Note: This post diverges from my “From the Trunk” theme of stories and lessons from my childhood and young adulthood. But it’s one I want to record on the anniversary of this date. I wrote this essay in July 2021, about a month after my Dad died.
On the last day I ever saw my dad, I crashed my bike in the desert. The chainring bit into my leg as I went down, slicing a jagged cut below my left calf. Blood trickled down my leg, staining a new sock that was already streaked with red dust.
I’d set out in predawn darkness on a hot Utah morning while my family slept. It was “the first of many” summer vacations for my family after years of only gathering occasionally for holidays. Sisters, husbands, nieces, nephews, and parents all stuffed into a rental home in St. George, Utah. My husband Beat, recovering from recent surgery, was the only one in my immediate family to remain at home. For several days we cooked, swam, chatted on the back porch, and ventured out sparingly in the triple-digit heat. On the final day of the trip, an unremarkable Tuesday, a friend invited me on a morning tour of ancient petroglyphs. I decided to squeeze the bike adventure in before everyone scattered.
Following a rough power line access road along the Arizona border, we pedaled toward the nuclear orange glow of the rising sun. While attempting to simultaneously brake and take a photo with my phone, I caught an edge on my narrow gravel tires and toppled sideways. It was the kind of crash that seemed to happen in slow motion. I watched the rocky ground close in on me like a curtain as I braced for the inevitable pain. The hit felt jarring, so getting away with a cut on one leg and several bruises seemed like a stroke of good luck. It was just over a week earlier when my husband, Beat, badly broke his clavicle and several ribs in a similarly superficial bike crash.
I felt slight unease about joining my family since I abandoned Beat to his upright recliner while he was still in the throes of recovery. But I also felt as though I had abandoned my family during our short time together for the selfish purpose of riding bikes. Guilt followed me, but the horizon beckoned. Daytime heat cranked on full power as my friend and I rode up to the empty trailhead and parked our bikes. We hiked through the sand toward a jumble of car-sized boulders scattered below Little Black Mountain. Scratched into the rocks were hundreds of images spread across thousands of years. With vague but enduring graffiti, ancient travelers commemorated their unknowable lives. As we walked, my friend pointed out the cut on my leg.
“That’s from that dumb crash back there,” I confirmed. I’d tried to wipe away the blood with a wipe, but the smear only made it look worse. “It’s not that bad, just the cost of being me.”
My limbs are riddled with scars — the soft and pink remnants of bike crashes, trail-running stumbles, silly missteps on the street. Sometimes while sitting cross-legged on the carpet, I run my fingers across my scars and remember the moment they became a part of me.
“The chainring cut when I crashed out of Frog Hollow and quit mountain bike racing forever but not really.” That scar on my right leg looks like a shark bite.
“That weird faceplant on Sanitas four years ago.” That scar covers most of my left knee cap and still hurts.
“That time I ripped my thumb open at church camp.” It was nearly 30 years ago, but the scar remains.
Clumsiness, sadly, has become one of my defining personality traits — an unwanted trait of course — but nonetheless an integral part of who I am. I’m an intrepid soul in an awkward body, navigating this life as best as I can. Scars are the price I pay to move through the world.
As my friend and I made out way back to the bikes, I thought about Beat back at home in Colorado in pain. Just days earlier, he called out in the night because he couldn’t sit up in bed. He needed help dressing and bathing. Only the surgery gave him enough mobility to help me feel better about traveling 12 hours away from home.
His surgical incision was a major scar from almost nothing at all — a split second of inattention while riding over a rut in the road less than 200 meters from our house. I was riding behind Beat when he crashed. I watched his legs flip into the air and spin beside a cart-wheeling bike in a cloud of dust. It was one of the most horrifying sights I’d witnessed because it looked as though he’d landed on his head. When I reached him, he was already sitting up, conscious but in pain. I drove him to the hospital while he moaned at every curve in the road. I watched his face darken when the nurse showed him the X-Ray. The clearly splintered bone mean there was no way he’d be able to run his first post-pandemic race, the one he had been training to run for months. Broken collarbones are a part of life, as common an occurrence as the many stumbles that produced my scars. But that doesn’t make them hurt any less.
I probably shouldn’t have left my moderately disabled husband at home alone just to participate in a family vacation, but this one seemed important. The pandemic threw its universal wrench in Thanksgiving and Christmas, so we hadn’t gathered everyone together in quite some time. My sisters proposed renting a house in St. George for the first week of June, perhaps neglecting to acknowledge that by June, Southern Utah has become, as my friend said when she greeted me, “the hottest place on Earth.” It was 109 degrees when I arrived on a Saturday evening, one day late because I waited for Beat’s anesthesia daze to wear off before I hit the road. My parents, my two sisters, their husbands, and their combined seven children were just sitting down to barbecue dinner when I walked in the door.
The weekend was a blur of typical family togetherness — hours of conversation, preparing meals, placating the children, and hitting the town for family-friendly activities like visiting old-fashioned soda fountains and cookie shops. It was the first time in the 16-month pandemic that I hadn’t practiced extreme social distancing. The amount of hugging and unmasked time in public spaces threw my anxiety into confusion.
“What is the risk?” it asked. “Everything is a risk now, but if everything is risky, then nothing is out of bounds.” I reminded myself that the vaccine probably works, but as soon as I crammed into a crowded candy store, my anxiety screamed at me to run as though the place was on fire. I had been one of those people who convinced myself I was probably going to die of COVID eventually. It was an irrational fear, but I was the type of person to collect mundane ailments and scars. Something like extreme sensitivity to COVID would be just my luck.
The result of all of this togetherness and crowd anxiety meant this neurotic introvert needed a recharge. Every morning I was up well before sunrise to set out in the 85-degree darkness for a three-hour bike ride — climbing to a nearby pass on Sunday, riding along the red cliffs of Snow Canyon State Park on Monday. The morning air was almost cool as I descended a steep canyon beside Gunlock Reservoir. I relished this brief chill as it wafted off the creek. The sensation of cold is so thrilling and yet so underappreciated. I thought about the strangeness of summer, a sun-bleached season that seems to bring so many people joy, but only leaves me feeling confined. Every year I wish summer away, count the days until October, as though time was an inexhaustible commodity, only worthy of living when it’s comfortable and convenient.
That evening, my nieces and nephews wanted to use the backyard fire pit to roast marshmallows. It was the only day of the weekend that there were any clouds in the sky. As the sun set, a peach glow spread across the sky. I sat at the porch table adjacent to my Dad, sipping a large glass of ice water as we talked about mundane things — Beat’s recovery, my plans for a post-pandemic vacation to Europe, his plans to take the children camping in the Wasatch Mountains. He was wearing canvas shorts and a short-sleeved, collared white shirt. His blonde hair was neatly cropped, his chin freshly shaved, as it had been throughout my life. Even when we camped in the desert for days, Dad was always clean-shaven with combed hair. He often wore wire-rimmed glasses, but on this evening, for whatever reason, he didn’t. These are the memories I cling to now — how I saw my Dad every day, and also how I saw my Dad on the last night I ever saw him.
It was June 8, the morning I crashed. I washed with wet wipes in my car so I’d be presentable for family breakfast. But I was too late. It wasn’t that I was physically late — I arrived back at the rental home by 9 a.m., just as I’d promised. But by 9 a.m., the vacation was already over. My youngest sister and her family gathered up three grumpy children and were well on their way to California. My frazzled middle sister was trying to do the same with her four offspring so they could return to Salt Lake. Mom and Dad both seemed dazed as they swept the floor and cleaned the last of the dishes. I’d expected to have one more breakfast with them, but that never happened. Everyone was done. My heart sank because I had this sense that I should have stayed home that morning. It was selfish to squeeze in that third desert ride. The gash on my leg was only partial payment.
I helped my parents finish cleaning, gathered a few excess food items in my cooler, and stood on the scorched sidewalk as they finished packing up their Toyota Camry. I was already dreaming up plans for an evening ride after I finished the day’s work. I looked forward to my solo time in a town one hour north, in a hotel room I reserved to avoid missing work deadlines that afternoon. Beat was still doing fine at home, but that morning I was filled with guilt for all of it — leaving my husband behind, leaving my family behind, throwing caution to the wind regarding my COVID precautions. As it turned out, I would catch some sort of bug — although negative for COVID — that would develop into my first illness in 18 months. And then, of course, I crashed my bike.
“We need to plan a week of hiking in the Wasatch,” I told my Dad as we stood next to the front door of his car. He seemed sad. Maybe that’s just the way I remember him now, or need to remember him. At the time, I thought he was just exhausted from the heat and crowds. But in hindsight, his demeanor was one of sadness.
“Sure,” Dad said. He thought a moment. “Lone Peak should be clear in a month or so.”
“Definitely we want to do Lone Peak. Beat’s never even been there,” I replied.
Lone Peak had always been a special spot for Dad — visible from his front yard, one of the most arduous peaks to reach on foot, and one he rarely let a summer pass without visiting. Ever since he retired, Dad spent many hours each week hiking in his beloved Wasatch Mountains. At 68 years old, he had developed a level of fitness that even the ultra-endurance athlete in me failed to match. Several months earlier, Dad told me Lone Peak was one of three places he wanted his ashes spread after he died.
“You better train up one of your grandchildren,” I replied to him then, about spreading his ashes. “Beat and I will be too old and broken to hike up there by the time you go.”
Just after 10 a.m. on June 8, 2021, we exchanged a hug. Again I felt awkward about post-pandemic nearness. My shoulders sagged and my arms hung limply around his torso. There was no art in that hug, no release of emotion. The memory of it still fills me with regret. Because after that hug, Mom and Dad stooped into their Toyota Camry and drove in the other direction as I walked to my own car. I don’t even remember what he was wearing.
Eight days later, I received the phone call that told me I was never going to see my dad again. I screamed “NO” into the phone and collapsed on the carpet, gasping for air that would never again enter my lungs. A monster of pain that couldn’t escape threatened to tear me apart. I pressed my knees into my chin and clawed at the scab on the back of my leg until it broke open. Blood ran thick and hot between my fingers. I hoped the wound would fail to close again, that maybe I could lie on the carpet and bleed until I died. Otherwise, this mundane bike crash scar would ache for the rest of my life. Time would pass and as I wished each day away, this scar would only cut deeper. But as the fog of grief settled over me, I feared even more that one day this scar would fade from view.
I’m at a loss for words at how sad and beautiful this is all at the same time. All the small little details and memories of your dad, looking back at what you couldn’t have known at the time. You capture it all so beautifully and honestly. I can’t believe it’s been a year. Sending you hopes for strength and peace at what I can only imagine is a tough milestone for you and your family this month.