Come Hell or High Water
Nanaimo, British Columbia
‘Life’s hard. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.’
John Wayne
Radium. For a brief moment, there was silence on the other end of the line.
“Huh?” was how it began. That had come out of Richard, who I hadn’t seen for almost a decade, although it was about to happen.
His exclamation had been in response to the answer I had provided, to the question he originally posed.
“You ready for some mean gin and tonics on the dock?” The first westerns had four standard scenes- a bar, a stagecoach, a holdup and a chase. Ours got stuck outside the bar.
“I can’t drink.” Which was about where the silence began.
“I’m sorry.” He sounded like he had dialed a wrong number. “Why not?”
“Because of the antibiotics.” I said. That was the cause of the second long pause.
“What’ll happen?” He asked.
“You’ll need a bucket and mop.” I said.
Richard was a Royal Canadian Mountie and, for that matter, so was his wife, Carolyn. We had met them in Mexico twenty-five years earlier, on our honeymoon, before they were married. Richard had tried to get me bus tickets in English, before I demonstrated how much easier it was in Spanish. We shared many Dos Equis in a cantina where you made sure you sat with your back to the wall.
Richard and Carolyn had fallen apart briefly, until we got them together for a reunion in the basement suite we were renting, in a house in Vancouver. They went on to their own honeymoon, three young sons, and an occasional reminiscence with the instruments of their reacquaintance. The one we were planning was long overdue.
Richard and Carolyn were camped out at their cottage on Christina Lake, a long crescentic mountain ellipse of inland glacial water in the middle of the BC Rockies.
“Come for a long weekend.” Carolyn said. But Robyn and I knew it would take another long weekend to get there and back, and we had to plan our visit carefully.
“I know.” Robyn said. “Let’s take a short trip back through the States on the way home. We could see Montana.”
My wife is from New Zealand. Her sense of distance is not highly developed. When she first came to visit my parents on Lake of the Woods, just over the Manitoba border into Ontario, she asked if we could take a short drive to Toronto. I told her that this would not be possible. The short excursion she wanted us to take on this trip, back through the States on the way home, through Idaho and Washington, with Montana thrown in, would be a reenactment of the original crossing of the American West.
“If you climb in the saddle, be ready for the ride.” I said.
“It’ll be fun.” Said Robyn. It would be fun, I thought. No matter if our pilgrimage through frontier country turned into either a wretched ordeal or a wondrous adventure, it could also turn into a book. Maybe even this one. I was already visiting the places that had captured my imagination on the big Paramount Saturday matinee theatre screen in my hometown, when admission was a quarter, and a Rowntree Cherry Blossom or a roll of black currant fruit pastilles was a dime. Thirty-five cents would get you Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Gene Autry and the Lone Ranger, and Indians and horses and cattle and outlaws and posses and buffalo and US calvary and rattlesnakes and stagecoaches and sagebrush and saloons. Which brought me back to the source of Richard’s disappointment, and mine.
Other than what I did at work most days, I had only been in a hospital as a patient twice before, the first for a tonsillectomy at the age of four (I still remember how good the Jello tasted, whatever that red flavor was), and the second to have my appendix out, forty years later. But this last time beat me up a bit. I had held off as long as possible, under the deluded impression that physicians are supposed to be endowed with some higher form of immunity from these more common maladies, until I was doubled over in agony on our sofa, at the end of a long day treating ailments that seemed far less serious than mine, listening to Robyn threaten me with death, unless I agreed to be driven to our hospital emergency department. The best thing you can do for death is ride off from it. Robyn took me into a collegial corral of amusement.
“That fast enough for you.” Said a good friend, one of the emergency physicians. I had been ushered through an airport-sized waiting room, full of plague and pestilence. Business class.
“You need a scan.” He said, after examining my abdomen.
“The radiologist is coming in.” Said the technician, not much later.
“What for?” I asked.
“You.” She said. And there he was in the flesh, leaning on the machine as I made my exit from it, grinning like coyote at a gopher wedding.
“Classic.” He said.
“Classic what?” I asked.
“Classic diverticulitis.” He said.
“That’s an old man’s disease.” I said. He didn’t say anything.
“Bullshit.” I said, but it was too late. I got admitted, and my surgeon, another colleague far too overjoyed at the prospect of looking after me, appeared in my doorway as a silhouette at 3:30 in the morning. He brought travel photos and stories, of my colon, all annotated and primed, to enable my incarceration in his step-down unit.
“I don’t think I’ll have to operate.” He said. “This time.” I spent four days on the surgical ward, infused with gorillacillins and transitional diets to nowhere. He let me out the day before he was heading to Portugal.
“Any good wines I should try over there?” He asked. I told him. He wrote me out a prescription for metronidazole.
“Take this for two weeks.” He said. “Of course, as an internist, you know about its disulfuram effect.” I had momentarily forgotten. As long as I was taking this antibiotic, no alcohol could pass my lips, or I would become violently ill.
I forget what I called him. He left smiling, and I left it at that.
We both knew that what had occurred, could recur, at any time. Five months later it did, and I was once again on the dreaded regime of abstemious antibiotics. Notwithstanding how devastating it already was, for an author to be unable to drink, it was increasingly unclear whether I would be well enough, or how unwise it would be, to cross the border into the land of mercenary medical care, in my current state of infirmity. They’ll take your house.
There was another complication on the horizon. One of the planned stops, back through the States on the way home, was a hajj to the last home of one of my minor deities, the place where he blew his brains out. Hemingway had lived in Ketchum, and Ketchum was in the news. The Beaver Creek Fire had become a state-wide inferno visible from space, the smoke filled and obscured the sun in Sun Valley, homes were evacuated, wolves were chasing sheep trying to escape, and Salmon, Idaho was becoming Smoked Salmon, Idaho. If the rains came, there would be floods. My medical office assistant, Bonnie, offered me an alternative to our planned diversion.
“You could work if you don’t go.” She said.
“I plan on being dead in Montana.” It was decided. We were going. Come Hell or High Water. We all got pieces of crazy in us, some bigger pieces than others.
'Some may never live, but the crazy never die.'
Hunter S. Thompson
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