Reckoning

by Emmett Lyman

I grew up in a small town in central Connecticut with a family that loved the outdoors. In the early years of my development we spent our free time traveling, backpacking, camping, and exploring the world around us.

When I was 13 years old my Boy Scout troop scheduled a day of rock climbing at a nearby cliff, in all honesty just a large glacial erratic boulder in the woods. It was my first time climbing a rock and using rope systems for safety. I was tentative at first, but as I began to climb I realized that it felt natural to me, like something that was pre-destined to be part of my life. I spent the day climbing around on the moderate terrain, certainly not doing anything that would be considered legitimate rock climbing to a serious adventurer, but at the time it felt like the opening chapter of a book that was entirely new to me, and it drew me in.

Seeing a photograph of my young self from that day, I’m now aware of just how easy the challenge was and how utterly silly I looked with poor form, laughable equipment, and little to no inherent skill. But the smile pasted across my face showcased a newfound love of the sport. I still remember the feel of rock touching my fingertips, my shoes edging to support my body weight on small ledges and cracks, and the thrill of weighting the fixed rope as I leaned back to rappel down the rock face for the very first time.

Many years later, my path had turned away from climbing as I’d moved to Boston and prioritized other things like furthering my education and career, fixing cars and motorcycles, and even playing golf, which is a sport about as far away from climbing as you can get. While I was at a posh training program in Miami one day, my best friend Pat called out of the blue and asked if I’d like to take a rock climbing class with him. Little did I realize at the time that he’d stirred a long dormant, but ever-present passion deep within me. Together we became engrossed in climbing and the climbing community, and we both knew it would remain with us for life.

Still, other priorities continued to guide my path. I was pursuing a career in business as I worked diligently to pay off grad school loans, and I moved to Washington DC following a beautiful and brilliant girl that I’d fallen deeply in love with. However, it wasn’t long before I found myself in someone else’s city, abandoned with a shattered heart. I fell into a terrible depression far from friends and family. It’s strange to reflect that now, years later and after a life-changing injury, this loss remains the most painful event of my life.

Pat and other climbing friends from my prior life in Boston desperately supported me across time and distance as loneliness threatened to consume me. One August weekend, two very close friends, a couple named Alissa and John, invited me up to one of our favorite climbing areas in the New York Catskill region. This wasn’t unusual, as we came to this climbing mecca regularly given its similar distance from our two cities. This time, however, they secretly invited Lauren, a girl I’d never met, in hopes that we might connect with each other.

I climbed that weekend with John, and Lauren climbed with Alissa. The cliff extends for miles through the forest with thousands of established climbing routes, so when we bumped into each other at the base of a route that was well away from the more popular areas, it was undoubtedly an orchestrated encounter. Lauren’s eyes caught mine with a shy smile, and I smiled back feeling an immediate spark of attraction. We exchanged pleasantries, and then John and I carried on down the trail. 

Once out of earshot, John nudged me with a grin and asked “She has a great rack, doesn’t she?” The double entendre referred to the rack of climbing equipment that Lauren carried on her harness as she prepared to lead Alissa up their next objective, and it was indeed nice. But the crass and uncharacteristic joke from my strait-laced friend left us both laughing like teenagers.

Lauren and I chatted at length during a group dinner that night, and quickly made plans for a climbing date a couple weeks later. My friends’ gambit worked, and I soon found myself smitten once more, eagerly searching for an avenue to leave my painful memories in Washington for another new beginning in Boston with Lauren. Within a few months I convinced my employer to let me to work remotely, still a rare feat in those pre-pandemic times. It wasn’t long before we were living together surrounded by friends and the climbing community that we both loved so much.

Three years later, Alissa, John, Lauren, and I had grown inseparable and we climbed together all over the world. We decided to plan something new for the warm summer solstice of 2018, and set our sights on an unexplored region of the Alaska Range of mountains. We’d spent years honing our skills in established climbing areas, where guide books describe all the difficulties and solutions to well-trodden routes up rock faces, and in familiar mountain ranges teeming with tourist hikers following trail markers toward known summits and vistas. We felt it was time to take a step into the realm of exploration, a pursuit that is slowly disappearing from the toolbox of many mountaineers as more and more of the world’s finite hidden wilderness areas are explored.

Our plan was to find an inspiring mountain that no person had ever climbed or seen before and establish a new route to the top. A close friend and mentor of ours had built his young climbing career doing expeditions like this throughout Alaska in the 1960s and 70s, and he helped us plan for the inevitable hardships we would face. Following months of preparation, a tiny bush plane dropped us off two at a time on a narrow gravel strip in the middle of an uncharted river deep in the sub-range aptly called the Hidden Mountains of Lake Clark National Park.

We portaged hundreds of pounds of food and equipment through thick groves of alders and underbrush, following the river toward its glacial origin and a line of distant jagged peaks erupting from the earth. After several days of thrashing through unforgiving terrain, we discovered a small glacier ringed by a cirque of stone towers that we surveyed together for promising climbing routes. We settled on our target, a twin-spired peak we dubbed Mt. Sauron.

After hunkering down for two days in camp to wait out unpredictable Alaska storms we awoke to promising weather and gathered up our equipment. We snowshoed across the glacier to the cliff face and began to climb by two different routes, both couples venturing into the unknown. I remember feeling utter euphoria as I quested up through virgin rock with no knowledge of what awaited me above, finding my own way in a manner I’d never done before. I was finally blending the physical challenge of rock climbing with the heightened mental challenge of unlocking a puzzle to find the best solution. It was the happiest day of climbing I ever experienced.

Unfortunately, this is where memory fails me. Sometime late in the day, about two thirds of the way up the cliff, the objective hazard that always looms in the mountains came for me. I was struck by falling rock, either let loose by the sun’s warming rays on frozen terrain far above me or perhaps pulled down by my own negligence as I climbed. We think the rock snapped my head back, slamming my rigid foam helmet into the back of my neck and partially severing my spinal cord at the C6 vertebra. What followed was an extraordinary rescue by my close friends, as well as a unit of elite military parajumpers that navigated a Pave Hawk helicopter at breakneck speed hundreds of miles from Anchorage and through the unfamiliar mountain range.

Several weeks later, I woke from a deep and bizarre dream state that I later learned was an induced coma to find myself in the Intensive Care Unit at Providence Hospital in Anchorage. The rockfall had caused a traumatic brain injury, and the coma was my best chance of avoiding total loss of higher function following brain surgery. Over the ensuing weeks, I was visited almost constantly by my climbing team, Pat and his family, who had flown up from Rhode Island, and many members of my own family from Connecticut and nearby Juneau. They had all rushed to Anchorage when my neurosurgeon advised them to get there as quickly as possible so they could say goodbye. 

I proved to be luckier than he expected and survived to discover a new and different type of life. As the fog gently lifted, it was hard to differentiate between the strange sea of dreams my mind invented to conceal its inability to grapple with the trauma, and the new unfamiliar reality that I was waking to. The sterile intensive care setting, the unknown faces of my medical team, and an unfamiliar detachment between my body and mind left the real world feeling as distant as the dream world I’d been inhabiting for weeks. 

The first two years with a spinal cord injury I felt like a very different person, and at times it seemed as though my very humanity had been stripped away. I felt weak, confused, and entirely dependent on others. Following twelve weeks of rehab at Spaulding Hospital in Boston, where my extensive injuries kept me from making significant progress, Lauren and I moved to an apartment across the street from the facility. I enrolled in an aggressive regimen of outpatient therapy, but still made little progress.

Meanwhile, in my confused state I failed to see the warning signs of a pressure sore developing, and less than a year after my accident found myself bedridden for months preceding and following flap surgery to repair the damage. For Lauren, the emotional trauma of the accident itself and the unrelenting difficulty of having to care for me with painfully little reciprocity weighed heavily, and eventually it broke her spirit. She left in a gloomy cloud of mutual sadness.

It felt like those early years were marked by an endless series of similar scares and setbacks, and it was difficult to see a path forward. Yet there were glimmers of hope. Shortly after recovering from the pressure sore, I got a handcycle and was thrilled to rediscover joy in the exercise, movement, and social engagement it gave me.

Nine months later I took possession of a manual wheelchair, which we’d thought during my stay at Spaulding I’d never be able to operate. I immediately felt comfortable in the new chair, and came to prefer its raw simplicity to the impressive technology of my power chair. It felt more like an extension of my body and offered a more direct connection with my surroundings, similar to the way tight-fitting climbing shoes used to transform intimidating cliffs of stone into inviting playgrounds where I felt most alive. I’m only now starting to appreciate how much that direct connection has always mattered to me.

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, my day-to-day existence was still enabled only by support from caregivers that came in the morning and evening to help with activities I was unable to do for myself. Most important among these were tasks like managing my bowel and bladder, showering, transferring to and from bed, and getting dressed. I had three caregivers on a rotating schedule, but one by one they fell ill and dropped out of service. One morning I got the dreaded phone call from the last remaining caregiver telling me that she didn’t feel well and was not coming to work. I was trapped in bed – a catastrophe I’d hoped would never come.

Terrified, I called my sister in Connecticut and she drove 2½ hours to perform the caregiver role that morning. She then told me flatly that we were going to pack my bags and I was moving in with her and my three nieces for the foreseeable future. At that moment I saw one thing with perfect clarity - my single most important objective was to find a way to live independently without requiring another person to drop everything and care for me. I wanted to make sure I never again felt so exposed and vulnerable.

 Since that morning three years ago, I’ve invested all my effort into reducing my dependence on others. I tell myself that this will mean I can once again play the simple role of friend, brother, or son rather than patient. I’m plagued by the memory of being stuck in bed without the ability to rescue myself, like a formative childhood trauma that haunts me years later.

 My journey has taken me to rehab centers across the country to learn new skills, through medical procedures to simplify my care needs, and into several housing arrangements where I experimented with ideas on how to adapt my environment to my disability. I solved one small challenge at a time, and I’m fortunate that the unique characteristics of my injury have allowed me to achieve real independence and with it the confidence that I won’t again feel trapped or abandoned. The sad irony is that by working so hard to achieve self-reliance and protect myself from being abandoned again, I know that in some ways I’ve pushed away others when they just wanted to help.

 A mental survey of my fellow quads throughout this community leaves me awestruck by how others have managed to emerge from their injuries to lead successful careers, start families and raise children, and give back to the disability community with endless commitment to mentorship and fellowship, all of them ways that I’ve fallen behind. Our injuries force us to be selective in how we invest our time, and zealous pursuit of one goal means profound trade-offs in others. No one can do it all. I wonder how I’ll feel about the path I chose when I look back years from now.

 These five years have also exposed for me a hidden truth about spinal cord injuries. While we’re capable of remarkable adaptation to solve complex challenges, we’re inevitably caught off guard by new and unexpected complications that often prove more difficult than the paralysis itself. In my case it’s a condition called heterotopic ossification. A massive bone structure has grown to encapsulate my hip joint, distorting it in a painful way that reduces my function and disrupts the nearby organs. It’s a poorly understood condition that leaves even knowledgeable clinicians with little to no appreciation for the challenges it has created.

 It’s hard to blame them. There are only subtle indications to an observer that the torque on my skeletal structure twists me violently sideways and prevents me from lifting myself during transfers, that the constant pain emanating from my hip causes intense tone and spasms from my fingertips to my toes, and that the dysfunction of my digestive system due to unwelcome bone constricting it has warped my once healthy diet to a limited palette of liquids and a few heavily processed foods.

 The limitations imposed on my body have meaningfully changed how I live my life, how I view my surroundings, and how I make use of scarce resources like time and energy. Still, I see within myself a familiar spark, the core of a person that remains undamaged and unrestrained by the physical changes around it. I will never again get to climb unknown cliffs in uncharted locations, but the spirit of exploration and adaptation persists, as do my most valued friendships.

 I’m buoyed with confidence gleaned from the successes that I’ve enjoyed over the past several years. I’ve realized that while this disability is restrictive and unforgiving, we can still learn to live our best lives with it. By forcing us to consider what matters most, it can actually help us focus on priorities that we might otherwise have neglected.

 There’s no cure for spinal cord injury and, strictly speaking, there’s no recovery from it. But this is not a terminal condition, and it’s one that can teach us to find new sources of strength and discovery. I hope that I and all my fellow members of the spinal cord injury community continue to look beyond our scares and setbacks, and unlock new routes to climb through this unknown terrain and reach the beautiful summits of our own hidden mountains.