“Why don’t we just let your mother out here?” she asked. “Your mom would understand. I know she would.”
I wanted to keep going. “We can do it,” I told her. She smiled weakly at me, and we pressed on.
By one-fifteen, we were within sight of the summit—maybe an hour from reaching it. But hours earlier, when we began the hike, we had established a turnaround time of one P.M. We knew we needed enough energy and daylight to make our descent, and we didn’t want to take any risks that would hamper our ability to return safely. Part of us wanted to continue on. But we deferred to good judgment. We resisted temptation and made a smart decision: We had come far enough.
I was understandably emotional as I reached into my backpack and took out my mom’s ashes. I opened the bag, and it was a powerful moment when I let go of her ashes, and watched them take off so easily into the wind. It was a clear blue day, not a cloud in the sky, and the ashes fluttered into the breeze and just kept going.
“I hope she enjoys her travels,” Lorrie said, and I wasn’t able to say much in response. I just watched.
Once that simple ceremony was over, Lorrie and I allowed ourselves to appreciate the majesty of the view. “Our worries seem pretty small in comparison to all of this, don’t they?” Lorrie said to me. “It puts life in perspective.”
We rested for a bit, taking it all in. But we couldn’t stay there too long. Our hike was only half over at that point.
Descending the mountain was almost harder than the hike up, because we were so drained emotionally and physically. By the end of a hike like this, every part of your body that could possibly chafe against another part of your body has done so.
When we reached the bottom of the trail at 8:15 P.M., again in darkness, we felt absolutely exhilarated despite our exhaustion. We were immensely proud of ourselves. Lorrie, who had spent years believing her body had let her down, recognized that in so many ways, her body had come through for her.
Flying home the next day in the rented plane, I circled over the mountain a few times, and we looked down at it with awe. We both joked that it was a good thing we hadn’t flown over it on the way there, because from the air it looked too formidable and steep.
“Wow,” Lorrie said to me. “Can you believe we did it?”
On the plane, as we headed over the mountain and then northwestward toward home, Lorrie, inspired, took out a pen and wrote a “gratitude letter.”
She wrote of how the mountain helped bring clarity to her life: “I realized how small our daily ‘stuff’ is. The mountain was here long before we were, and will be here long after we are gone. The fabric on my family room chairs really seemed insignificant by comparison. But what seemed supremely important during the hike was the giggling and laughter of Katie and Kelly, even when we want it quiet, and the love of our family—those living and those who have left us.”
Lorrie is well on her way to having led “a well-lived life.” She makes her way with passion and purpose, and by doing so reminds others of what is possible. I’m grateful to have shared the trail for so much of it.
LORRIE IS always on the lookout for inspiration, and a couple of years ago, she heard Maria Shriver speak at her annual California Governor and First Lady’s Conference on Women. At one point, Maria recited a Hopi Indian poem that had touched Lorrie deeply. It reads, in part:
Lorrie said this poem moved her to tears. She recognizes that all of us have to find the courage to leave the shore. That means leaving the crutch of our lifelong complaints and resentments, or our unhappiness over our upbringing or our bodies or whatever. It means no longer focusing negative energy on things beyond our control. It means looking beyond the safety of the familiar.
Lorrie loves the image of letting go of the shore, finding the middle of the river, and letting the river take us. It’s a reminder that our lives are a combination of what we can control, what we can’t, and the results of the choices we make.
The river analogy works in our marriage and it helps us cope with matters such as our financial difficulties. “As long as we can keep our heads above the water,” Lorrie says, “we can make it.” It’s a beautiful way of looking at life.
Lorrie and I don’t always succeed in staying optimistic, but we have tried our best to live our lives in the middle of the river. Or else we’re on our favorite hilltop, looking at the world below, reminding ourselves that anything is possible.
11. MANAGING THE SITUATION
AL HAYNES.
Pilots mention his name with reverence.
On July 19, 1989, he was the captain of United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10 traveling from Denver to Chicago. There were 296 passengers and crew on board.
When I was a facilitator of the crew resource management course (CRM), the story of that flight served as one of our most useful teaching tools. And personally, Flight 232 has taught me a great deal about flying—and about life.
After taking off from Denver, Flight 232 flew uneventfully for about eighty-five minutes. Then, soon after crossing into the airspace above Iowa, with the plane at thirty-seven thousand feet and the first officer, William Records, at the controls, an explosion was heard coming from the rear of the plane. The cause was soon apparent: The center engine had failed. Captain Haynes, who was approaching thirty thousand hours of flying experience, asked Dudley Dvorak, the second officer (flight engineer), to go through the engine failure checklist. As this was under way, the cockpit crew realized that all three hydraulic systems were losing pressure. Hydraulics are necessary to control this type of airplane. The first officer was having trouble controlling the aircraft.
Captain Haynes took the controls and saw he could turn the plane to the right but not the left. After the flight engineer announced to the passengers that an engine had failed, an off-duty United check pilot named Dennis Fitch, seated in the main cabin, came up front and offered to help. Captain Haynes welcomed him into the cockpit.
This type of emergency was so rare that there was no training for it, no checklist. It would later be determined that the odds of a simultaneous failure of three hydraulic systems approached a billion to one. But Captain Haynes played the hand he was dealt, and relied on his decades of experience to improvise and to lead. He and the others realized that the only way to control the airplane was to manipulate the throttles. The four men in the cockpit flew like that for more than forty minutes, trying to brainstorm ways they might get the damaged airplane to the ground in one piece. In essence, they had forty minutes to learn a new way of flying an airplane.
Traditionally in the airline industry, there had been a steep hierarchy in cockpits, and first and second officers had been reluctant to offer many suggestions to a captain. The fact that Captain Haynes solicited and welcomed input that day helped the crew find ways to solve this unanticipated problem, and have a better chance of making it to a runway.
At first, air traffic controllers were going to send the crippled aircraft to Des Moines International Airport. But
