CHAPTER TWO

A Warrior Loves His Craft

“Be master of mind rather than mastered by mind.”

—Zen Proverb

As a kind of Nepali send-off, our team had an epic, dramatic, terrifying, nearly disastrous exit from Hotel Tibet to Tribuhaven International Airport in Kathmandu. Just as we prepared to go to the airport, the Maoist rebels started one of their near-daily confrontations, paralyzing the city and its daily business. We were assured of our safety, as no one wanted to put tourists, the lifeblood of the national economy, at risk of being hurt or killed in the crossfire.

Al, Steve, Jim and I piled into the back of a twenty-person bus with our duffels secured to the roof, and we held our huge backpacks on our laps. Steve and I were in the two back seats. The bus crawled through the now-deserted streets and picked up other tourists. Gradually, the bus got full, then overfull, and then people rode on top and hung off the sides. Huge banners on all sides of the bus designated it as “Tourist Only,” but these became covered. Suddenly, we came around a corner to a mob of demonstrators completely blocking the road with rocks, logs and fires. The drivers in the cramped operator area—there must have been four people hanging over the wheel, so it was impossible to tell who was actually driving—quickly turned down a side street.

We glanced at each other and breathed a sigh of relief as we dodged the confrontation. The bus picked up speed and we seemed to be well on our way, but when we turned a corner, my heart nearly stopped with horror. The street was completely filled with a mob of angry, screaming demonstrators. A feeling of pure terror engulfed me as I realized there was no escape for the bus or from the bus. It was so overcrowded by now that we were wedged in and intertwined with arms, legs and pack straps. I met Steve’s eyes and said, “If things get ugly, we’re going to have to break windows and pull each other out.” Steve resolutely agreed.

A hundred or so rebels, dressed in rags, hair greasy, faces filthy and contorted by their angry chants, surrounded and stopped the bus. Many swung bamboo canes over their heads, ready to smash anyone in their way. Several of the mob hurtled into the cab and threw the driver to the ground. The last I saw of him, he was on his knees with his hands together, his voice shrill, pleading for his life. The demonstrators pulled themselves up to the bus windows, taking stock of the passengers. As someone began to let the air out of the tires, one of the passengers jumped into the driver’s seat.

Just one thrown rock or some loud noise might well have sparked a volcano of violence, turning us into stains on the road. There would have been no escape if someone firebombed us or sprayed us with machine gun fire. We were a CNN lead story in the making. However, in the ensuing madness, the new driver just gunned the diesel engine; people dove out of the way, and the bus churned itself up the hill. Before we knew it, we were at the airport. One minute, we were praying for our lives; the next minute, we were sitting in front of the terminal. We all sat there for a moment of numbed silence. Then the rush began and we tumbled out of that bus as fast as we could.

Alas, a flight out was not to be. While we encountered the Maoists, our flights had left. After a two-hour wait, we caught another bus back to the now business-as-usual, no harm-no-foul city streets of Kathmandu, and, grateful to be alive, checked back into the Hotel Tibet. We headed straight for the bar.

“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” —His Excellency the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

6 June 2007 Warwick, Rhode Island 60 feet elevation.

I couldn’t wait to get back to my chiropractic office and start adjusting people. Turning the power on, as chiropractors call it. Al and I flew from Kathmandu to Thailand to Hong Kong to Los Angeles to New York City to Warwick, Rhode Island, crossed the International Date Line and dealt with a twelve-hour time difference over forty-eight hours, all the while dozing and watching eight movies. When we landed, each of us wrestled three huge duffel bags and a full backpack through customs.

Back in Rhode Island, my friend Dana Millar picked us up at the airport and we cajoled the poor suffering Big Al back to my house. Big Al planned to stay in Rhode Island a couple of days on the way back to Canada for good reason: he had a case of “Kathmandu colic,” otherwise known as “the trots.” After the pure guts of summiting Everest on May 19, Al had limped for three days down valley on an injured knee to get to Lukla before flying to Kathmandu. He was fine until he caught a nasty gastrointestinal bug at a hotel buffet; it just leveled him. He alternatingly slept and ran to the bathroom, while setting a new world record for toilet paper use by one bottom. He became so emaciated by the time he got to his girlfriend’s home in Toronto that she didn’t recognize him. He had morphed into “the Everest climber formerly known as Big Al.”

“No defeat is made up entirely of defeat, since the world it opens is a place formerly unsuspected.” —William Carlos Williams

I took a day to do laundry, then got back to work and my regular life. I decided to take a slight break from training for two or three weeks to rest and hang with Kurt. At this point in my life, I had been divorced for seven years, did not have a girlfriend, and hadn’t dated anybody in months. The weather was warm and humid and Rhode Island looked like the lushest of rain forests, especially when I hadn’t seen it since the gray days of March.

After only a week, ADHD kicked in and I began serious planning for Everest 2008. My desire to give Everest my best effort was becoming stronger and stronger. The first task was to organize my training: more emphasis on functional training as well as more scientific cardiovascular work. I had always resisted heart rate monitor-assisted training as being too analytical. A heart rate monitor is made up of a chest strap and a watch, which the athlete programs to beep if he or she is in the target range of cardio effort.

A heart rate monitor is the only way to determine whether your training is progressing adequately. It can also give clues if you are over-training.

As a minimally talented high school and college runner, I was a tad wimpy about getting my heart rate up because of the ensuing pain involved. I found I was drawn to the slower, more cerebral, and less painful pace of marathons. As marathons turned to triathlons, then weight training, and then all of the above to train for the mountains, I became more comfortable with pain. I should clarify pain as the illusion of pain, because pain is relative. While grinding up a long hill on my road bike, I learned to ask myself, Am I in pain? And the answer invariably would be, No, it’s discomfort. It may have been strong discomfort, but it was simply discomfort.

What I had dismissed as too left-brain for me became part of my new commitment. After two days at home, I purchased a heart rate monitor and started getting the hang of it. I even embarrassed Kurt when his buddies saw me out chopping wood in shorts, sandals and a monitor.

“Let no one outwork me today.” —Dr. Tim Warren

In 2007, I thought I’d worked hard in training, but for 2008 I vowed a massive increase. In 2007, my former girlfriend Kathy, a retired competitive bodybuilder, had been my quasi-trainer. We did hard workouts, but the rests between sets were more suited to bodybuilding than an Everest climb. I did a lot of cardio work, but evidently not enough. It didn’t help that during the last two months before leaving for the Himalayas, I was distracted and pulled in different directions by business issues.

The training felt intense in 2007, but I realized seven thousand miles away that it was not nearly intense enough. For 2008, I decided to train at Northeast Sports Training in Warwick, Rhode Island. The gym was only a mile from my office, but most importantly, Mike and his bevy of trainers had the goods.

Mike assigned me to Jaime Gamache, a trainer in his early thirties with tattooed quotes from Milton (“abashed, the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is”) on bulging biceps, a slightly insane smile, and obligatory sadistic tendencies.

I committed to two workouts a week from July 1, 2007 until I stepped on the plane March 23, 2008. Jaime put me through a “pain-fest”—no rest, constant abuse of multiple body parts, and sport-specific functional training. I usually showed up ninety minutes early and got on the step-mill, which the club leased for me. I put medicine balls in my backpack and soon became drenched in sweat as I humped uphill without rest. Then I got down to business, flipping the six-hundred-pound truck tire four to eight reps, then super-setting—jumping in and out of the three-foot-thick tire without breaking my neck—followed by flipping the two-hundred-pound truck wheel ten times, and plyometric box-jumping while holding the forty-five-pound bar in outstretched arms, always doing mass quantities of different exercises to confuse the body. I became known as the “old guy” who worked out “like a madman.” I developed a modicum of fame among the high school, college and professional athletes who frequented the house of pain.

Once, doing pushups on differently sized medicine balls, my pectoral muscles gave out and I collapsed chest first onto the hard rubber of an eight-pound ball, cracking my ribcage like a lobster shell. For several weeks, Jaime stayed away from upper-body work, but managed to find different forms of torture. The whole point was to prepare body and mind for the extreme rigors of climbing asymmetrical ice formations in the unforgiving environment of Everest while utterly exhausted. It was equally important to train my brain for pain, for the mental stress of hours and hours of misery without respite.

I paid Jaime good money for the mountaineering equivalent of water-boarding, but it was perfect for where I was going. I focused on forearm strength to hoist myself up a fixed rope; back and biceps to climb vertical ice or rappel off cliffs; hip flexors, glutes, quads and calves to propel myself uphill explosively through the icefall. Under Jaime’s watchful eye, I punished my body by working harder and longer than I ever thought possible. My constant mental companions were affirmations such as “pain is weakness leaving the body” and “the purpose of training is to make me hard to kill.” I red-lined my body and mind for the next nine months.

Jaime pushed me into severe oxygen debt to increase my body’s ability to keep climbing for hour after painful hour in the oxygen-starved atmosphere of the world’s biggest bump in the earth.

Afterward, I somehow drove back to the office, although I felt seriously dizzy and couldn’t grip the steering wheel with my wasted jellyfish arms. I would shower, then collapse on an adjusting table for a catnap before I saw afternoon patients. The ever-driving Jaime claimed, “It’s not really a workout unless you have to squirt the shampoo on the shower floor and rub your head in it because you don’t have the strength to pick up your arms.” I also ran, biked and hiked with gradually increasing poundage of dog food or cement bags inside a backpack.

When the snow started flying, I made regular forays to New Hampshire to ice climb with my longtime climbing and craziness partner, Rob Scott. Rob and I have had many great adventures together: twice we slogged for weeks up Denali in Alaska, the highest point in North America, where we finally summited arm-in-arm in June 2004. Rob, however, does more jonesin’ for a fifty-foot frozen waterfall. He is the climbing equivalent of Monet to my Jackson Pollock. I prefer the long, slogging grind of an expedition, the travel to exotic lands, and the ever-present objective of bagging one of the world’s great peaks. Rob, the Impressionist, prefers the more precise, yet more imaginative climbing demanded by picking his way up a strange course of vertical ice.

“Cold and exhaustion are mere incidentals on the road to victory.” —Rene Desmaison

The physical was only one of three equally critical parts of preparation and support for the mission. The second is financial; the third, emotional. The physical I have to do myself. I had to rely on others for the other two.

Let me tell you about the financial commitment needed to climb Everest:

•International Mountain Guides — my share of the infrastructure of the climb: $30,500

•Phinjo, my Sherpa climbing mate: $6,000

•Everest climbing permit from the Kingdom of Nepal: $10,000

•Round-trip airline ticket from Rhode Island to Nepal: $1,900

Total: almost $50,000—just to get yourself to the starting line. (Note: climbers who hire a professional guide or service could spend much more, upwards of $100,000.) My total did not include my training costs or the biggest ticket item: lost income while not working for seventy days.

I had already spent $6,000 on the specialized climbing gear I’ve gradually accumulated over the years. I made two notable upgrades this year: a new down suit and new boots. A suit takes a beating above Camp One—you literally live in it, eating, sleeping and, of course, climbing in the brutal weather conditions above 21,000 feet. I decided on a Feathered Friends one-piece for this year. The keys to a good climbing suit are warmth and functionality, and this one, at $1,000, fit the bill perfectly. It didn’t hurt that it’s in the same cool hue of yellow as my Wild Things summit backpack.

The boots ($750) are the same as last year’s Italian-made Millet Everest, triple-layer with high-tech but super-light features that make them look like oversized Frankenstein shoes. Last year’s were just too damn big, causing me to repeatedly drive my crampons into one or the other boot, and leading to potentially life-threatening lurching stumbles, not to mention looking like a drunken Yankees fan. I climbed Mt. Washington in my new correctly-sized boots several times that winter and never spiked myself again, even when dangling from a rope on a vertical frozen waterfall or descending in waist-deep snow.

A couple of smaller but necessary new items: a new headlamp ($80) was imperative. Without light on the greatly exposed Southeast Ridge, ascending or descending is just plain foolhardy. Your carcass could easily freeze into a lump of ice to join the other permanent residents of the upper slopes. I still had my triple-layer oversized OR mitts ($200) for the deep cold, but needed a snug-fitting pair of ice-climbing gloves for dexterity and warmth. A pair of Black Diamond ice-climbing gloves ($95) was best for the serious climbing in the icefall to the Lhotse Face and to the summit. If I found myself in the sun (a rare occurrence) and warm, I’d switch to light ice-climbing gloves to handle ropes and carabiners while keeping the burning sunlight—magnified in the thin air—from scorching my digits. And my “most valuable player” of gear—my Patagonia R-1 hoodie, which I knew I’d wear nearly twenty-four-seven. It’s high-tech underwear that wicks any stray moisture but is always warm; it even has a hoodie with offset zipper to keep cold metal off the face; a steal at $150. “There is no bad weather, only bad gear,” I often say.

I intended to give my hoodie to Phinjo, along with a stuffed duffel of other equipment at the end of the climb, just before the forty-mile walk from Base Camp to the plane home. He will need it more than I will, as I have firmly decided that, win or lose, summit or not, this will be my last Everest climb. Phinjo, on the other hand, will climb as long as he can because this is his job and, at thirty-eight, he has a few more years.

Incidentally, the oldest climbing Sherpa on our squad was Dawa; though still tough as nails, he was hanging up the crampons at age forty-nine to open a teahouse in his home town of Phortse. It must be difficult for the studly Sherpas who accompany Westerners on their climbs in the Himalaya to retire. First of all, they make great rupee. Secondly, they are very proud men. Even though they play Russian roulette with their lives by the sheer numbers game of multiple trips through the icefall, up the Lhotse Face, and to the summit, make no mistake, they want another summit. It’s for the personal satisfaction, or juice, as well as being a boon for the pocketbook.

As I write these words, Phinjo has summited Mt. Everest five times, but he is not even close to Danuru’s ten—the most from IMG’s group—and will never reach the all-time twenty and counting by the great Apa Sherpa. Ang Jangbu, the CEO of Sherpa activity on our climb, told me that he didn’t summit Everest, for various reasons, until his thirteenth try, so it is never a given—even for super-strong Sherpas.

Back to the question of raising money. How do I raise well over $50,000 for the privilege of putting myself in the most challenging environment known to man? If it’s anything like last year, I’ve already learned how. For 2007, I had relished the challenge of approaching businesses and corporations for sponsorship or donations. How cool is that, I explained, your widget showcased on the top of the world by having some knucklehead (me) spend seventy days in god-forsaken conditions, risking death even, just to do it? My thirty-second elevator speech marketing message to everyone in business who had a pulse was roughly translated to “I am your knucklehead.” And what do you know? It worked.

I engaged two big corporate sponsors, Verizon and Pro-Solutions for Chiropractic, and multitudes of smaller companies. I strove to give them back double what they paid for in public relations and visibility. I mentioned them in the many presentations I did, as well as in all interviews for TV, radio and newspapers. I wore Verizon and Pro-Solutions crests on my fleece jacket for six months before leaving, everywhere I went and in everything I did.

I was honored that friends, colleagues in chiropractic, and especially my patients were extremely generous. We offered various sponsorship opportunities, from a $15 message on a lightweight sheet that would stay in my pack to the summit, to “adopting” a base camp yak for $250.

Upon returning home in 2007 from my failed attempt and tallying up the damage, we were able to give a $15,000 donation to A Wish Come True Foundation and pay for the majority of the climbing costs incurred.

Based on that success, I naively thought that in 2008 I could raise $50,000 for A Wish Come True and pay off my $50,000 climbing nut. After all, wouldn’t a second try on the world’s toughest playground warrant increased interest from advertisers and marketers wishing to place product or service at the world’s highest point? Of course, I was thinking, absolutely yes. But in reality, the most repeated response from previous sponsors, directly or indirectly, was, “Why didn’t you summit last time?”

I was still the “knucklehead with a big dream,” but somehow I was less attractive to investors. Pro-Adjuster (the Chiropractic technique that I use) didn’t respond in 2008, although Verizon, to its credit, was still on board, albeit for a lesser amount. My friends, colleagues and patients remained wonderfully generous.

As the weeks and months clicked off from summer to fall, 2007, I ramped up the public relations barrage, hoping to bring more dollar value to the endeavor. I tried to talk Dan Barbarisi, a Providence Journal reporter, into another attempt at a winter climb on Mt. Washington with me. Dan usually writes about politics (a sport in its own right in Rhode Island, home of “lobstas and mobstas”). He had attempted the climb in 2007 with me, but he hadn’t made the summit due to cold weather and lack of fitness. He wanted no part of another climb, and I didn’t blame him.

I did radio shows, talk shows, TV interviews, blogs, anything that could generate publicity for my climb and for A Wish Come True. Starting weekly in January, I produced a thirty-minute show once a week that schools across the country could phone into and use as a lesson plan. I created shows on the Sherpa culture, the climate, fitness and training for the climb, physiology of the body at high altitude, goal-setting, and the history of climbing Everest. The show was facilitated by the folks at the Telecom Pioneers, the non-profit wing of Verizon Communications. We ended up with thousands of kids across the country listening and participating each week. It was wonderfully satisfying for me to talk to the kids about Nepal and climbing. But it sparked little in the way of financial support.

Deadlines for payments approached. If I didn’t make the payments, I didn’t go—it was simple as that. Becoming more than frazzled with work in my office, workouts in the gym, and working the phones, I got a little panicky and hired a public relations firm to help me generate interest in the climb. All the company seemed to generate was income for itself. Lots of promises, no dough. Throw out the first puck for the Boston Bruins. Documentary on cable TV. Throw out the first pitch for the Pawtucket Red Sox. I went to Boston for one TV interview, in a limousine, no less. One and done. I went back to doing it myself, having spent money I needed for the climb.

By January 15, 2008, faced with the deadline for fifteen grand, I realized something had to give. I had to quit all the hours on the phone. No more butting my head against the wall hustling for dollars. Let me concentrate on training and public relations and forget the fundraising. I also decided to second-mortgage my home and just pay the freight.

“Life is expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun.” —Unknown

I always received strong emotional support for my ventures, and now preparing for 2008, it was just the same. Co-workers in the office, patients in my practice, and close friends and relatives have always wished me well and been very generous. But there were a few close to me who were superstars, the backbone of my emotional support team, and I have to tell you about them. My chiropractic practice is always under the watchful mother-hen eyes of Sharon and Joanne, my co-workers for many years. During the months before 2008, they not only gave me their great energy to help work out my crazy schedule, they also worked to raise money for A Wish Come True. They didn’t blink when, after the years-long planning for the 2007 Everest expedition, I promptly laid the egg of a return attempt for the 2008 climbing season. Now that’s support.

How, you may ask, could I afford to take two months out of a busy practice and just go “play?” That’s another aspect of my life that demanded support. As I did in 2007, for 2008 I hired a young chiropractor to take care of patients while I was gone. Dr. Matt Mendillo was a friendly, competent and ethical chiropractor whom I groomed to have in the practice. He can get a bit long-winded with patients, however, so the girls and I made a plan: as soon as he got a little behind, one of the ladies would sound a chime to alert him. We jokingly had him shaking in his shoes over the sheer horror of this possibility, as if it would be a near-fatal lapse in his judgment. Giving this young chiropractor some invaluable real-world experience and the ability to get a good paycheck before he opened his own practice was a bonus for him. It was also emotional support for me.

I’ve saved my two biggest emotional supporters for last. In late July 2007, while making a bank deposit, I saw a stunningly beautiful, long-legged woman with dark brunette hair in a fashionable blue summer dress. As I unabashedly stared, I realized I knew her. She was Rose Yehle, and I had heard that she had started a business, Sewing Creations by Rose. I said hello and congratulations on her business. She stopped and chatted, answering my queries about her new office and business. I had not been aware she was so friendly and sweet. Great smile and eye contact. Wowser! Did I mention she was knock-down, drag-out gorgeous?

We went out on a date on August 4, 2007, and have been inseparable ever since. She had to put up with a relationship with a guy who loved her very much and was devoted to her totally, but carried the added baggage of unswerving focus on a mission: summit Everest with a safe return. She had to hear my weekly tales of how painful my workouts were, and my impending two-and-a-half-month fandango, all of which she had no play in. She endured this process cheerfully and accepted that Everest was the thing I had to do, and do to the best of my ability.

My other emotional supporter was my teenage son, Kurt. We took his first nerve-wracked, tentative driving lessons together just before I boarded the plane for Everest in March 2008. While still actively preparing and training, I tried to spend as much time with him as possible.

In late February, Kurt and I took off for a weekend in New Hampshire and stayed at The Nereledge Inn in North Conway, where owners Steve and Laura have taken amazing care of me on multiple climbing and training sojourns. I rented two snowmobiles for the two of us to blast around on. We did our usual North Conway routine of penny candy at Zeb’s Country Store and breakfast of venison sausages at Gunther’s. We hung out, laughed and spent precious time together, realizing that all too soon the painful separation would begin. Kurt was shocked that we were in North Conway in winter and I was not climbing anything.

When I was preparing to leave for Everest in 2007, my little boy was surprisingly fine with me risking my life in a far-off third-world country, saying goodbye with a simple, unemotional admonition that was classic Kurt: “Dad, don’t die.” I was unprepared in 2008 when, on our last night together, he completely broke down and cried in my arms, saying that he loved me. Having read of the misery inflicted on families in Into Thin Air, the classic Everest disaster story by Jon Krakauer, Kurt was more aware of the risks to my life than he was in 2007, and I didn’t have the larger-than-life Al with me as a teammate. He has never asked me to stop climbing or to skip an expedition; he innately knows that I just have to go. My mission, my purpose, my destiny, my raison d’etre.

“The harder you look, the harder it is to surrender.” —Vince Lombardi

Time marched toward departure and I crossed myriad tasks off multiple lists. I have often observed that when the mission is the right one, the universe conspires to see it through. Conversely, when striving for a goal is a constant struggle, I now take a long, hard look inward to make sure I am on the right path.

My new training regimen had gone well. On one solo foray up Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, I cruised to the summit in less than three hours and descended in one. The windchill was thirty degrees below zero. Washington was a paltry 6,288 feet in elevation, but had some of the world’s worst weather thanks to three converging weather fronts that conspired to rip climbers off the hill and thrash their sorry butts. On average, two people per year die on Mt. Washington’s icy wind-scoured flanks.

From my lifetime of training for various endurance sports since the age of twelve, and despite a prodigious amount of weight training, including bench pressing 265 pounds—a hundred pounds more than my body weight, I’ll have you know—I have developed a very lean, some might say skinny, physique. I therefore needed to gain some weight over the year before returning to Everest. I committed to a regime of nutritional habits designed to repair tissue injury resulting from intense training and to add some badly needed bulk to the muscles. Just existing at high altitude causes the body to consume itself, a kind of death-zone cannibalism.

The plan involved five or six meals a day with the definition of a meal being some protein and carbohydrate in a one-to-one ratio. I drank a ton of water and ate three main meals, then supplemented at the office or at home with a protein shake containing fruit, or a good-quality protein bar, a can of tuna in water, or low-fat cottage cheese. My protein in my main meals involved salmon for the omega-3 fatty acids, and poultry, meat, and sushi at least twice a week. I never went more than an hour after any workout without ingesting protein in order to help heal the tissue damage associated with heavy training. My roomie at Palmer College of Chiropractic in the 1980s was Dr. Jay Manning, an expert in diagnosing and treating nutritional deficiencies using a technique called applied kinesiology. He checked and re-checked me and donated all the supplements I would need for training, and stocked me up with vital nutrients for the ten weeks on the climb.

My nutritional plan worked. When I got on the plane at Green Airport in Warwick, RI, on March 23, 2008, I was a pumped and buff 173 pounds with less than nine percent body fat. However, when I returned to the same airport and kissed the ground and Rose in front of several television cameras in June, I was an embarrassingly emaciated 150 pencil-necked pounds without the strength to climb anything higher than the ramp to get into Rose’s kitchen. The bathroom scale hadn’t read that weight since I finished one of my marathons, badly dehydrated, while still in my teens. I can only imagine what I would have been like if I had not been as obsessive about weight training and nutrition.

As time grew short, Rose and I spent as much time as we could together. Her maddeningly frenetic time of year as a wedding and prom gown fashionista was nearly the same period I was in Asia: March to June. Her business was so busy then that she traditionally would work until 1 or 2 AM, sleep until 5 AM, go for a power walk, then see clients and sew all day, sometimes seven days per week.

By my last day of work, Friday, March 22, 2008, Sharon and Joanne had Dr. Matt and the office well under control. My house was put to bed; my best buddy Dana was paying my bills; Palmer, my obsessive-compulsive golden retriever, was comfortable in his home-away-from-home with the Culton family; Rose ramped up for her crazy time; so there was just one thing to do: party.

I hoped to have a private area at Ted’s Montana Grill to converse with friends and family and eat bison steaks, but that’s not what happened. It was loud and noisy and I didn’t have much time to talk to buds like Bizil and Jay, whom I didn’t get to see much. I felt badly that I didn’t have any quiet time with Kurt. Also, in the back of my mind was the phone call that Dana’s eleven-year-old son Cameron had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes that day and would need insulin injections for the rest of his life. After dinner and goodbyes, the emotional parting as I dropped off Kurt, and a cocktail with Rob and Jenny at Main Street Coffee, I left for home with Rose.

As I held a sleeping Rose, I saw how her long, black hair accentuated her beautiful face perfectly on the white pillowcase. I smoothed her hair for the thousandth time and wondered what kind of extreme insanity I possessed that compelled me to leave her, leave Kurt and leave my work, travel around the world and maybe even get myself killed in the process. Am I nuts or what? These thoughts of dread and excitement made for a sleepless night, until 5 AM, when Rose drove me to the airport.

“Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible: not to have run away.” —Dag Hammarskjold