The Mississippi River rolled smoothly beneath us as we leaned on the railing, resting on our elbows, into the light breeze. Live bluegrass music floated forward from a small group of musicians in the enclosed rear section of the cruise boat. My daughters and I soaked up the tranquility of the warm evening, the last of Indian summer, like contented sponges. We’d grabbed what we thought were the best seats on the boat. Right up front, with no one else standing between us and the river as we slowly cut our swath through sultry, languid side channels and the river main. We laughingly passed a bottle of white wine, bought earlier that day at a winery across the river in Iowa, between us. Paper cups scrounged from our bed and breakfast stood in for fancy stemware. And we acknowledged, though briefly, that we each had our reasons for looking at life a little differently now, as a lot more precious and finite and precarious, as “before and after.”
My own moment of reckoning came twelve years ago, though at the exact moment I must say I was too preoccupied with surviving it to look at the deeper ramifications. Only two months after actor Christopher Reeve was paralyzed from the neck down in a horseback riding accident, I took a long fall from a tall horse going over a jump and hit the ground, hard. My back hit first, then my head. I remember lying in the sandy dirt of the riding arena, blue skies and tree boughs above me, wondering when it would stop hurting enough for me to breathe again.
After some dickering and bickering and negotiating—I was sure I’d be “just fine”—an ambulance was called. I was strapped to a board, lifted in like a piece of lumber, and transported to a nearby hospital. I remember swapping horse stories on the ride down with one of the EMTs who used to own some Appaloosas. An exam and some paperwork and a CT scan later, doctors delivered the bad news: I had a broken back. A vertebra halfway down my spine had fractured. No, I wouldn’t be going home that night. I was shocked. Serious life-changing accidents were something that happened to other people, not me.
In a pain-killer induced haze, I remember some doctor explaining that it was too risky to try to stabilize the break surgically, so the plan would be to let it heal on its own. I was catheterized and confined to bed for five days, while the swelling in my back muscles went down enough that I could finally be wrapped in fiberglass from collarbones to hips and sent home. Three months of aggravation, discomfort and taking no deep breaths (not to mention no showers) ensued, followed by a good year or two of the kind of pain and weakness that even now still lingers.
It was a watershed for me. “Life’s short, take chances, trust your instincts,” were the top themes that rose to the top of the philosophical pile. I’d taken that fence a second time at the confident urging of my riding instructor but against my better judgment and some strong argument. “See, I told you so,” seemed a churlish and petty way to view a grave situation, but I emerged with the indelible conviction to give that “inner voice” a much better hearing as well as a final say from now on. And to make the most out of every day I had left.
There was no rhyme or reason to luck, I knew, no sense at all to be made of the fact that after our equestrian accidents, Christopher Reeve was in a wheelchair and on a ventilator, and I was still driving the car pool to gymnastic practice.
And so I found my voice. Looked back at the fork in the road made fifteen years earlier—journalism or law—and gave the road less traveled a try. Got more accustomed to first recognizing, and then saying, “I want this. I need this.” Went to law school, flourished like a flower in the desert suddenly blessed by a deluge, picked a career in criminal prosecution. And was reminded every day, by the ache in my back, of how fragile we are.
My daughters have also had their own reasons for looking down the maw of mortality and coming away changed, valuing every shining moment. Anna Quindlen described this awakening well in her book “A Short Guide to a Happy Life,” when she wrote about her mother’s illness and death from ovarian cancer when Quindlen was only a nineteen year old college student. We’ve each experienced what she called that “dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on, for the darkest possible reason.”
We take little in the way of happiness for granted these days, and so after months of trading busy schedules, we booked a weekend for just the three of us to meet in Prairie du Chien to do a whole lot of nuthin’…and anything else we could come up with. For two and a half days we flew by the seat of our pants. Laughed and picked our way through a flea market in Iowa, ate chili and bison burgers at the Marquette Café, sampled wines at the Eagle’s Landing winery, shopped for antiques and candles and knicknacks at too many places to remember. Snacked every once in a while on a bag of Honeycrisp apples we bought at a roadside stand and a Ziploc tub of homemade apple dip I’d brought along for the heck of it. (Made of cream cheese, brown sugar, chopped peanuts and vanilla, it’s one of those “perfect foods”—a combination of fat, sugar, and just a big enough fig leaf of protein to justify its existence.) Signed up for the sunset bluegrass cruise down the Mississippi, hiked along the Iowa bluffs along the river.
The cruise was heavenly, the music wonderful, the evening temperature perfect as the sun dropped lower in the sky. As we gazed, and drank, and admired, one of the musicians took a little while to recount spending a few weeks up in the mountains with his son—New Mexico, I think—as they camped in rudimentary conditions and hawk watched together, a shared passion. He spoke warmly, and fondly, and eloquently of time with his son in soaring, splendid surroundings, of beautiful skies and cold nights and meals cooked on a camp stove. I never turned around. Just thought, “oh, that’s sweet…now how about another song?” My younger daughter, Sarah, bought one of their CDs at the end of the cruise, and read us the liner notes as we drove around after breakfast.
The next day we crossed over the Mississippi into Iowa again, to Effigy Mounds National Monument, where we hoped to find a hiking trail that wouldn’t do us in. The day once again was gorgeous, warm and sunny, with a light breeze. The parking lot was packed, filled with families and other birdwatchers gathered to view the annual hawk migration taking place. We saw a bald eagle flying above as we walked from the parking lot to the visitor center.
A large white tent was set up nearby for T-shirt sales and music CDs. A small sign announced that the proceeds from the T-shirt sale would be going to support the family of somebody or other. The name rankled slightly, and I cast around for a stronger thread of memory. We looked the T-shirts over, started examining the CDs. Sarah stood at my elbow. “Hey, wait a minute,” I asked. “Isn’t that the same name as those guys on the boat from last night?” She wasn’t sure.
I walked to another side of the tent. A newspaper article was on display, a long and moving tribute to a young musician and his three year old son who had died recently in a car accident. It spoke richly of his family, and of his father, also a musician and fellow environmentalist and hawk fancier. And a sad chill spread through me as I thought of the mid-music narrative from the night before, that fond reminiscence by a father about spending irreplaceable time in the mountains with his son. How he could speak at all amidst grief so deep was beyond me. And it reminded me once again of just how quickly life can turn on a dime, and that opportunities to say “I love you” should never be passed over.
We found a trail that took us, panting in the heat, to the top of the bluffs, to a picturesque view where we could look over the glittering river far below that we had skimmed the surface on just the night before. Once we walked back down, we knew, the weekend together would be over. There would be hugs and kisses and waves goodbye through car windows, but we each had a hundred miles or more ahead of us, and a return to the daily grind and responsibilities. We lingered, soaking in the sunlight sparkling through the tree branches, feeling the wind in our hair, and congratulating ourselves for making it this far.
If we had the ability to change the past, I’m sure that each of us would summon a magic wand to undo the things that gave us such an appreciation that time is fleeing, and that life is fragile, and that beauty is everywhere and often found in small things. But of course we can’t. All we can do is gratefully wake up every morning, and think…“carpe diem.”
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