Journey of Resilience Introduction

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         Damn! I’m stuck hanging 180 feet above the ground about

 what happens next. 

         My first rappel into a 200-foot-deep cave in Mexico wasn’t going as planned. 

I was dangling 18 stories above my friends with my glove mangled between the aluminum brake bars of my rappel rack. Suspended on my first vertical cave, I couldn't go down or up, and I couldn't reach the cave wall. Sweaty and scared, I yelled to the guys below for advice. Following their shouted instructions, bit by bit I untangled myself, and landed at last on solid ground. My breathing returned to normal.

         Caving was one of my early passions and the beginning of a life of adventures. 

This book is the story of that life, but it was fairly uneventful until I was about eighteen. I had a good childhood. I was bright and occasionally driven. Generally, I liked to hang out with my friends, just like most American kids.

         So, why would you want to read the story of a nuclear engineer who loved the outdoors and the people close to him in equal measure? You may see some of your own ordinary life in my words, or perhaps something about our shared humanity will resonate with you. You may understand the shudder of fear that runs through you when you lose track of direction during a snowstorm on a wild mountain pass in the Himalayas, or the infinite comfort of holding the woman you love, even when you know it may be for the last time.

I want to share with you my humanity, my passions, my vision, and my somewhat ordinary life. Along the journey, we may discover that every life is actually extraordinary and worthy of the telling.

More than a hundred years ago, Emily Dickinson wrote this poem:

My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven

And all we need of hell.

The second time my life closed, I was driving on an icy road in January. As I crested the hill, I saw a car coming toward me in my lane. I had less than five seconds to react. I said “Shit!” hit the brakes, and turned the wheel. When I regained consciousness, members of the ski patrol, who had been close behind me, were trying to assess my status. Firemen had to chop me out of the wreckage using the Jaws of Life.

That accident closed the adventure chapter of my life. Skiing, skating, backpacking, mountain climbing – gone. I became depressed and filled with pain.

The first time my life closed, my beloved wife, Carrie died. We’d known it was coming. We had more than three years to talk about it and to process it as best we could. Still, we experienced every classic emotion from denial to anger and acceptance,  

although I’m not sure we ever fully embraced the idea of her death. We were so intimately bonded, and so much in love. We rode a roller coaster of emotions as her cancer arrived, left, and then returned.

Our round-the-world trip, 18 months after getting married, cemented our relationship more closely than I could have thought possible. Other than six hours in New Zealand, we spent the six months outside the United States never more than ten feet apart – or possibly a hundred feet when hiking on steep mountain trails. We went through bone-aching cold, bad knees, and diarrhea. All of it brought us closer.

And then she died of lung cancer, and I was left alone with our twelve-year-old son.

Carrie and I kept journals throughout our travels, even recording our adventures at home. Over the years, as I entered into another relationship and as our family grew, I continued to write in my journal. Gradually, the idea of a book evolved.

I started by jotting down some notes about my childhood and growing-up years in Allen Park, a suburb of Detroit where most houses on the block were home to four or five kids, and every house was spaced thirteen feet from its neighbor. Every day after school, all the kids were on the street playing baseball, football, or hockey until the shout “Car!” went out and we scrambled out of the way for half a minute before resuming play.

When I was eleven, we moved to Ohio, where I became a Boy Scout and developed my love for the outdoors. I went camping almost every weekend, built campfires, hunted for frogs, and explored the forest 

I liked my math and science classes, excelling in honors geometry, but then in 1970, we moved to a log cabin on a lake in Foxboro, Massachusetts. After school, I would take a rowboat out on the lake and in the winter, I played hockey with my friends. That was fun, but my math skills were so advanced, the teachers moved me from the junior to the senior math class. In my senior year, I’d already taken the highest-level math the school offered, so two math teachers teamed up to teach me calculus.

I chose to do my undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral work at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a private research university in Troy, New York. I had already settled on a career as a nuclear engineer – a field I saw as the wave of the future. I gave my dissertation presentation in March 1979, the same day a cooling malfunction in the Unit 2 reactor at Three-Mile Island in Pennsylvania caused a partial meltdown.

At age 24, I had my doctoral degree and had to choose between three job offers. Idaho was my obvious pick. I’d already climbed most of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. In Idaho, I only had to drive ninety minutes to reach Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons. Besides, the job offer from the Idaho National Laboratory was $4,000/year more than the company in New York City.

I made friends quickly by joining the Idaho Alpine Club, and every weekend I was climbing, caving, hiking, or white-water rafting. I’d rarely dated in college because I was too busy studying. But now, it seemed women were everywhere. After much mental struggling with the lack of women in college, I was overjoyed to finally be dating again after seven long years. And then I met Carrie. We talked on the phone for two or three weeks before meeting. I fell in love with her beautiful mind and soul long before I saw her gorgeous face.

Our first date: I cooked dinner and then we skied in the local park and cemetery through a foot of fresh snow. Not many women would say yes to that on a first date, or say yes to winter camping with the ski patrol and sleeping in a snow cave shortly after that. It was love at first sight for me – and second sight, and third sight… I was thrilled to have a wonderful outdoors woman to share adventures.

A year later we got married and eighteen months after that, we quit our jobs and travelled around the world. Our Everest trek and the Annapurna hiking were immense highlights, but so was Thailand, where the heat and beaches thawed out our frozen bones. Carrie and I were both re-hired by our former employers. The hospital switched Carrie from labor and delivery to neo-natal intensive care, while I moved from reactor operator training to reactor physics.

Our son, Dan, was born in 1987. He initially slowed down our outdoor activities, but then we took him to Alaska before he was a year old, hauling him around in a baby carrier. Six months after that, we took him to Costa Rica for three weeks.

Carrie got sick in 1995. It took four visits and numerous X-rays before they found the tumor in her lungs. Dan was twelve when she died. Suddenly, I lost the great intimacy we shared having gone through so much together. No one to touch and hold. The loneliness of college returned. I was lost, but as my new reality settled in, I knew I didn’t want to live my life without a woman. The odds of meeting someone local weren’t great. It seemed there were three single guys for every single outdoors-oriented woman out there. And then, in Idaho, fifty percent of the women were Mormon.

I decided I must proactively seek another pleasing partner to share life. I turned to the internet and met Dory on Match.com. As with Carrie, we emailed and talked long before we met. Happily, we kept all that early correspondence. That, combined with Carrie’s journals and my own diaries and notes, were quickly forming the skeleton of a book.

Dory lived in Oregon, and we started a long-distance relationship in June 1999. By October we joined households, but I still travelled back and forth for occasional work in Idaho. My soul brightened as we fell in love and intimacy returned to my life. In 2000, we married and moved to Idaho, and the next years were filled with shuttling teenagers to and from various activities – an ordinary time of family chaos. And then I drove home from skiing on a cold January night when the roads were icy and a driver had been drinking.

My life changed irrevocably. I broke my hip in five places and my left forearm. In addition, I had gouges in my left arm and hand, and seat belt abrasions on my shoulder and face. I was in a wheelchair for five months.

The pain has never left me. I have a splint on my foot and get around with a cane. I can walk two miles. I can lift a backpack, but I can’t carry it. The things that breathed life into me are gone forever: skiing, backpacking, climbing – all gone. I played hockey for 30 years. Not too long ago, I put on my skates and couldn’t stand up. I also tried skiing, fell, and couldn’t get back up – but I tried. Both were depressing experiences.

I will never work full-time again. The policy from the Idaho National Laboratory stated that if you couldn’t work full-time, they would terminate you, which they did. 

The nightmare of insurance providers and paperwork almost equalled the misery of the accident itself. Somehow, through it all, I had to find resilience to keep going and still live a life of joy and meaning. In 2019, I suffered a stroke. Other than a loss of internal time-keeping, I’m not sure how much it affected me. Dory notices small differences that I don’t. I am still determined to live this life. I’m introverted and I’m married to a beautiful extrovert. I have five wonderful grandkids we manage to see a couple of times a year. We have an RV, and though we may not be backpacking, we can still travel. We probably have ten good travel years left before we have to slow down.

We live our lives as millions do. But beneath the everyday calm surface lie deep, hidden currents, jagged rocks, and unexpected depths. With this book, I hope to take you beneath the surface. Come and explore a world that may feel much like your own, but with its own unique map of mountains and rivers, some of which are still waiting to be explored.

I invite you to join me on the ride.