A cast iron handle to a trap door, then down some steep slippery steps. Are you counting? And then a passageway. At the end of which a glimmer of light. A group of men. Laughter. A nightclub, and a red light inside.
Then down some slippery steps. Are you counting? Have you reached thirty nine? And what makes you think that your story last week “must be a dream”?
And, another thing, don’t apologise (it is editorial policy here not to). Don’t apologise about “James”: James Hunt (sic: meaning ‘as it is’). World Racing Champion. 1976. Hot year. Driving for McClaren and smoking forty a day. On the edge of the racing line and going flat out on the Nurburgring circuit heading for that corner where your friend’s car is already on fire.
I am counting. Because at a precise moment, the story goes that it is at the number thirty nine or in the next few seconds, I am meant to do something. Maybe it is to change gear. Maybe it is to hit the brakes. Maybe it is to start running. Or to stop. At this split-second moment I can’t remember which. How much adrenalin is pumping? Or is it the fear? Fear driving the fear.
The next six seconds, thirty nine steps, or 127 Hours. I hadn’t thought about that film much until about a month ago (based on the true story of professional mountaineer Aron Ralston). I was looking for books to recommend for a ‘Navigating Serious Illness’ section of a health chapter I was writing for a book for maturing men, and came across The Power of Two: Surviving Serious Illness with an Attitude and an Advocate by Brian and Geri Monaghan (Workman Publishing, New York. 2009). Brian and Geri keeping going; he was seriously ill, she became his health advocate, and it was Brian who told me how much he had got from the film 127 Hours. Theirs is one of the best books of "experience and common sense" I know on the subject of serious illness.
The path of Conscious Ageing? An Elders Rite of Passage? Post-traumatic growth? “James”: this time another James. James Hawkins writes across the boundaries in his latest two posts in his Good Medicine blog about the “most intense, prolonged, potentially catastrophic experience of my life”, and about the “lessons, self-compassion and post-traumatic growth”.
About his 3 Hours: three hours down a snow shute above a cliff in the mountains of Skye. I dwell on every word and rejoice in his rescue! James says he writes, “both personally and as a therapist”, and, I would add, writing across the boundaries of humanity about:
…wayfaring / the primacy of movement / the nature and constitution of the ground / divergent perspectives of earth as ground of habitation and scientific object / the intercourse of earth and sky, wind and weather / the fluidity and friction of materials / the experience of light, sound and feeling / what it means to make things / drawing and writing/ storytelling (this list as it happens is borrowed from Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, by Tim Ingold (2012)).
I am not there yet, but I am still counting.