Down From The Mountaintop

After more than a year of high altitude living, I have returned to the muggy swamp of the Southeastern U.S for some oxygen and a peek at the ocean.  The oxygen deprivation of living above 7000 feet may have been catching up to me.  I have recently become more clumsy, smacking my shoulders into walls, hitting the back of my hands on counter corners and dropping kitchen utensils and other items that are meant to stay up high onto the floor.

Hiking while accident-prone is hardly a good idea.  Besides the constant threat of attacks by savage beasts, I have to guard against eroding cliff edges, falling trees and freak weather systems.  Above all, I must beware prankster rocks.

When I was a kid, I used to fall down at least once during every hike, sometimes going so far as to roll a little ways down the trail.  Even when I was around twenty or so, I remember slipping awkwardly while crossing an Alaskan creek, ending up with an entirely soaked lower half, which greatly amused the rest of my family.  I blamed everything from poor vision to lack of sleep to a distracting brother, but the end result was simply me on the ground.

I had been recently priding myself on having grown out of this klutzy habit.  I had managed to stay more or less on my feet for many hikes in a row and barely even broke a nail in the wilderness any more.  Until Friday, when a trickster rock decided to deflate my pride. 

This hungry boulder lie in wait in the middle of the path, lunging out at me with its stony fangs as I tried to step over it.  It grabbed the toe of my boot with a vicious fissure and hurled me to the ground.

I lay flat on the ground, pretending to do a push-up, and I've never really been able to do push-ups or chin-ups or any of those ups requiring upper body strength.  I couldn't see a thing, so my first fear, even before that of broken bones or fierce, man-eating rocks, was that I had smashed my glasses.  I pictured myself having to blindly grope my way out of the mountains.  The angry feldspar and quartz would have finished me off in no time.

Further exploration revealed that my glasses were still perched on my face.  I had simply hit the ground so hard, I had created an enormous cloud of dust that coated my entire body, including my glasses, giving me the illusion of blindness.  My hands had taken the brunt of the fall, and both palms were bleeding through the dirt.  I laughed briefly at the thought of holding up my hands to the next hiker that passed and telling him that I had stigmata.  I have the feeling he wouldn't have stopped to chat about trail conditions and the weather.

My left knee was scraped and my upper arms felt sore from the shock.  I was a mere mile or so from a lovely waterfall rushing at full capacity from the melt of the heavy snowpack, so I was soon able to rinse off the dust and blood in the frigid, refreshing water.  My man, at this point, was allowed to laugh at my humorous display of clumsiness.  Watching someone falling down (as long as she is not seriously hurt) is one of the most basic forms of entertainment.  I wish I had seen it.

So, now, I am at sea level, on a tranquil South Carolinian island, hoping that the inundation of oxygen in this thick atmosphere will help my clumsiness and make me temporarily smarter.  I am trying to write a novel, you know.  The humidity has already made my skin feel more healthy and given my hair a little wave.

In the meantime, I will be vigilant for prankster rocks.  I keep a sharp lookout for snakes and alligators.  There's a persistent hummingbird that I'm keeping my eye on.  And I only went into the ocean to my knees.  There are sharks and jellyfish out there.  And boulders lurking under the waves.