John Muir Trail Night 21 – Priority Mail (mile 148.5/211)

While I was swimming in the upper Palisade lake yesterday, a message popped up on my InReach. My squadmother (my boss at the local 911 ambulance agency I’ve worked for since I was a brand-new pandemic-qualified EMT) asked when I would be home in New York. I was scheduled to start back to work the following weekend, a couple of days after my Mount Whitney exit permit. 

However. The county was giving “lifesaver awards” to myself and my crewmates for a CPR save we’d had back in July (I can write about this as it’s since been in the newspaper/posted publicly on the internet). The ceremony would be on Tuesday and the date was inflexible. Squadmother would not tell me whether the patient – this rare, miraculous survivor of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest – would be at the award ceremony. But she hinted it was possible. Likely. 

I did not have enough time to summit Whitney then make it back to New York by Tuesday morning. 

As I’d sat around on bear canisters with the guys from Georgia and New Jersey and Australia over our plastic-bag dinners the previous night, I pondered this dilemma. As we talked about how many miles and days were left until Mount Whitney, I imagined I was going to continue south with (or, probably, several miles behind) them all. The unbroken thread of the JMT pulling us all to that same summit where people had been starting-ending their long, shared walks since the 1930s. The point and the cumulation of all this patient, painful progress up and down, wet and dry, scorched and frozen, lonely and joyous, always stubbornly continuing South.

I love walking in old footsteps, becoming a tile in a mosaic of shared history and purpose, altered by the accumulation of time and distance. As I sat on my bear canister (and one of the NJ gents observed it was looking pretty empty already) I held and turned the heavy, smooth stone of this possibility – feeling its weight and proof. I could finish the JMT, slowly and surely. I could, for once, see something through to its conclusion and leave no JMT mile untrodden. I could update my mileage on this blog to 211/211, satisfied and reliable and accomplished having done 100 percent of the thing I’d said I would do. 

And if I chose that possibility, I’d be standing at the trail-top in California – momentarily the highest person in the contiguous United States – while the other members of my EMS crew (and the firefighters and police who also answered 911 that night) assembled somewhere familiar in the Northeast and shook hands with a man who was dead when we met him. I’d sent epinephrine and electricity to his unbeating heart – pushing the meds through syringes, touching the orange button with its lit-up lightning-bolt icon and, for-real this time, announcing “all clear… shocking”. All our muscles combined had lifted him off the tarmac and into the ambulance and pulled him up into the light – breathing air, renewed pulses meeting our fingers. 

It was the third save of my career, my first as the lead (only) paramedic. The first time I’d been the one holding the drugs and the defibrillator, the responsibility for decisions about what we should do and where we should go. Paramedics work under the medical directorship, and licence, of a physician – we can call the doctor for “medical control” advice on medications, treatment or decisions on which hospital is the best destination for a patient. The doctor can authorise us to give medications or doses that go beyond our “standing order” protocols.

Except (as I was that night) when you are roadside without phone signal on any network. Then the paramedic has to make the best decisions they can. I’ve been a medic less than a year and it is the responsibility for these decisions that intimidates me more than any of the gore, velocity, violence or wrecks of the work. 

The same yearning for connection and camaraderie that had led me, some nights on trail, to join a social campsite or almost-weep over my dead phone was now pulling me eastwards. The superstrong connections forged in extreme circumstances are among the great joys and meaning-makers for me in life. Especially in wilderness, or endurance sport such as ultramarathoning. The quick, deep, mutually helpful connections you make with another runner as you pace and encourage each other for a few minutes on a small-hours mountain trail. The strength and purpose standing or shouting or sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with other protesters (or protester-protectors, which is how I usually perceive my role). In June I walked out of a gig with an artist I’d met hours earlier, into a street protest that turned tense and then violent. We crouched on the pavement side by side; he held his camera high above our heads; I checked on people who were hurt. He said “we are closer because we experienced something real together”. 

Emergency medicine forces you to trust your partners. That July night, my crewmates were two men I didn’t know well – an ambulance driver young enough to be my son, an EMT/Spartan athlete I’d spent only a few hours with in the past. The driver was leadfooted and aggressive but safe, hurtling us through the dark with the lights and sirens ablaze. The EMT worked elbow-to-elbow with me, handling the oxygen tank and the backboard, doing exactly what he was supposed to do. Afterwards they were kind, helping me clean and and reassemble the back of the ambulance. The driver brought me a cup of water in the hospital; the EMT bought me seltzer and a Quest cup at the gas station. Tuesday would be a singular and special day for all of us – these near-strangers who also experienced something real and began to feel like some sort of family. 

But, back to the trail and my tent above the upper Palisade lake. I lay supine on my thin sleeping pad, watching the purple and cream nylon flutter with high-altitude breezes. As with the previous night, I slept poorly. Probably from the five-figure elevation – I woke every few minutes cold, breathless, slightly nauseous, a pressure headache. Symptoms of mild altitude sickness. I had weird dreams about a toddler running around the campsite and bopping me on the head through my tent. 

I thought about the important days of our lives. How these don’t have to be weddings and graduations and baby showers. Musician and writer Buick Audra has spoken (publicly) about how achievements such as writing a whole book or recording and releasing an original album should get equal attention and celebration as the babies and engagements. Often they don’t, perhaps because most people don’t know what it takes (in terms of time, energy, resources) to create a book or a dozen true songs. Or perhaps because music and art are fun, things most people do as hobbies or for relaxation.

I have made dozens of albums, released with varying levels of celebration and attention. I will likely never have a baby, or another wedding. The special, singular days of my life will now probably feature drumsticks in my hands rather than rings on fingers. Polished tactical boots and the weirdly athletic-military uniform of EMS rather than a veil or maternity wear. Tuesday in New York could be one of these days. 

By dawn, I’d decided. I painstakingly scrolled through the alphabet on my InReach, picking out each letter individually to text my squadmother: “I’ll be there Tuesday. ROSC is special, the mountains will still be here”.