The Only Easy Year Was Yesteryear

“It would be pretty neat”, I thought to myself early in 2023, “if I scored a cool flight on the ten year anniversary of my cancer surgery”, but then I guess I forgot about it. That’s probably healthy because “flying the day you wanted” instead of “flying the day you got” is about one of the most dangerous things you can do in paragliding. It happened anyway and I didn’t realize it until the day afterward: on the 23rd of September, having shown up for the Red Rocks Fly-In a couple days early, I launched Monroe Peak for the first time and over the course of an hour-long flight made it to Cove before heading to the main LZ. I am reminded thus that “ninety percent of life is just showing up”.

That day offered a major highlight in my rollercoaster-like 2023 while also marking a big milestone in an arduous journey. Another trip to Monroe both before and after this one also yielded some signature accomplishments in my paragliding reality, to include not just a brain scrambling climb to over 15k’ MSL (gonna want supplemental oxygen before doing that again) but also some of my biggest, most technical, and off-on-my-own cross country flying. By the beginning of October I had a certain feeling of “I’ve made it” with paragliding after a meandering journey of great ambiguity and many setbacks. I found myself describing it as “being like graduating from college — a moment that simultaneously represents a big accomplishment and yet also is only the beginning”.

The year had started so well — a trip to Columbia in January that let me start dialing some new gear and yielded some really satisfying XC, then an incredibly fun trip in March to Italy where the gear began to feel like an extension to my body and I scored some huge-to-me flights as long as four hours, and then a trip to Oregon that began with SIV training in which an assortment of maneuvers finally began to feel natural and concluded with some gorgeous mountain flying.

Then, shortly after returning from Oregon, feeling like I was rocketing out of a really deep gravity well I had been struggling to escape for years since my brother’s passing, I found myself making an impromptu trip to Maryland on no notice because my sister had killed herself. After that I shut down my flying for all of May and June to protect myself from myself. I didn’t have any business doing something as dangerous as strapping into a paraglider when I couldn’t even remember to turn on the washing machine after loading it. Instead I threw myself at a variety of activities with lower consequences for poor cognition — breaking into 3D printing, upping my poi game, swimming and hiking a bunch, lifting heavy weights, working on my bouldering technique, and even re-discovering a love of running with the help of a self-propelled treadmill.

I also enjoyed some sporting clays along the way which perhaps some folks would think was weird and I guess they are not wrong. Over the seven years since moving away from Maryland, a regular outing with a particular old friend when visiting there has been to go to the PG County Trap And Skeet Center for a round of sporting clays. On this particular visit, doing the same as usual, my friend remarked “I was kind of surprised you suggested this as our outing”, which I suppose was fair given the trigger for this particular visit was my sister having impulse-purchased a shotgun which she used the next day. :shrug:, I replied. When I got back to Utah I was like “I’ve been missing that” and so, already owning a couple of shotguns but neither of them much good for sporting clays, I looked up local options and finding that Wasatch Wing And Clay looked promising I went over to the nearby Cabela’s and purchased an over-under shotgun. While filling out the background investigation form, as I had done many times previously, I found myself wondering what must have been going through my sister’s head while she did the same, thinking to myself “whelp — I guess she must have lied on this question and nobody cares enough to actually check that”.

As June turned to July I found myself imagining getting back into the air but struggling to convince myself to actually do it. On the first of July good friend Josh Ellison invited me out to the local park to help him launch a tandem flight as a way to ease back into it. We shared a big and memorable hug that neither of us seemed inclined to have end then got him and his passenger into the air. The next day I finally strapped into my own gear and had a simple but meaningful flight that marked the end of a painful hiatus. This was classic Josh — always there for you in a way where you might wonder why he seemed more confident in your ability to do things than you were in yourself. Roughly two years earlier I had had my first substantial interaction with him when he sought me out for a long phone call after he saw me damn near kill myself paragliding in a terrifying cascade of events that I managed to navigate with the narrowest of margins, escaping physically unscathed but nonetheless with a deep fear injury. In January of 2023 we had had a dinner at my place which we paired with wide ranging conversation that included crying unabashedly over one of each of our brothers, one of his that he seemingly saved from a rock-bottom situation and one of mine that I could not.

After breaking through this barrier and getting back into the air I went on to an assortment of flights that were both my biggest in Utah as well as in some ways my biggest anywhere. Expanding what “Utah” meant to me to include not just the Wasatch but also central Utah’s Monroe proved game changing, not just yielding great experiences there but also unlocking the skill and comfort to do more daring things back home in the Wasatch. By the time I returned home in early October from my third trip to Monroe I was again flying high and feeling hopeful.

And so when, in mid-October, Josh was killed in a midair collision while piloting a tandem just a stone’s throw from where I had helped him launch a few months earlier, I was pretty thoroughly crushed and feeling whiplashed in a way that perhaps had no precedent in my reality. Two days before his funeral I found myself doing a repair job on my grill so as to break out of a cooking slump… and realized that the ashes in the firebox must have been from our dinner in January. Subsequent to that dinner the Suncrest Snowmageddon had shut things doing for a few months and then after my sister had killed herself I was too demotivated to cook at all despite this usually being a chief source of joy in my life. I have since then used my beloved Kamado Joe to cook for an assortment of friends but so far only been out for one simple flight and am struggling to find the cogency and stoke to get in the air. This, too, shall in the fullness of time pass but paragliding is not a sport in which to force things.

And so it has been a slog of an autumn with a mix of excruciating events and painful reminders. I had been anticipating the weightiness of the four year anniversary of my brother’s passing in late October. Then on the 13th and 14th of November I felt myself hit with the one-two punch of it being six months since I discovered my sisters passing and four weeks since Josh had left us. With my gym’s pool shut down for want of heater repairs and the ski lifts not having yet begun spinning I was feeling profoundly awful and so I was correspondingly profoundly grateful to have some skins I could slap onto my skis to make an uphill trek at Alta and get in my first skiing of the season to lighten the burden. Knowing that my sister having been born on Thanksgiving would make that holiday extra difficult I packed the preceding week with meals shared with friends. Thanksgiving itself was quite nice though the boundaries to either side stung — on Wednesday evening I received word that a much loved member of the paragliding community, Todd Crowley, had died in his home of a massive heart attack; on Friday morning I woke up to an email informing me that my parents are separating. I had shared a big hug with Todd at Josh’s funeral in Draper and shortly thereafter sat around a fire pit with him in Park City reminiscing about Josh, reflecting on flying, and pondering the meaning of it all. Part of me can’t help but wonder, Josh and Todd being such paragliding BFFs, to what extent we might guess that Todd died of a broken heart.

It has been a heck of a decade as I have reinvented myself multiple times while navigating an assortment of trauma that I would not wish on anyone. I am incredibly grateful that I finally got to plonk my butt into a ski lift chair yesterday for the first time this season. Snow covered mountains are among the most potent medicine.

I will meander my way back to a happier state, but I have no delusions about the pace and completeness thereof, and I find myself turning again to a particular passage from the book Good To Great, wherein the author Jim Collins recounts his conversation with Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking military officer in the so-called Hanoi Hilton prison camp…

A little later in the conversation, after I’d absorbed that and said nothing for about five minutes because I was just stunned, I asked him who didn’t make it out of those systemic circumstances as well as he had.

He said, “Oh, it’s easy. I can tell you who didn’t make it out. It was the optimists.”

And I said, “I’m really confused, Admiral Stockdale.”  

He said, “The optimists. Yes. They were the ones who always said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ Christmas would come and it would go. And there would be another Christmas. And they died of a broken heart.” Then he grabbed me by the shoulders and he said, “This is what I learned from those years in the prison camp, where all those constraints just were oppressive. You must never ever ever confuse, on the one hand, the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail despite those constraints with, on the other hand, the need for the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are. We’re not getting out of here by Christmas.”

Every year I feel more competent to deal with what the world may throw my way but, as the saying goes, “the game adjusts to match your skills”…