EXCISIONS CONTINUED: The excerpt below is from my 2015 42 places trip. Cut from the upcoming book, FORTY-TWO PLACES: A LITERARY TOURIST’S GUIDE TO DOUGLAS ADAMS, it is a look at my traveling life. I hope you enjoy it!
Not everything that happens on a once-in-a-lifetime birthday celebration quest is perfect. Here’s a short excerpt from my Forty-Two Places scouting trip that didn’t go so well.
The turf cushioned my butt gently as if in apology for the extreme pain of my right ankle. Throb ouch throb ouch throb ouch. My throat constricted to squeeze out something between a sob and a wail that I hoped would be mistaken for a bird call if anyone heard me.
No one did. I could see for at least a half-mile ahead and behind. The track ran, a narrow brown channel, boot-deep and winding across the headlands of The Lizard.
No one had seen me land awkwardly on the edge, roll my ankle with all my substantial (not-a-regular-hiker) weight, and go tumbling on a pillowy headland green. Thick soft grass saved any other part of me from harm. But it didn’t save my ankle. Which throbbed.
Someone would come.
My hired van driver was waiting for me at the next stop along the trail. I was in no real danger of being lost, hungry, or attacked by wild gulls high above the Atlantic Ocean, waves crashing gloriously hundreds of feet below me.
I did what any Willoughby is supposed to do when a Marianne has twisted her ankle: I ascertained the damage. It hurt, but it moved. I rolled the foot slowly in multiple directions and (YIKES!) some directions hurt more than others.
The pummeling my confidence was taking from my abusive superego was what hurt the most. Shedding a few tears from the pain, trying to breathe so I wouldn’t go too much into shock, I could hear a harsh voice inside my lizard brain hiss what were you thinking? Hike alone? Never, EVER do that! You are such an idiot!
I pushed the foot against the turf to test how it reacted to pressure. I did not remove my pull-on hiking boot. I knew to leave my foot where the sock and shoe would continue to support the ankle and if it was going to swell, the shoe itself would provide some pressure. My lizard brain still wanted me to panic and run: Where in the hell did that information come from? Some book? A TV program? Do you even know if it’s right?
I stood carefully and brushed myself down. I took the cord off my wrist to put away the little blue travel Nikon that hadn’t dropped. The new digital camera I liked because it had an old-school viewfinder as well as a display screen. I’d had to choose between two models at Sammy’s Camera and Video and I’d asked the salesman, “Which one is least likely to break when I drop it?”
He had blinked, echoed my self-deprecating smile, and handed me the little blue one I was now stowing into the case velcroed to the loop of my jeans. You shouldn’t have been trying to walk and take a picture at the same time you moron, said that panicky lizard brain.
But I had so many questions! What were the poles that ran along, about a hundred feet from the cliff edge, with notches cut into them all the way up? I wanted a picture, I wanted to get up close so I could ask my guide all about them…and the one step off the track, searching for an image, was a step in a very wrong direction.
I was paying now. Limping along the track again. Going slowly. Easing my way, and paying zero attention to the interesting poles, the birds flitting in the high grass, the gulls swooping above the waves that crashed into the crumbly basalt edge of the Lizard Peninsula.
Step. Throb ouch. Step. Throb ouch. SNIFFLE. Throb ouch.
I’m going back someday soon. To hike the coast, to not hurt myself, and to ask someone about those poles.
What do you think?