Crash Landing!

Given the later events of the summer, it's taken a while for me to get around to posting these videos. I wrote tens of thousands of words this year, but nothing got the attention that came from sitting in a plane that flipped over. "Holy cow!" "I thought this was a fun thing." Somebody decided it needed to be set to music...

The Measure of a Man

Marine Capt. Matthew Freeman made his last trip across the U.S. Naval Academy in the company of friends the other day.
Yes, there were admirals and generals, colonels and majors, captains of the Navy and the Marines among the hundreds who joined him. But there are moments when the strictures of rank are loosened by the greater bond of brotherhood. This was one of them.
Four thousand and seventy-four days had passed since Matt arrived here as a kid, had his head shaved and was sworn in as a Navy midshipman. Two thousand six hundred and fifty-one days had gone by since he hurled his hat into the air at graduation and became a Marine. It had been 47 days since he married Theresa, his high school sweetheart, and 34 days since he headed to Afghanistan.

And it was just 19 days after he led his men onto a rooftop that provided the only high ground in a nasty firefight with the Taliban in a hamlet in a rugged, desolate northeastern province.
The morning he came back to the Naval Academy was a Wednesday, but it will stick in your memory as the day you heard that Ted Kennedy had died and the week when you learned that someone might have killed Michael Jackson. The politician and the entertainer of their generations, they were lionized by many and scorned by some. One pleaded guilty, the other was found innocent. But they each died with an indelible asterisk, a footnote to their legacies that time will not erase.
Matt Freeman died clean.
His life and death played out that sunny morning in the chapel at the Academy and as the long cortege made its way on foot across the Yard to what would be his final resting place. The words they found for him were devotion to his Maker, loyalty beyond what most men possess and grim courage in the end. Marine sentries in dress blue snapped into salute as he passed. There was a band. Flags flew.
Nine days earlier, when his body came home to a small town in Georgia, three creeks south of Savannah, people lined the route, waving paper flags. Children drew signs of tribute on cardboard. Mothers cried. You can find it all on the Internet, of course. All that, and a lot more about how he lived and how he died. You will discover, most of all, why people loved him.
It is the business of generals to calibrate the magnitude of a man's courage. They are not to be envied the task, and many of them learned its measure by testing their own guts on the battlefield.
Theresa rose from her pew in the chapel to accept Matt's Bronze Star, the fifth in the hierarchy of combat medals awarded Marines. He died on a mission for which he volunteered, in a province far from home, leading men into battle. Pinned down and receiving a "heavy volume" of enemy fire, the medal citation says, he rose up and led his men into a mud-brick house, cleared it of the enemy, "was the first to reach the rooftop" where he "spotted an enemy rocket-propelled grenade gunman and immediately killed him . . . and began to engage while under fire."
His best friend told the mourners, "He would want you to know that he went down swinging."
There were a dozen Marine captains in dress blue in the overflowing pews of the chapel. Marines may blink hard a few times, but they don't cry. Their mothers and widows cry for them.
In the week when they laid a young Marine captain to rest, the news was dominated by the death of a politician and the echo from an entertainer's death. The flag-draped coffin on the front page was not his, but if you look carefully in the paper this week you will see a small picture of Matt Freeman among the faces of those who have fallen recently in battle.
He did not live long enough to become an the icon of Kennedy or Jackson, but he died the greater hero

The world is full of many beautiful places, and Margaret River in Southwest Australia will rival the very best that I’ve seen and outdo all of the rest. The word spectacular aptly applies to so much of it, and after using that word once, you could exhaust the list of synonyms fairly quickly. The hundreds of acres of carefully regimented vineyards, each row aligned with military precision and the vines cropped back for the growing season just begun. Spring flowers are all over. The majestic Indian Ocean seems offended to encounter Australia and crashes angrily against the reefs, with 30 and 40 foot waves that spew white spray off their crests. The green forest rolls down to meet the sea unlike, I’m told, anywhere else in this huge continent. The beaches are empty, for October is Australia’s April, but there isn’t enough accommodation around here for it ever to get very busy. Margaret River is about three and a half hour’s drive south of Perth,where I raced two days ago. The town itself is set about five kilometers from the coast, and the Margarets Beach Resort at which I’m staying trades on the Margaret River name without actually being in Margaret River. I can see the ocean from my balcony and the beach is about 15-minutes walk. The Margaret River name is based on wine. It’s said that the Margaret River area produces just one percent of the Australia’s wine, but 15 percent of its finest wine. Some fellow named John Gladstone, an agriculturalist, did a study in 1965 and concluded that soil and climate in Margaret River actually exceeded Bordeaux in quality (sacre bleu!). They’ve been producing wine ever since, and the best of it is ... well ... spectacular. This is a matter of exploration and validation in which I’m investing my time for the next few days. There is a bit of history which plays into the issue. When Laurie was pregnant with Graham we went on our annual trip to Paris, a trip which had always been based on eating at -- literally -- the best restaurants in the city for both lunch and dinner. These places with the world’s best wine cellars don’t dole it out by the glass, so we ended up ordering a bottle with each meal. Since Laurie couldn’t drink, I did, and my liver just about gave out after a week of two-bottle days. (But, hey, you can’t leave half of a $137 bottle of wine on the table, can you?) Here in Margaret River my research plan has been (Now, I’ve only been here 24 hours so far....but) to sample a bottle of wine from a winery that I’d like to visit and, if it’s on the mark, go there the next day. Since my liver can’t survive another Parisian experience I will leave behind for the staff of the Margaret River Resort on Friday a collection of $50 bottles of wine with all but my two glasses remaining. Here’s hoping they have the wisdom to drink it! Today I visited the Watershed winery, tasted all of their whites and then had lunch overlooking their vineyard. The food, all incredibly fresh, was the most ... spectacular ... lunch I can recall. So was the glass of wine I had with it. So, right now I’m taste-testing a bottle of the zinfandel from the Cape Mentelle winery, which is located between my hotel and the town of Margaret River. It’s a quite-nice wine, and they are my likely destination for a tasting tomorrow. Although I teased the wine shop owner where I bought that bottle, telling her that the Aussies ought stop sending us the crappy bottles of Yellowtail and Penafolds that they consider “swill”, such that she felt sufficiently guilty and recommended a couple of other wineries I ought not miss. So, perhaps I go there myself.

That is, after a run on the miles of beautiful roads and trails that seem to be all around here. It is a bit strange doing all of this by myself, but I find I’ve become a comfortably solitary person in the past few years and can draw great joy from everything that surrounds me, even though I’m alone. Had I been less than extraordinarily fortunate in the crash on St. Margaret’s Road I wouldn’t be anywhere worthy of note today. Had it not been for the friends who were there as I mended, I would not now be whole. Had it not been for the uncharted path that led me to triathlon, I never would have come to the competition in Perth or had the chance to head south of there to what is the most remote and beautiful part of the Earth I ever will visit. I am very, very lucky. This has been the most sensuous and beautiful day of my life to date. So wonderful that there were times when I closed my eyes, wondering whether a blind man could feel it so profoundly. Perhaps, I think, almost so. The voices of the ocean and the wind, which helped send waves crashing against the coastal boulders; the salacious taste of seared rare beef and a world-class Chardonnay, or the utter absence of sound in solitude almost a mile deep in a limestone cave. Plip-plop every ten or twenty seconds was all that broke the silence in darkness turned total when I flipped off my light. I drove south from Margaret River to visit the point where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet.

I thought about my dad as I set out, for he more than anyone would share and understand my desire to simply lay eyes on the Southern Ocean, the broad band of water that spreads from the southern-most cape of each continent and the south-coast of Australia until it reaches the shores of the South Pole. My dad, who loved the sea, as do I, and precedes me in a long line of ancestors whose life revolved around the tides, would have relished setting eyes on the Southern Ocean, something that few men of our hemisphere ever see. I doubt that my great-great grandfather, who spent his life, and finally died, at sea ever saw the Southern Ocean. So, I drove south toward Cape Leeuwin to see where the two oceans collide. Along the way -- it’s probably 60 or 70 kilometers -- I indulged in ways we so often deny ourselves. Yogi Berra said “When you reach a fork in the road, take it.” We so regularly wonder “what’s down this or that road?” without ever finding out. So, on this trip, at every fork in the road, I chose the turn that seemed most interesting, even if it took me off my intended path. Most of the roads hereabout are nicely paved, two lanes without shoulders and flanked by gorgeous vineyards, pastures and forest. They would rival the race courses of the Giro or the Tour de France for beauty, but I’ve not see a bike on any of them and wouldn’t want to ride them myself without a car behind me, since the speeds allowed get up to 110K per hour. Cave Road hugs the coastline without every giving a view of the sea, but it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder where it got it’s name until several miles into the trip when a sign said “cave to the left.” In I went, totally clueless as to what to expect. There was a nice lady in the visitor’s booth who charged me $14, gave me a helmet with a light attached and a second flashlight and said that, unlike most caves, this one had no interior lighting. I blundered on. Until today I’d never been in a cave of any consequence, and certainly none like this. A brief aside to talk about the season and set up my visit to the cave. It is spring in Australia. We would call this moment of the year April. They call it October. So this whole region (“from Cape to Cape” as they call it) is in pre-season mode.

 I’m staying at the Margaret Beach Resort, where occupancy seems to be at about 10 percent, and the vineyards I’ve been visiting are sized to handle hundreds of taste-testers and diners, while this time of year they get dozens. (No waiting). No question, this is pre-season. I was the only person in the cave for the first half hour. If you’ve done a lot of caves, perhaps this sounds less amazing, but I wandered through this one in awe: The colors, the sounds, the amazing formations of stalagmites and the pre-historic look of the life in the pools of water that flowed from above. The dripping down the cave walls looked like butter scotch formed into exquisite patterns. I went down to the depths of one part of the cave, where a bench sat at the very end, and turned my lights out, just listening to silence -- to total silence. I was as peaceful as anywhere I’ve ever been. I buzzed on merrily from there and plunged into the Leeuwin National Forest. (Leeuwin must be the George Washington of Western Australia, since the name pops up on everything hereabouts.) And with it came awesome stands of trees. I will find out what type they are soon, but for now picture huge sycamores without branches for the first 100 feet. They looked like a fantasy setting for Harry Potter, majestic, foreboding, haunting, and beautiful. I stopped in the middle of it, photographed and listened. After that I rolled through the resort town of Augusta (where they have a golf tournament, just like the town of the same name in Georgia), and came to a fork in the road. A sign said that a right turn would take me on the “scenic” route to the lighthouse, which is where I was headed. I took that invitation, leaving the pavement and rattling for several kilometers down a gravel road. Then I came around a bend, saw the lighthouse in the distance and the oceans (two of them) and was awe struck by the beauty. So much so that the immediate opportunity to pull over was a godsend that kept me from driving off the road. I spent a long while there, overlooking the sea crashing at the lighthouse peninsula from both directions. There are times when we all are struck by the thought that “this moment will never come again.” I was surrounded by a profusion of colorful spring flowers and flowering bushes which I wish I could name for you. Then I saw a perfect, isolated beach down to my right and decided to find my way to it. Pushing through the brush that threatened to overwhelm the path, I followed a trail and then passed over coral rocks for a bit before reaching pristine dunes that finally gave way to the beach. The surf was that perfect marriage of blue water turned turquoise and then transformed into pure white as it rumbled forth to gnaw at the sand. My foot prints, this morning, were the first to spoil the sand’s perfection. The lighthouse is pure white. The only such, of that size and color, that I’ve ever seen. The two oceans wrap around the point on which it sits. I looked out at the rambunctious Southern Ocean and imagined the mariners of centuries past who took its challenge, aware that there was no margin of personal survival between success and failure.

    It was hard to walk away from this beauty, but I wanted to make lunch at the Leeuwins Winery, which was about 50 kilometers back north and which came highly recommended by the lady at the liquor store in Margaret River. (Hey, alway ways trust even suspect local knowledge over the tour guide books!) Leeuwins is located in the Margaret River area, which has emerged as one of the world’s best wine regions since the 1964 study that found it had climate and soil to rival Bordeaux. I’m sure the French sniff at this suggestion, but then they sniff at almost everything. The best of Margaret River wines -- and, lordy, have I tasted a lot of them in the past three days -- are extraordinary. The wineries seem small -- I don’t know how may acres or how many bottles they produce each year -- but so are the most of the best French vineyards. Here, they are all over the place, each very elegant, and they open their doors from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. for anyone who wants to come in and taste a few wines at their walk-up bars. It is all very civil, and tourists build their day around visiting three or four or five or six of them. Most of them also serve lunch, and the three at which I’ve eaten -- Watershed, Knee Deep and Leeuwins -- have served some of the best food I’ve ever had. (And, to provide context and risk sounding boastful, there was a time when I’d eaten at every top restaurant in Paris other than the pretentious Tour D’Argent.) Beyond the wonderfully simple preparation and presentation, the food also is as locally grown as any you will ever eat, even out of your own back yard.

The salads at Knee Deep and Leeuwins were picked from gardens just outside the kitchen door. The meats came from just down the road. The wines ... well they came from vines within a stone’s throw, literally. So, the hour was well past noon and I wanted to get to Leeuwins for lunch but when I came to a fork in road and the GPS told me (yes, even in the remote corners of the earth there is GPS) that taking the Bussell Highway was faster than Caves Road, and asked myself: How many times in this life or the next one will I experience the beauty of Cave Road and the Leeuwins forest. So, you know which way I turned. I hope I will retain the magnificence of that drive for as long as I live. (I did see my first kangaroo: road kill. And a big one. There is a picture, which I will share if you ask, and an aroma, of which you will be spared.) I rolled into the Leeuwin winery just past two. Some wineries are beautiful but basic -- Knee Deep was one of those -- others are just astoundingly beautiful. That would be Leeuwins. Suffice to say that the sink in the men’s room was so exquisite that I took a photo of it. The rest of the place was even better. I sat on the deck overlooking a perfect lawn and a ridge covered with a stand of tall trees. Birds of varieties I’ve never seen splashed merrily in a bird bath by a bush 20 feet away. The wines -- Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Merlot -- were excellent. Then came the lightly seared local steak and a salad all grown within 100 yards. There is a salad dressing common here that is so light as to not be there at all, but it gives moisture and a hint of sweetness to greens otherwise so fresh that they speak for themselves. I lingered over coffee -- you order a “long, black” -- for quite a while. The birds and the view were better to savor even than the very fine coffee. I rolled back into the town of Margaret River -- one strip of main street with boutiques, a couple of bars, a few tourist shops, a grocery market and assorted other stuff -- in time to make a few purchases.

     Shops in this part of the world shut down at 5 p.m., a perfectly sensible approach, if you ask me, that curtails the ability of life and work to make unreasonable demands on our time. If you can’t shop until 9 at night, or find a 24-7 convenience store then you must wrap life’s demands around a more reasonable reality. Then, as I drove from town to my room, the radio station I found on “scan” began playing various interpretations on Vivalidi’s Spring. Dear, god, could anything be more perfect? It was time to revisit the ocean after I returned to the not-really-in-Margaret-River Margaret Beach Resort. The sun was determined to set behind a veil of duff-gray clouds, but sun streaming behind those waves would have dulled their magnificence. The sea hammered high across jagged rocks hundreds of yards from shore, expressing its anger in streams of white foam flung high, and then marshaled force against the pale yellow beach which has defended it’s honor for centuries. A great collision between the forces of nature that makes all animals so simple as us seem inconsequential. I stood there on a high bluff until it grew purple dark, relishing the beauty, thinking of my father, who would have shared my love of the moment, and of my son, whose brilliance of beauty would have sucked in every scintilla. Could any day have been more perfect -- without my dad or son to share it? No.

          

Until that dreary morning last year I'd never done a cartwheel. Alas, I don't recall my first, but they say that's a good thing. Your brain will draw a dark curtain around what it thinks you're better off not remembering.
The doctors and the lawyers needed to know, however, so now I know what my brain won't tell me.
From the driver's testimony: "I would say he was airborne for -- from the point where he separated from his bike -- 10 to 15 feet before he hit the ground, and he bounced, quite literally, back into the air from that initial impact."
From the surgeon's commentary: "Your helmet is cracked because you landed directly on your forehead."
From the medical reports: "Unstable neck fracture, C1-C2."
The driver: He "basically tumbled from there down the hill . . . somersaulting, rolling . . . an end-over-end all the way into my car."
The surgeon's commentary: "You were doing cartwheels."
The medical reports: "right wrist and hand fracture"; "left second rib fracture"; "left [shoulder] separation."
Driver: "He was on his back . . . I said, 'Don't move.' "
Medical reports: First surgery: "This was a complex operation . . . requiring two board-certified neurosurgeons . . . using a power drill preset to 28 mm we cautiously drilled holes through the [top vertebra] . . . we inserted 22 mm titanium screws into these holes . . . and locked them down with a torque wrench."
Second surgery: "The [shoulder] was exposed . . . the drill guide was placed . . . a wire was passed through [the hole] . . . and tied on the top" to close the separation.
Surgeon's commentary: "It was the classic Christopher Reeve injury. It is a miracle you survived."
But this is not about falling down. It is about getting up, something that you do every day. And it's about choices we all make when we roll out of bed.
The question I asked myself last year, and that I ask you today, is: "What are you going to do?"
Is it time to pack it in? Is it time to recognize that most people give it up after a while? Is it time to accept that being 20 pounds overweight isn't fatal? Is staying fit worth the time when time is so precious?
And -- here's the biggie -- I'm flat on my back and you're flat on the couch: Is it even possible to get up and get fit? Can this washed-up, busted body ever work right again?
We are, after all, not teenagers anymore! I'm 56. No need to kick my tires. The body creaks, it aches and sometimes it shrieks out in pain when those muscles are asked to bebop along like a college kid's.
More on my own answers in a minute, but here are yours.
Yes, you can get up and get moving again.
Yes, you can avoid the injuries that have stopped you every time you've tried.
Yes, you have the time if you can find the willpower.
Yes, you have the motivation.
Your motivation is the same old, same old. You know you'll feel better. You know you'll like yourself more. You know that you can apply the brakes to the aging process.
You're lucky. The sciences of sport and nutrition have matured right along with you. Not so very long ago, a whole host of things could put your desire for fitness on permanent hold. Now we know better. The know-how about the way a body works, why it fails and how to correct it has increased tenfold in the past decade.
You've watched as the ways to exercise have mushroomed into the thousands, and with those opportunities come a lot of people just like you to share the experience with you.
Sweating isn't such torture if you're doing it with a friend.
The first step is getting up out of bed.
Or so I told myself.
A thought came to me that night as I lay there awaiting surgery that, should it go wrong, would leave me in a wheelchair forever. This is it: "The winds of adversity can knock you down or lift you up, depending on how you spread your wings."
Aging and adversity may not be twins, but they sure are kissing cousins.
It is all about faith and the will to move forward. I took as an act of faith that the operation would go well, that I would regain my fitness and that one day soon I would be stronger than I was that morning when that car swerved in front of my bike and sent me soaring.
What's more, I made a silent vow that after I found my fitness again I would do my best to help other people find theirs.
So far, held together by steel, titanium and wire, it has worked. At first, I pedaled a stationary bike in a neck brace, with one arm in a sling and the other in a cast. I started out jogging on a treadmill, but now I run outside. Finally, after a year of shoulder therapy, I can swim in a fairly straight line. This month, I won a triathlon in Texas. I made the U.S. team in my age group for the triathlon world championship in Australia this fall.
I will not lie and tell you that the journey from being screwed back together to winning medals has been painless. For a while, just moving in bed caused me to scream. But that's long over with, and the satisfaction of being whole again is so worth whatever it took.
And my promise about helping other people get fit again? From 9-year-olds to college kids to some folks who are seriously adult, if you get my drift, that's what I've been doing.
To my fellow baby boomers, here's my simple message: Boom again, baby!
I'm upright again, and you can be, too. I'll help, but do me one big favor: Try to stay away from cartwheels.

It's a busy, busy world....

The Dream, Part Two

The dream resurfaced again last night, this time wearing a different face. This time I was falling, in a fetal ball that uncurled as I descended. I awoke with a start before the skid down the pavement that I sensed was coming.

The Dream Emerges

In the months since being liberated from all the plastic braces and slings, I'm told I frequently kick and twitch in my sleep, something I'd never done before. Sometimes it wakes me up, although the dream that caused the physical reaction never emerged until last night. All along, I'd figured I must be dreaming about the instant of the crash, of which I still have no conscious recollection, even though it certainly is embedded somewhere in my subconscious and I've been warned that it may emerge eventually.
But I awoke in the middle of the night last night with the dream that is causing the twitching still fresh.
I was in a wheelchair, trying to escape.