I plan to catch the trail just up the road from my cabin, Cove Cottage, where I’ll head up the narrow ramp-like stretch of gravel and grass leading to Stanton’s Trail. I am a writing resident at Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia, just on the border of North Carolina. I have three weeks to work on my parenting-with-cancer memoir before I head home for Thanksgiving. The detailed map of trails Hambidge provided seduces me into believing that this trek will be easy. For the first time in days, the sun shimmers onto the foliage surrounding my cottage. Rain pelted softly against the fiberglass skylight each of the last few nights, and when I looked out the window each morning, spoonfuls of water had collected in leaf bowls. Back in Michigan, the weather has already begun its winter dance, so I must enjoy the warmer temperatures here while I write.

Upon reaching the beginning of the trail, my body and I recognize the slight incline. I love trails but do not consider myself a true hiker because I don’t care for inclines. I am not fit, and uphill work reinforces that fact. I have walked only 50 yards, yet already the huffs of breath I make aloud drown out the shush of my feet against the leaves, the volume increasing with each step. When the doctors listen to my lungs, they want me to exhale loud, deep breaths when they place the stethoscope on my back.

I breathe out now. I stop. It is okay to rest. It is okay to breathe loudly. No one can hear you, I tell myself. I wear my orange vest, recommended in my housing information, because there could be a hunter shooting from a car on one of the roads, even though doing so is unlawful. I carry my cabin key, with its cowbell keychain, designed to startle bears. My accoutrements suggest that I might, in fact, cross paths with someone or something, but I convince myself that my awkward gasps and huffs will go unheeded.

The map says Stanton’s Trail goes left, while Anselm’s Trail goes right. I want Stanton’s because 40 the map says later it connects to the old logging road and then to Jean’s Trail, leading to Patterson Creek. I missed Jean’s Trail the other day – walked right by it. I want to see the waterfalls on Jean’s Trail close up.

The trails are clearly marked, the map says. The light blue rectangle in the key on the right side of the map tells me light blue means Anselm’s Trail. On a nearby tree, a small sign with a light blue mark matches the map. I veer left. This spot offers a bit of plateau, affording me the chance to stabilize my breathing.

It is not just the noise of breathing that bothers me. My chest burns. My lungs, I guess. Because I am out of shape. Or because the cancer is progressing?

We played cards sometimes, my mother and I, during my childhood asthma attacks in the middle of the night. After I woke from a dream – always a detailed dream urging me to wake, a ruse designed by my brain to propel my body into a sitting position so that I could breathe in the real, non-dream world – I would creep past the bathroom door, slightly ajar with light spilling out onto the kitchen linoleum, the light kept on mostly for my benefit. I went through the living room and to my parents’ bedroom door, also ajar. Mom, I would whisper. Mom.

That’s all I needed to say. She rose, arching her shoulders to waken her body, and came to the living room, where I waited for her. Turned on the light. And stayed up the rest of the night to watch me breathe.

Watching me breathe meant making decisions about whether to call the doctor in the middle of the night or take me into his office in the morning. She watched the skin covering the trachea at my throat. With bad attacks, the skin would grow tauter at my trachea as I sucked for air on the inhale breath. Sometimes I put my hands on my head, fingers clasped together because latching them and pressing down on my head created more energy to suck in the next breath. As I grew older, I avoided placing my hands on my head, afraid to tip my mother off about how bad the attack was. But if I forgot to hide my distress, or if she saw other signs, she would call Dr. O’Neill from our phone on the kitchen wall. First, she apologized, and then she answered his questions, listening to suggestions he offered based on what she told him we had in the cupboard. Purple and golden liquid medicines sat on the top shelf, along with an envelope or two, one with Pen-G tablets, the other with Prednisone. Years later, Marax tablets would replace the liquid. Then theophylline tablets, theophylline enemas.

For a long and harrowing attack, she woke my father to drive me out into the night air, which we thought helped with the breathing. If he drove me into Pontiac, we meandered through the neighborhoods bordering the hospitals, looping repeatedly down certain streets, our leisurely pace a sham, because really, he remained close to those hospital entrances in case my breathing worsened, propelling us both into the light and warmth of the busy Emergency Departments for an injection of adrenaline, Celestone, Depo-Medrol, Sus-phrine, the same injection I would receive if I could hold on until we reached the doctor’s office the next day.

Sometimes watching me meant making honey, lemon, and whiskey toddies, or, if we had no whiskey, just honey and lemon, so the hot liquid could break up the phlegm in my chest. But often, as I sipped on my honey and lemon, my mother rubbed my back and shoulders, which were always hunched down with the effort of breathing. Or pounded between my shoulder blades, another strategy to break up the phlegm. If the breathing started to ease, sometimes on its own or sometimes because I’d had some of the 41 medicine from the cupboard, eased enough so that the rattling and wheezing diminished, then she would pull out the cards, because she still needed to watch; neither one of us could rest yet. We would play two-handed Euchre. Or double solitaire.

I continue on Stanton’s Trail, heading south. For much of this walk, I’ve followed a narrow trail through the forest, but now, as the trees begin to open around me, I anticipate the old logging road, which should appear shortly, another left fork ahead.

A loud crackle sounds from the underbrush across the shallow ravine, and I turn in a circle, expecting to see a bear, raising my cottage keychain cow bell. Instead, I see a tall, thin tree a couple hundred yards away tilt and then fall, landing with a low, raspy crash and the ruffle of dried leaves. I have never seen a tree fall in the middle of the woods. I think about the old sound riddle; if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? But you are here, my brain reminds me. You have listened. You have heard.

A wimpy, neophyte hiker, I’m afraid of confronting a snake, or a bear, or a character from James Dickey’s Deliverance on the trail, yet my exuberance trumps my novice-hiker status. I take such pleasure in hearing the wind flick at the edges of the dead leaves, lifting them, allowing them to scrape against fallen trunks. As a silent, grateful observer, I’m thankful for both silence and sound. For the proof of existence, with all its existential possibilities.

I don’t know how my mother’s level of anxiety fluctuated when she watched me breathe through the night, but she never smoked in the house during my asthma attacks. For intense attacks, ones which she woke my father, she might take a break from watching me and go into the backyard with a cigarette to look at the sky. Pull the edges of her housecoat closer together, hold them with one fist, and hold the other hand with the cigarette away from her body, the smoke curling up into darkness, disappearing. After such a break, she returned with a smile or a tilt of her eyebrow, a question about whether the breathing had improved. She never fretted in front of me, remained calm and positive.

The wide swath of the old logging road provides a chance to determine where I stand in relation to Patterson Gap Road, the road off which the Cove and Son House Studios are located, set apart from the larger Hambidge complex on the north side of Betty’s Creek and Betty’s Creek Road. When I walked and even before that, drove the length of Patterson Gap Road, I missed the entrance to Jean’s Trail. As I study the map, a map revised just two months earlier, I see that I should be able to walk across Patterson Gap Road from the logging road and head directly into Jean’s Trail. No jags right or left. Yet when I reach the pavement and look ahead, a dense area of brush greets me. I refuse to accept defeat, and I peer into the spaces between branches, searching for a marker. According to the map, Jean’s Trail doesn’t have a color marker associated with it. But I see, there in the brush, a bit of orange fluorescent tape.

That’s where I pick up Jean’s Trail.

I cross the road and head into the brush, and almost immediately, I can hear the water. Just those few feet in from the road. The pouring, rushing force of water, falling from a distance. I just stand and listen. And then, I take a few steps and I see the white froth in movement, behind the bushes. I try to work my iPhone camera to capture this first small fall for my family. It appears that Jean’s Trail heads back north, following both the road and the creek, eventually transporting me to Son House Studio, leaving me with just a brief 42 jaunt over Patterson Gap Road and a large fallen log to my own cabin. I am certain that the short distance of the trail will consist of manageable ground to cover as I finish up my adventure.

Yet I have not bargained on the slippery moisture of rain that still coats the ground, rocks, bushes, and trees next to the Patterson Creek. This part of the trail doesn’t get sun. And today, on a gray day, sodden ground, the rain’s leftovers, and water from the creek make walking difficult. For the first hundred feet, the walk here is no different from the one earlier on Stanton’s Trail. But then the trail moves up sharply and then down. My tennis shoes, already slick on the bottom, can’t gain purchase on the rocks that encroach now on the path.

How foolish to assume I could handle even this modest terrain. I receive an Xgeva injection every three months to strengthen my bones, keep them strong against invading metastatic cancer, yet one slip here could result in a break. I’m angry with myself for not anticipating the weather’s effects on the terrain. I reach an impasse. I need to jump over a large boulder in front of me. But I am no longer a jumper. I scoot. I must grab hold of something to brace myself, but I’ve been warned against the poison ivy. When I’ve heard these warnings, I’ve wondered, “Why would anyone purposely step into poison ivy?” Now I understand. There’s no purposely about it. On a trail, you reach to brace yourself, yet you can’t always protect yourself from what your desperate hand touches when it reaches.

“Up,” I tell myself. You must reach up! That’s a partial solution at least, keeping my hands away from the ground cover. I must reach up.

And then, as I stand on Jean’s Trail, fear gathering as I contemplate the water on the ground, the rocks, the tree stumps in front of me, I understand. I must become Jane.

Because now Phil Collins sings the Tarzan score in my head, I laugh out loud. I reach up, imagining myself swinging on branches through a jungle. Reach up! I chant in rhythm to Phil Collins music, and I become Jane, reaching up for the vines, not for the poison ivy vines but for the branches that will keep me upright and swinging from one rocky nook of Jean’s Trail to the next. Reaching up doesn’t solve everything, but it helps me navigate the slippery terrain, the water rushing and burbling next to me, disappearing and then bursting into view again.

When the path turns away from the creek and toward the Son House Studio, I am wet and grimy, my thin knit pants soaked with soil and tree fiber. But I haven’t touched poison ivy, and I haven’t broken a leg. I’ve danced with Phil Collins in the Georgian rainforest.

As I cross Patterson Gap Road, ready to stumble over that last fallen tree hurdle before I arrive at Cove Cottage, I hear myself breathing, the sound a bit quieter, but still audible.

During my senior year of high school, after a stressful week of classes, a swine flu shot, and a complicated A.P. Chemistry experiment, I suffered an asthma attack, the worst I’d had since childhood. My pediatrician instructed the hospital to admit me straight to a floor, so I bypassed Emergency, and some bureaucratic glitch on the floor delayed treatment, delayed the delivery of one of those injections I needed to open my airways and help me breathe. Until they finally delivered an injection to the floor, I struggled for each breath. My mother, summoned from work, sat next to my cranked-up hospital bed, the head raised to provide better breathing dynamics. I told her how tired I felt, how hard it was to keep gasping in each breath. She told me to keep going on, just a bit longer. Later, when I said to her, “I think you kept me alive,” she told me that she’d never been so worried, that she’d thought for sure I was dying.

When she died, her breathing remained silent until near the end. Small puffs of sound emerged from her lips, like the snore puffs she made on those nights I’d returned from college and lay awake with the hums and creaks of my childhood home. In the hospital, as she lay dying, her brain stem already dead, I couldn’t encourage her as she exhaled her last puffs. I just listened.

I extract the cowbell key from my pocket and enter the cottage to the faint smell of wood smoke from fires the previous resident made. “Living is about the breathing,” I might have said to my mother on one of those nights I clambered through an attack. We both knew that. But sometimes it helped to hear things aloud.

Share This: