I vowed to live my life free of regret when I awoke from unconsciousness at age thirteen.
I came to in the back seat of our rusty old Chevy truck. I rubbed my pounding head and looked down at my wrist to see a plastic hospital band bearing my name and phone number. I looked up at my mother sitting in the front seat. “What happened?” I said. “Where am I? I feel so confused.”
“Sundance spooked at a ground hornet nest and threw you off when you were warming up for show jumping,” my mother replied in a monotonous tone. She had clearly told me this over and over again. “They rushed you to the hospital. You need to get a lot of rest. You got a pretty bad concussion. I have been worried sick about you.”
I was disoriented. Where was my horse? Had I let down my team? This was the one thing that meant the world to me. I was a girl with a horse. I woke up every morning to care for Sundance before school. My thoughts wandered throughout the day toward the next horse show or trail ride. I had what so many thirteen-year-old girls could only dream of: a horse in my front yard and limitless wilderness to ride. Now an entire section of my life had just disappeared from memory. I did not remember the ambulance ride or the events that led up to the fall. I had gone somewhere else, but where? My body was still here. I sat silently for a long time before I finally spoke.
“Mom, where was I when my body was lying in the hospital bed?” During the long drive home I told her what I could remember. The rain started to fall on the windshield and the rhythmic sound of the wipers kept me from drifting off into my thoughts. “I remember soaring over my body. I looked around at people I didn’t recognize. Then I looked behind me. Everything around me disappeared—no people, no fluorescent hospital lights or machines.” I described the abyss of darkness to my mother, and how when I looked closer I saw a passageway with a soft light at the other end. The light had been so inviting. It was soft like the dawn light when there are no clouds in the sky and the sun has not yet pierced the horizon. It was like the pure, clear light of the full moon. I told my mother I had been drawn to go through that dark passage toward the light. “It was like there was something I had been looking for in that light. It was…peaceful.” I paused.
My heart longed to see that place through the passage. When I was soaring over my body I was in a realm between life and something else. It was not a place or a thing, but a feeling so awe-inspiring that words only detracted from the sheer brilliance. I held on to that moment. I had never experienced anything like it.
I had been soaring, my mind had no thoughts, and my body had no separation between the flesh and the universe surrounding me. I felt the sheer ecstasy of freedom from the burdens of my body, the imperfections of my life. All the complications of a teenage girl had volatized in that one moment.
I continued recounting my experience, shifting on the cracked vinyl seat, trying to find a position that soothed the pain in my head. “I looked behind me and I saw my body lying on the hospital bed. You were sitting next to me, Mom, with your hand on my shoulder. I could hear myself talking, but I was not making any sense. I was asking about Rebecca. Why was I asking about Rebecca?”
Mom spoke quietly. “She was the last person you talked to before your…” She paused. “Accident.”
“Where is my team? Where is Emily?” I replied, anxious. “Did we win the blue ribbon? We were in the lead!”
“Emily wasn’t on your team for this event,” Mom said, scraping her thumbnail over the grimy steering wheel.
“Yes she was!” I cried out. “I was in the barn with her, cleaning the stalls before I…” But I trailed off, giving up, not sure of my recollection of the events.
Everything was so confusing; I had experienced a different reality. I couldn’t differentiate between what was real and what was just a story that my mind had constructed. The only thing that seemed real to me was the euphoria I’d felt when I was soaring over my body. This accident ignited a search within me.
What had my physical body truly experienced after my fall? Why was my interpretation of the events that led up to my accident so different from my mother’s? I was at a horse show, and the people and the events were similar to my mother’s version of the story, but my recollection was unmistakably different. I could not remember what had happened in the days leading up to the show. When I was soaring over my body, I felt I could have gone into that passage toward the inviting soft light. So why hadn’t I? Why had I come back into myself, the body lying on a hospital bed? If I had not come back, where would I be? Would I be living in a dreamland if I had gone toward that light? If I had not come back to my body, would the intellectual burdens of my brain no longer tie me down? Now that I was back here, how could I live a life that let me experience that rapture?
I had already begun questioning everything around me on the first day of seventh grade, the year before my horse accident.
That morning, I sat silent on a rock. The boulder jutted out of a vast concrete entryway next to the front parking lot of Chief Kanim Middle School. The school rose up from the concrete, a low, sprawling two-story building with tiny windows. Small poplar trees thrust up out of small holes chiseled into the concrete next to the entrance.
The school was brand new, and my Fall City, Washington, community was proud of it. But I felt differently. Before the school was built, this land had been a beautiful cedar forest with a large meadow, where I would often see deer grazing. I felt out of place in the building surrounded by concrete. I liked the elementary school I had attended the year before. It was an old brick building built in 1909. Through its large windows I could see into the courtyards that surrounded the school. The rhododendrons would bloom in March, signifying the transition from winter to spring and letting us know that summer break was just around the corner. I often watched the robins perch on those shrubs outside the classroom windows, hearing their muffled calls through the closed panes.
In elementary school we had been allowed to be kids. To get to some of our classes, we walked outside along the edge of a large meadow with trees all around it. I had my favorite cottonwood trees; I would play around their trunks during recess. The smell of the cottonwood buds as they burst open in the early spring on the first warm days was a celebration of the winter past. The reddish resin that dripped from their buds filled the air with the sweet smell of freshly cut pine infused with honey. My friends and I had a whole world of our own on that playground.
Now I was sitting on a cold, uncomfortable rock in the middle of a sea of concrete. All of the kids around me were walking or talking and laughing in small groups. The only thing I could think about was getting out of school at the end of the day.
I entered the school when the bell rang. As I looked around my first class, I saw that the kids in the room were either stone cold bored or self-involved, busily trying to catch a glimpse from a classmate. I sat and did my math problems. The teacher, a thin older man with glasses, commented that he had never seen a girl with such a logical mind. What did that mean? I wondered at that moment if I should be more like the other girls in the class, fixing their hair, looking in their pocket mirrors to see if their makeup had smudged. I just sat silently, not knowing how to respond.
As the days went by, I became increasingly disillusioned with middle school. I was not interested in the things we were learning, and my teachers did not seem genuinely interested in the passions of the students. Just as I was hoping for a way out of school, I walked into my history class. There was a life-sized cutout poster of John Wayne up on the wall. His cowboy hat was cocked off to one side, and there was a red handkerchief around his neck. The look was completed with dirty chaps, boots, and spurs. He was pointing a revolver straight at me, barrel smoking. In the classroom I listened as my teacher, Mr. Johnson, talked about the history of the United States during World War II. When he spoke he breathed deep. It was as if talking and breathing were a physical exertion. He spoke of all the great men who had fought in various wars. He spoke of Hitler and the Holocaust.
What were the women doing during World War II, I wondered. They were left out of history textbooks. Those books spoke about the men who had fought in our nation’s wars and introduced us to the leaders in the country, none of whom were women. I really did not want to be hearing about this war from Mr. Johnson. I wished I were sitting next to my grammy, looking through her photo albums and hearing her tell me the stories instead.
I drifted off into a daydream.
I remembered thumbing through my grandparents’ photo album, sitting next to my grammy. She was showing me pictures of my grandpa standing next to an airplane, his leather pilot hat down over his ears and strapped under his chin. On the outside of the plane were swastikas. I set my finger on the symbol that I’d come to know as a symbol of hate.
There was a number painted beside the swastikas. I asked my grammy what that was. “Those were the number of Nazi aircraft your grandfather shot down during World War II,” she said proudly. Then she went on to tell me how evil Hitler was and the things that happened in those concentration camps. “How could anyone ever do that to other human beings?” she said, looking off into the distance with a look of deep sadness on her face. I wanted to change the subject, talk about something that was not so disturbing. So I asked her about her life on the Montana homestead, which shifted her mood, and we moved into much happier territory.
As my mind returned to the classroom after drifting off in thought, a gangly girl named Sarah raised her hand to ask a question. She had thick lenses in her glasses, which constantly fell down the bridge of her nose. She asked a question about the homework assignment. The teacher turned to some of the older boys in the class and they laughed and made fun of Sarah for not understanding her homework. I’d had enough. My heart racing and my underarms damp with sweat, I stood up. I told Mr. Johnson he should not treat students that way and that I was tired of the way he disrespected all of the students, especially the girls. His face turned red, like a tomato. Nearly spitting as he spoke, trying to hold back his anger, he told me to sit down. I did not sit down. He told me to go to the principal’s office. I gathered up my books and my backpack and stormed out the door, glancing at the John Wayne poster as I left.
I wanted to walk right out of that class and never come back.
I slouched on a chair in the school office with my arms crossed. I told myself that I was going to get out of this jail. I looked around at the walls and the woman behind the desk. She had a permanent scowl on her face. I wondered if she was capable of smiling, or if the muscles in her face had formed from the constant frown and strain of her unhappiness. When I explained to my mother what had happened, she was furious at the teacher. She attempted to call a meeting with the teacher and the principal. The teacher never showed up, so instead of the principal confronting the situation, he switched me out of the class to another teacher.
After that incident, Sarah had thanked me with her eyes, peering over her glasses next to her locker, where she stood hunched over with her schoolbooks bundled in her arms. With that glance I knew I had shown her that she could stand up for herself. I wondered what would have become of her if I had not defended her that day in class. Possibly she would have taken the abuse not only from the teacher, but from a boyfriend or husband, never speaking up for herself again since that moment at age thirteen.
As school went on, I grew more and more disconnected, always longing to be somewhere other than where I was. I could not wait to get home and go outside to be with my horse in our front yard, surrounded by trees, listening to the rushing Snoqualmie River in the bottom of the valley.
I can still picture to this day the trees surrounding the little yellow house I grew up in. There was a huge King apple tree we harvested every year to make applesauce. Those apples were the size of a baby’s head—perfectly plump and round. After my two sisters and I climbed up in the tree to pick the apples, we handed them down gently to Mom. We peeled and sliced them, simmering them in a big pot with some water until they got soft. With a hand masher, we pressed the apples firmly until they formed a chunky sauce. The applesauce simmered on the wood stove to thicken, and my mom added cinnamon and nutmeg until the entire house smelled of the sweet spice brewing within the apples.
I also loved the lilac trees that bloomed with beautiful purple and blue blossoms, the large Douglas fir trees, the cedar trees we used to climb, and the filbert trees that lined the road next to the horse barn. Those filberts were so delicious. On a good mast year the filbert nuts would weigh the branches of the trees down and cover the ground below in a blanket of light brown nuts.
The grey squirrels would enter frenetically through the filbert trees in the fall, collecting the nuts and hoarding them for later in the year when there were no nuts to be gathered. Sometimes I watched from a distance before I went up to the trees. The grey squirrels would jam a nut into their mouth and carry it to a spot on the ground, quickly bury it, and go back for another. I watched as the squirrels scattered their larder throughout the landscape. They buried nuts in all different locations around their territory. Standing in the shadow of the horse stall, I watched a squirrel, nut in cheek, glancing over his shoulder. He dug a hole, but did not bury the nut. He faked it, keeping the nut in his mouth, perhaps suspecting a jay or other intruder in the area that could have raided his winter cache. That squirrel must have had such a detailed map of spatial memory and of the scents specific to place. He could go back throughout the year to feed, especially during the cold winter when he needed to keep himself warm. I continued to watch as those grey squirrels chirped and flicked their tails at intruders, including the Steller’s jay and me as I gathered filberts to roast over the fire on our woodstove.
This landscape was part of me. I was born in that house in the Snoqualmie Valley. The land, the waters, and all the living things there shaped how I perceived the world around me. I was a baby crawling on the soft grass, a child running barefoot on the damp leaves of the maple tree and picking those bittersweet grapes on the vines. Those times held some of my richest memories. I can even remember the distinct sound of the winter wren that sang on the very top of the cedar tree outside my bedroom window. This is the place that I would picture when I closed my eyes to fall asleep after I left home in search of the unknown.
On the way back from the hospital after my fall from Sundance, I stared out the window at the lush green forest blurring by. Everything looked different, the forest more alive than ever. The edges of the cedar trees’ leaves glistened, their branching pattern mimicked the branches of the streams and rivers I had grown up around. I noticed a doe grazing in a field next to the road. A red-tailed hawk perched on top of a tree just before it swooped down in front of our truck. I was more aware of my surroundings than ever before. Every detail and disturbance jumped out at me like an explosion from a firecracker: crisp, clear, and full of wonder. Had those animals always been there and I was just noticing them for the first time? My new awareness felt somehow linked to the mysterious place I’d gone to after my fall.
Sitting in that old rusty Chevy pulling a horse trailer, I vowed that I would search for the unknown. I would discover why I was here on this earth and search for that light of comfort and peace through the long dark abyss. I felt trapped in my body, and my thoughts felt significant: I now knew so much more was possible beyond thought. I saw the world around me in a new light, where anything could happen.
It had taken nearly leaving this world to discover how much wonder it held.