this disease from choking on their food or saliva, or from starvation. Others from injuries sustained in falls. The cause of the disease is unknown, but it has a genetic component. My mother also suffered from chronic pain in her right “flank,” as she called it, and I never bothered to dig into exactly what that meant to her. My right hip began to hurt the autumn I was helping her to die. I could have the gene that predisposes to this disease. Her flank pain could have been a symptom of it. My friend Darlene kept attributing her shoulder pain to a fall she’d taken, at first insisting it was from the impact, and when time ran out on that reason she decided it was from something being torqued out of place, a muscle or vertebra… turns out it was a tumor wrapped around her spine. She was dead three months later. Why should I not worry when I cannot identify the source of this chronic right hip pain? When I begin to think like this I mix another martini and try to forget.

 

Six weeks ago, lifting a giant tortoise to carry him outside, I felt a twang on my left side. This developed into sciatica. My one good side was gone. I was truly at the end of my rope. It hurt to sleep, it hurt to wake up. It’s hard to want to get out of bed and face the day when it hurts to move. Last week, having hobbled to the health food store to order dog food, I ran into a woman I hadn’t seen in years.

 

“You look great,” I said, and she said “I feel terrific. I discovered this book and I’ve been doing these e-cises forty-five minutes a day for five weeks. My shoulders don’t slump anymore, my back doesn’t hurt….” She went on about this program and her radiance persuaded me to look into it. I ordered the book, Pain Free: a Revolutionary Approach to Stopping Chronic Pain, by Pete Egoscue. Egoscue believes that almost all chronic pain can be attributed to musculoskeletal misalignment, and that the human body evolved to move, in bilateral symmetry, not to live the sedentary life of the 21^st Century. In our early years as a species, when we wanted food we had to spend the day hunting and gathering it, not get up from the couch, take ten steps to the fridge, pull out a bowl of mashed potatoes, and flop back down on our butts in front of the TV. He didn’t say it quite like that.

 

After all these years of sensing that the source of my pain lay in asymmetry, trying to decipher and link symptoms, I may have found the key to correction. After four days of practicing Egoscue’s e-cises, the sciatic pain has all but disappeared, the tendonitis in my right elbow acquired last spring during forced labor on the irrigation pipeline is just a twinge, the ache in my left shoulder from sitting at the computer is minor, and the chronic pain in my right hip is much improved. Already getting out of bed is no longer a challenge. If this program of e-cises does solve this hip problem, I will be even more infuriated at the amount of money spent, time compromised, and anxiety wasted over the past three years working within bounds of the medical system. And I have to wonder, if Egoscue’s method works so well, why is this book, this practice, not a staple for every doctor who deals with muscular and skeletal pain and dysfunction? Perhaps because then hip and knee replacements would become rare, arthritis drugs redundant, rotator cuff surgery obsolete? Insurance companies would go broke if people could treat themselves at home for free. The medical industry would collapse.

 

And all those questions the doctors couldn’t answer: What caused the lack of blood flow to that little piece of ankle bone all those years ago? Was it sitting curled always to the left in my childhood, pinching that right groin and restricting blood flow into that right leg? Did I sit always curled to the left because it was uncomfortable to sit curled to the right, perhaps because my little growing ovary was even then fusing to my pelvic wall on the left side? Who knows. Did wearing a cast on that right ankle and favoring that leg for years cause misalignment of my right knee and hip, lumbar spine, left shoulder, right elbow? Or is the source of my hip pain not my ovary or my ankle bone, but that I spent most of 1988 driving around the country in an automatic car with my left foot braced out the window? One thing is certain. The ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone, the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to the back bone… I’ve been crooked for nearly 50 years. I think I may finally be straightening out.

 

***

 

So it was after Day 4 of e-cises. (Egoscue calls them this because they are more passive than we generally think of exercise, and because it’s his system and his name starts with E.) All my aches and pains were diminished and getting out of bed was easy. But on Day 5 I had some soreness in my low back. By Day 10 it hurt to move again. What was new about this pain was that it was evenly distributed. Both sides of my low back hurt equally. A lot, but equally, “right-side-left-side.” I chalked this pain up to my body adjusting to its new alignment. I have kept at the program of e-cises – discipline at last – for at least an hour a day, usually two. Now, on Day 16, I wake and walk easily, bend to load the woodstove easily, and the aches and twinges that come on me don’t last long. I have a new appreciation for the importance of motion in moving through a day.

 

I’ve begun to incorporate yoga back into my program, and find my downward dog is longer, both in stance and duration, and easier. I can sit lower in Virasana than ever before. In addition to pain-relieving routines for every joint pair in the body, Egoscue prescribes specific routines for peak performance in many sports and a daily maintenance routine that incorporate some of the yoga poses I’ve been doing for years. It seems that the release on my right side and the apparent realignment derived from his pain-relieving program have enabled me to deepen my experience of yoga postures. I see now that my yoga teacher asked me over the years to do some of the very same things outlined in the Pain Free routines. Somehow I was not able to accept their benefits in the same way. Egoscue offers a “supine groin stretch” that he encourages you to hold for as long as an hour if you are in severe pain. I did this on the second or third day, and I am convinced that this did more than anything else to restore balance to, to open, my right hip. Not only did the groin pain diminish dramatically after that first one hour stretch, but at last I could actually feel my right heel press into the floor.

 

In standing poses yoga teachers always say “press into your back heel,” and I could never feel it on my right side. My ankle did not bend enough, my calf did not stretch, and even when standing straight in Tadasana I could not feel my right heel pressing into the ground. I feel my heel connecting now in all these poses. When I walk, climb stairs, bend to reach for something on the floor, my right leg feels different, straight, right, as though for years one part of it hadn’t been working at all and another had been locked in the wrong place. Perhaps it is this quite literal grounding that makes my spirits soar this morning. There is nothing like waking up without pain to give a body energy for living.

I am for sure a better pet owner for knowing this vet. Tonight as my old dog wobbles in from her evening walk I remember when he diagnosed her a year and a half ago with renal failure. He said “I’ve seen some dogs go two weeks from this point, and some go two years.” I didn’t like him the first time I took my cat to see him fifteen years ago. He was brusque with her and with me. The other day I took in little Vincent with a similar problem to that old cat, who lived fourteen more years. Dr. Vincent was like a different vet.

 

I suspect he may have changed a little, but what’s really changed is my perception of him. When he whisked that calico cat away from me fifteen years ago, and said as he was turning his back, “She needs an enema, call me this afternoon,” I was stunned. No further explanation, no chance to say goodbye to my kitty, and he was gone. I stood around for a minute then left. Once I picked up the cat that afternoon I didn’t go back to him for six years. I found another vet ten minutes farther away. She was an excellent vet, and I was very happy with her care of all my animals for years.

 

Then one night the old knobby-headed dog was stricken, bloated tight and crying under the stairs, and my vet didn’t answer the phone. I called the next vet down the valley, and rushed the dog there at 10 at night. He said “Your dog is fine. Whatever it was is over.” That was a relief. But it was wrong. The ailment recurred a few months later. I tried my usual vet, who once again wasn’t home. Believing knobby-headed dog would be fine, I walked him around the yard for hours, but his pain increased. Finally, at 3 in the morning with much trepidation, I broke down and called Dr. Vincent.

 

“Bring him in right now,” he said. When I arrived half an hour later he was waiting for me with The Book open on his table. He showed pictures of a dog’s stomach twisted over on itself. “Gastric torsion,” he said. “This is what it was last time. Occasionally taking a dog for a car ride will create just the right conditions for the stomach to untwist. It usually requires surgery to fix it, and even that might not work. In 20 years I’ve done ten of these surgeries. Five dogs have survived. He might make it through the surgery and die in the next week from the systemic toxins created by the torsion.”

 

He took the dog back to the surgery room and gave him a sedative, then stuck a tube down his throat trying to relieve pressure and get the stomach to untwist. It didn’t work. By now it was 4 in the morning. He said “You’ve got three choices. You can take him home and hope it corrects like it did last time; I can put him down; or I can do the surgery.”

 

I tried to say “Put him down.” The dog was 11 years old, and while he had been an excellent companion and protector, he’d also been a trial. For starters, he always tried to kill any non-human creature that was bigger than he was. The flaws and strengths of that dog’s character are too numerous to go into now, but the part of me that wanted an easier life opened my mouth to say “Put him down.” Instead, out came “Do the surgery.”

 

“He won’t be the same dog,” cautioned Dr. Vincent.

 

“That’s fine,” I said with some relief. He gave me two more chances to change my mind and each time my mind said “Put him down,” but my mouth said “Do the surgery.” I left and drove to a friend’s house to sleep for a couple of hours. Knobby-headed dog not only survived the surgery, but a month later he brought down a fawn in the front yard. He was the same dog. After that experience, after Dr. Vincent’s gentle and informative explanations of the problem and possible solutions, after his obvious concern for both the dog and me, not to mention his total lack of irritation at being waked in the night, I liked him a lot. Knobby-headed dog lived two more years, and while he became rapidly more mellow with his advancing years, he remained a pretty scrappy hound.

 

Fortunately I did not have too many occasions for a vet for the next few years. When I did I spread the wealth between the two or three nearest vets. We’re fortunate where I live that there are half a dozen fine vets within less than an hour, all of whom help out with strays and broken wildlife as well as paying customers. I take the old dog to a holistic vet an hour from home because diet, homeopathy and supplements work better on renal failure than standard treatments. But ever since Dr. Vincent solved two diagnostic mysteries on two dogs in less than a minute each, I pretty much converted completely.

 

He’s been my primary vet now for 7 years. He has never been brusque with me again, and he has unfailingly explained in detail what is wrong and what I need to do to help my pet. In short, he has taught me. He makes jokes and laughs readily when I tease him. He offers options when they exist, and confidence when they don’t. With each visit to him I learn something new about how to treat an abscess, or how a stool softener works and why it doesn’t mix with oil, or when a cat’s lip might need to be cut off.

 

The old calico I first took to him died last year. Three days later I was out in the garden and I heard a strange sound. I thought at first it was some unusual bird, but as my ears sorted it out I realized with dismay it was a cat crying quite nearby. I found him under a tree not 20 feet from the calico’s grave, a tiger tabby with a bloody mouth and bloody paws. I scooped him up and held him to my chest. It was love at first sight. It’s impossible to articulate the feeling that passed between that cat and me in those first moments of holding him. I didn’t even take time to call. I rushed him to the car and, murmuring reassurance to him all the way, drove him up the valley to Dr. Vincent’s office. I needed a name to murmur. “Vincent,” I said, “it’s ok, you’re going to be fine.”

 

At the clinic Doc came out from emergency surgery during his lunch hour and said “What have we got?” “He’s bleeding from his mouth,” I said. “I just found him. If you can fix him I’ll keep him. Please fix him.” He whisked him into the back saying “Call me in three hours.” That was the sum total of our exchange. I realized then that his haste with me that first visit had been solely a result of an emergency situation. For six years my knee-jerk emotional reaction had kept me from knowing and learning from this extraordinary doctor and teacher.

 

I called him in three hours. “It’s calicivirus,” he said, “a respiratory virus that has ulcerated his tongue. If I can save the tongue I can save the cat. A cat can’t survive without a tongue. He needs it to drink. I’ve seen it before but I’ve never seen it this bad.”

 

“You better save him,” I said. “I named him after you.”

 

Dr. Vincent laughed. “Well I’ll have to save him then,” he said. “If he makes it over the weekend I think he’ll be fine.”

 

Monday morning little Vincent emerged from the back room looking like a new cat. “He’s a remarkable cat,” said his namesake. “I just gave him an anti-inflammatory. He did the rest. Really, he’s a special cat. You can take him home tomorrow,”

 

“Only I can’t,” I said. “I leave home for a month tomorrow. Any chance you could keep him for me until I get back?”

 

“I don’t see why that would be a problem.”

 

A month later I returned to the clinic to pick up my new cat. He was the darling of the staff. He came into my arms as though he’d known me forever. The doctor charged me a pittance for everything. But this is what he would do for anyone, for any cat. He’s a small-town vet who works all hours for the valley’s pets. He donates and discounts his services for the local animal rescue group. He works in a room open to the front desk and the waiting area. I never mind waiting my turn, watching and eavesdropping in fascination and admiration as he diagnoses, treats and explains each patient in front of all the rest.

 

A few months after acquiring little Vincent I took in one of the dogs and Doc asked after his namesake. “He’s great,” I said. “He is so smart. Sometimes he’s so smart I call him Dr. Vincent.” The real Dr. Vincent almost blushed.

 

Vinnie goes back to his vet every now and then when he gets in a fight outside at night. Last week he went in for an abscess on his tail. This week for a fecal blockage, the same condition that introduced me to Dr. Vincent fifteen years ago. “This is too far up for an enema to do any good,” he said. “We’ve got to approach this from the other end.” He gave me a week’s worth of stool softeners with a pill plunger to get them down. “These pills are bitter, they’ll make him drool. Don’t be alarmed. Keep an eye on that cat for me, I mean it.”

 

Today, rather than phone, I dropped by when I was in the neighborhood to get a report on blood work for one of the dogs. The parking lot was jam packed. I stood in the center of a hubbub of ailing kittens, nervous dogs, and their people, watching and waiting until he had a chance to talk with me. I watched him take a phone call while he turned off the lights and looked at a cat’s injury with his eye scope. He took his time with me between patients, explained the blood work and discussed options, then patiently heard my report on little Vinnie’s progress. I walked out of the chaos of the clinic calm, informed, and, as usual, a little bit enlightened. I hope he’s not planning to retire any time soon. I want this vet to keep tending my pets and my education for many years to come.