Hard Fall
Solstice light goes silver. The air is heavy with the perfume of a desert river. My friend and I carry some of her partner's ashes down a rocky slope to the Verde River.
A soft rain begins to fall. What might have been shoreline is muck. “No good,” she says. “Let’s go back to the bridge in Camp Verde.” We start up the sandstone we’ve just descended. I step on a shallow ledge, feel my foot sliding in mud and crash down on my left knee. The pain is nauseating.
Two hours later, a kind Emergency doc says, “I’m sorry. It’s broken in three places. We’ll have to keep you here and you’ll need surgery.”
“But, I don't want surgery," I say. “It only hurts if I move it.” "You don’t really have a choice,” he says, “If you want to walk again…”
Now there is an eight-inch incision healing in my leg, and two metal pins and a cable in my knee. I’ll be on the walker for at least four more weeks. No driving. I live alone. There is no room for error. And I am re-learning what it means to be a real friend in a real community.
Thirty-two years ago, I moved to Flagstaff. My best friend lived across the street. I hung out with hard-core "enviros", river runners, writers and cooks. We all took care of each other through break-ups, injuries and arrests. There was no internet. There were no smart phones. There were only land-lines and the Freak Telegraph to thread together our community.
Then the Southwest became the place to find yourself, to invest, invest, invest and cover the desert and forest with acres of red-roofed houses and trophy mansions. Flagstaff's population grew by 189%. Now, there are 25,000 students at the university. Every six minutes a trendy restaurant opens. My friends and I avoid what was once a genuine Southwestern downtown with old-time diners, bars with boards across their windows, and local bookstores. Even though the coffee at Macy's Café is still killer, too often it's just not worth the drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic or the fight to the death for a parking place. More and more, most of us connect by text, email and social media. I'd begun to think that community as I had once known it was dead.
As soon as word got out about the surgery, friends showed up at the hospital. A few stayed by my side. Others took care of my four cats. Another drove me home in a white-out snowstorm and stayed the night to guide me in the basics of the walker and the peril of moving spontaneously.
Two local neighbors showed up the next day and continue for every day. They empty cat litter, feed the four cats and repeat the cycle. When intestinal flu struck on my third day home, they got me through it. Other friends drove a Trader Joe's run, brought cases of cat food. Dozens of people said the magic words: "What do you need?"
I found myself feeling happier and safer than I have in a long time. One morningI looked out the living-room window to snow lying thick on the Ponderosa branches. For an instant, I imagined that I was back in the wallboard and scrap lumber cabin I had lived in when I first moved to Flagstaff. There would have been only a land-line phone and a few neighbors in the shacks around me. I would have felt that I was embraced by neighbors and friends - and I understood that the hardest fall I'd ever taken had landed me back in that living community.
Whose Behind This Story
Mary Sojourner is the author of three novels, Sisters of the Dream (1989); Going Through Ghosts and 29, 2014; two short story collections Delicate, 2001 and The Talker, 2017; essay collection, Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest; memoir, Solace: rituals of loss and desire and memoir/self-help guide, She Bets Her Life. She reviews books for KNAU, local NPR affiliate and has written countless essays, columns and op eds for High Country News, Yoga Journal, Writers on the Range and dozens of other publications. She teaches writing, in private circles, one-on-one, at colleges and universities, writing conferences and book festivals. She believes in both the limitations and possibilities of healing. Writing is the most powerful tool she has found for doing what is necessary to mend the broken.
Breakthrough Writing website: http://www.breakthroughwriting.net