These Days

On illness and joy

On August 16 I woke up a few hours before dawn on a half-deflated sleeping pad. As I rolled over from my sore arm and hip, out in the pitch blackness came the sound of a zipper, shuffling nylon, and the footsteps of my hiking companion. With a heave of willpower I did the same, stepping out of my tent into the cold night. A bright light appeared and swung my way, and my companion and I set off together down the faint, narrow path between the blueberry bushes and around the other tents of our sleeping coworkers, our headlamps bobbing like sprites.

The path led around the southeast shore of Williams Lake, which sat nestled in a high, craggy mountain cirque that rose above us in a great black backdrop beneath the brilliant stars. The two of us and our other comrades on the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest trail crew had made the ten-mile hike up to the lake the day before, cutting any logs blocking the trail along the way with chainsaws, two-person crosscut saws, and axes. Now it was time to go home, but before we left, my companion and I decided to sneak in a sunrise hike. Somewhere high above us in that black cirque headwall sat another group of alpine lakes at a high mountain pass, and we had heard them called the loveliest corner of our entire ranger district, practically the heart of Washington’s spectacular Alpine Lakes Wilderness. We plucked quick breakfast from the drenched huckleberry bushes along the trail around the lake, and eventually came to a small, barely-noticed cairn at the edge of an imposing scree field rising into the darkness. We scrambled over car-sized boulders, searching for more guiding cairns with our headlamp beams, and briefly got lost when the way led into impenetrable trees before emerging onto a wide, rocky flat patchy with alpine grasses and heather. The faint light of predawn glowed above the mountain crest. We spotted a hill—really a massive dome of granite, with a small stand of mountain hemlocks—and climbed it for a view of the beautiful, inky lakes, as still as glass. A rosy light ignited the snow on a distant summit and began to spread.

As the sky turned fiery colors and illuminated the landscape of pink snowy peaks, golden alpine meadows, and deep evergreen forest racing down the valley below us, I recognized a familiar feeling. My job leading a backcountry trail crew could be as physically arduous and unspectacularly paid as nearly any other job I could think of, but over the years, and more times than I could count, it had delivered me to places like this which I would remember for the rest of my life. It was the only job I hoped I would ever need—almost a certain impossibility, but worth a shot. I would sound corny trying to relate all the times I’d felt this way on the clock, so I will leave it there. We sat on the granite slab watching new colors spread across the sky, listening to the profound silence.

Soon we made our way back down the scree field, urged on by the eeps of pikas, and met our crewmates just as they were beginning to break camp. Stoke ran high that morning. Since we’d managed to cut every log we found in the trail the day before, the work hiking back would be light and quick. Then, once we made it back, I had a plane to catch. My family was having its first post-pandemic reunion back on the east coast. But then several things happened. Temperatures crept into the 90s early that day as part of western Washington’s worst heatwave of the summer. I foolishly took no water on our sunrise scramble, and I skipped a real breakfast. Ten miles later I could hardly speak or stand with heat exhaustion. Back in town I showered, took a few bites of real food, and within twenty minutes was on my way to Sea-Tac. Dizzy and weak, I trudged through TSA, the long airport corridors, and the crowded boarding ramp and plane aisle—the only one in view at any given point wearing a mask. I landed in Vermont in the morning, slept all day, and then drove to the reunion in Massachusetts the next, where my brothers, parents and I had rented a little cabin together. We met for dinner at my aunt’s house that night; I didn’t drink much because I still felt weak. When I woke up early on the morning of August 19, my leg muscles were in excruciating pain like nothing I’d ever experienced. That was my only symptom. Given how weak I’d felt since hiking out, I could only come up with one likely culprit, an overexertion syndrome called rhabdomyolysis. I got dressed and drove to the nearest urgent care, which directed me to the nearest emergency room.

A nurse there hooked me up to an IV and administered a rapid COVID test as a formality, which came back negative. The doctor arrived, said it looked like rhabdo, then explained the treatment they would give if my blood tests confirmed it. Maybe as another formality, the swab they took was used for a PCR COVID test too. A long while later the doctor returned looking sheepish. “Well, it’s COVID after all.” With the family reunion over for me, I went back to my parent’s house to isolate in a spare bedroom and recover. The muscle soreness cleared up in couple of days. A sore throat and an awful inability to keep down food came on and lasted for a few more. After that, the illness was mild. A week passed, then two. Tests turned negative. I flew back to Washington feeling a little weak, though it was hard to distinguish from jetlag, and finally collapsed onto my messy bed at 2 in the morning Pacific time. I rose to get dressed late the next morning and picked some old laundry off of my chair. Doing so made me so tired and dizzy that I had to lay back down. A week passed, then two, three, four.

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On January 11 I woke up around noon in a warm bed, with a faint, wintry breeze lapping at my cheek from the open window. It’s wasteful with the heat on, I know, but the combination helps keep down the pain in my legs. Don’t know why. For breakfast, as always, was Bob’s Red Mill Muesli with a cup of off-season blueberries from Peru. The first is whole-grain and low-histamine, to keep calm my immune system, and the blueberries’ antioxidants and resveratrol supposedly help my vascular system, though the evidence is mixed. They’re mainly just my favorite. Coffee sadly isn’t good for me anymore—too high-histamine, vasoconstrictive, basically identical reasons. All the same, I have a big mug of it every day too. It’s not like anything has made much of a difference.

I was never a morning person until I began working in the forest, and then it became like a drug, seeing the light and color rise slowly out of the vanquished night. Yet I’ve learned to stop beating myself up for this new sleep schedule, which surely sounds lazy or depressed but is really a kind of work in itself. I have a hard time falling asleep now, for several reasons, but my injured nervous system still needs a full night’s sleep. These days, living with family until I can get back on my feet, I’m aware of my ridiculous luck to be able to take the steps I need to recover, so I do. “Sleep like a god damned champion,” said one stranger on Reddit. I’ve taken most of his advice to heart these last four months. He had it way worse than I do now, and recovered in about three years. As far as reliable medical advice for treating long COVID, you could do a lot worse—at most doctor’s offices, for example. There had been a period early on, around September, where I could barely sleep at all; I’d lay there on the second or third all-nighter in a row and beg like I never have in my life for either sleep or death. Thankfully those days feel like a long time ago. Now, I say a quiet prayer when I wake up rested and not in pain. I clutch the comforter, delighting in the gentle texture. I find the cool spots in the sheets with my bare legs, splaying out, taking long strides.

This time of year there’s not much time left after breakfast before sunset, so after a couple hours reading news, twitter and other messages I got dressed and drove to the waterfront. There’s a small battery park close to where I grew up with a scenic, streetlamp-lined path along the seawall at the mouth of a wide, marshy tidal creek. From one side, the park overlooks the marsh, the boat channel, and the jetty reaching out from the opposite bank, where the land sweeps away in a long, stout New England beach. From the other it views a small, secure harbor, the backside of the nearby city’s blinking, smokestacked skyline, and a rocky headland with a picturesque, nearly archetypal white lighthouse. There’s parallel parking all along the walkway, and it’s not the kind of attraction where the parking ever gets full. When I arrived back east from the Cascades, this was the first place I visited. Now it’s probably my most consistent daily routine.

Early in my recovery, when there was not much to do but sit in bed or take a drive, the sunsets here, facing west over the water, were an accessible source of daily splendor. Eventually I could take short walks, but by that time the purpose of my visits had changed. Now I was looking for birds. The road to the park crossed the tidal river, then turned seaward on the eastern bank. Tide was high, and the islands of golden marsh grass swayed in both the breeze and the current. Over so many daily visits, I’ve become familiar with the marsh’s resident birds—herons, egrets, kingfishers, mallards, and black ducks, all present here year-round, but also the visitors. Brants arrived in October or early November from the archipelagos of the Canadian arctic. They resemble a small, cubist Canada goose, and they flock reliably in the little cove between the park’s headland beach and the jetty, cooing with their strange accent. Striking black-and-white buffleheads abound in great numbers from the boreal forest, and they swim and dive pretty much anywhere they please, seemingly accepted by whatever larger waterfowl they meet. As the road and river make a sweeping turn towards the sea, a minor raft of marshgrass called Wigeon Island has become home to about a dozen striking American wigeons. They’ve been there every day since I first noticed them late last month. (I’m the one who came up with Wigeon Island.)

On one of my most memorable days here, I went to admire the wigeons only for them to take off in a hurry as soon as I arrived. There was some commotion among the seagulls circling above, and when I looked up I saw that one of them was a bald eagle. On another I walked out to the rocky shore of the headland beach and watched two loons paddling in the channel with their heads held high. They were each wearing their conservative winter plumage of grey and white, but loons are one of my favorites anytime of year, and I watched them as joyously as I had on summer mornings in the White Mountains, listening to their cries echo over misty lakes. Then I noticed something strange: their beaks were different. A look at the Merlin app told me I was watching both a common loon and a new, less-common lifer: a red-throated loon from the Arctic Ocean. Watching them dive as the sun went down, my sense of the marsh expanded and raced north, silently and very fast.

I glanced at the channel out my passenger window, then slowed as I pulled over on the side of the path. I stepped out with my binoculars into an icy wind. The low, grey sky was reflected almost perfectly by the ocean except in the foamy, green shallows along the rocks, where pairs of mallards bobbed and paddled around pushy seagulls in the waves. There were days early on, fresh off my spectacular last hitch in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, when I was terrified of having to live this way. What a small life, I thought. It took time before I could see that my days had always been and would always be the same size, filled with exactly as much life. The same goes for the experience of joy. I’m fortunate to love birds, and that they bring me so much necessary joy. And I was outrageously fortunate that day, because for the first time, for no real reason, I decided to watch closely the ordinary flock of mallards. Down among them like a needle in a haystack bobbed a rare wood duck. I’d been hoping to see one for years.

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Thanks for reading. With all of this time on my hands, my goal is to publish here more frequently—a little column about the outdoors, my recovery, and some thoughts on ecological issues I’ve had on my mind for a long time. Please consider subscribing for free and reach out anytime with comments or questions.