2010 - New Granddaughter, Evie; Cross-Globe Shuffles; New Horizons in Training and Travel; Elves Chasm Again Dangling by A Strand, An Epic Trek

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Her grandchildren were her ultimate dream and pleasure, but also one of Linda’s greatest unfilled longings, only once in the twelve years that followed being able to see them without flying to the other side of the world. She did, she tried, as did Paul, but the physical strain and expense over the years proved difficult. As she saw her beloved grandchildren less and less it left a weight on her heart and a hole in her happiness. But the grandchildren knew: they loved Gramma Linda and knew she loved them.

Professionally, Linda demonstrated an insatiable thirst to help, and an insatiable thirst to learn so she could help. Not content with her thriving acupuncture practice, she got on the Colorado Board, joined “Acupuncturists Without Borders”, and began trips that took her in the next seven years across the world to teach and mentor. In 2010 she began a homeopathy training program, and in the next years undertook to learn aromatherapy, herbal and botanical medicine.

All this in her “spare time”…

Linda fell in love with the “International Home Buyers” TV series, dreaming of a place less expensive and one still beautiful enough where she might settle with Jared. This preoccupation grew into her becoming an avid watcher of home restoration TV, almost every show of that topic she could see or record.

Both Paul and Linda acknowledged they were “getting on in years”. Their fervor and zeal had not slackened, and their impetus to discover and to live life to its fullest had not gotten tapped out. But no doubt their physical capability and the means to do so both were becoming limited. Working her ass off was hard, funding Alia, funding her own trips was hard. Being “alone” was ever harder. But carpe diem, she did not give up. They did not give up, and in 2010 planned perhaps one of their most ambitious backpacking treks ever, back to Elves Chasm in the Grand Canyon.

From Apache Point along the Esplanade into upper Elves Chasm, then down to the Colorado River, along up-river through the Inner Gorge, and out via South Bass Canyon: with their friend Tom and an acupuncturist friend, Christian, Linda and Paul set to planning. A two-week trek with scanty water and their aging bods, but still childlike awe in their hearts and positive audacity in their step.

The issue was water. Water is ALWAYS the issue in the desert.  A body needs a gallon a day in the desert, more with exertion. That’s 8 to 16 pounds of water. No matter how light the camping gear and the food, one can at most carry two to three days of water plus gear and weeks of rations. Those are loads (as some often complained) accomplished only with hip-splitting back-aching, groan-eliciting effort not even a combat soldier should do for long.

Ergo, finding water remained critical, Task-1, and they missed two of their few and far-scattered planned water sources.

A dried spring here, one soaked with minerals and clearly unpalatable there: stashing their packs they slid-scrambled to the Colorado river with a few portable bottles to freshen their water, but then scaling up to the Esplanade they ran low again two days later. Tom once in desperation plunged his face into a small rivulet of Copper Canyon side-canyon water without knowing what was upstream, no cup, no purification. Christian, too, once thought a stream good and dumped the rest of his carried water, his GOOD if muddy water, and filled his bags with contaminated water thinking it was pure.

Not good.

But they made it, Linda sharing some her jealously rationed water to get them through, keeping her head about her.

On the Esplanade they ascended a bend on the trail to see two condors mating on the rocks before them, a marvel of pinions and dancing torsos, slow motion dignity. Two more of those largest-of-all birds with their prehistoric-scale wingspans soared overhead with ravens and canyon wrens. Spanish Bayonet yucca grew a foot per day, meaning if one sat there an hour, the plant literally grew in front of wondering eyes. Stars: Linda with her app to show where a satellite soared overhead, the constellations, planets coming into conjunction.

The second-to-last night, hurricane winds and horizontal rain slanted across the Esplanade above the Vishnu schist of Granite Gorge. Rounding the point, they had no place to run, no place to hide. Tom and Christian sought to rig a make-shift canopy on ski poles, which the wind ripped into a ground cover tatter. Linda and Paul got their tent up, but an inadequate tie-down for the rain fly flapped like a machine gun with strong gusts all night. But behind a slanted slab of small rock in their tent-bubble with nature doing a thing around them, they held each other (and the tent corners) through the night, confident somehow that holding each other would do it.

Without question Paul declared to any who listened he never met a man or a woman that could do all Linda did, endure that kind of rigor mostly with a smile, her self-reliance coexisting with all her other generative attributes and with her flaws. On this trip and more, halting but enough where they both knew true positive feeling remained, they became enabled even for just moments at a time to get beyond their self-protectiveness, irritation, or disappointment to see each other for the sake of the person they loved.

Paradoxically, though, it made it harder on Linda, and made her harder. She saw love still endured, that they could and wanted to do things together. But both made her already-committed bolting for independence and freedom even more difficult for her. She did not trust Paul or perhaps herself to go back, to reconcile, to forgive. So, she sallied forth and onward.

Paul did, too, after a near-death (so he thought) experience on the Elves’ Chasm trek, with scant or late help from Linda (so he thought!). They both kept moving, mostly on and apart.

On a float-trip years earlier (2006) they scaled the rimrock of the Inner Gorge on a rope, a free-climb which to Paul’s utter consternation left him freaked out and phobic, clinging to the ground. But Linda did well. Paul got through it, got over it, so he thought. On this trip, though, it was the same rope but years older, still dangling vertical to a shelf 30 feet below the rim. That was bad enough, but to get to the rope required scaling down a near-vertical lava flow, only 15 feet high but totally exposed, 100 feet of thin air between the edge and the river, the climber and the river. Going UP in 2006 to Paul’s recollection, as frightened as he was then, seemed far easier.

Indeed, getting the backpacks down nearly proved his undoing. Thinking to jockey the packs down so Linda could follow, he unwisely shouldered both their loads without strapping them tightly, determining he would quickly swing them to the rock shelf below after descending.

Wrong. Rotating midway around a corner the weight of the packs pulled him out and back, paralyzingly close to down and off. Only clenching fingers clinging to the rock like cacti roots prevented an immediate “radical descent”, i.e., a likely fatal fall.

At that point, seeing Paul clinging on that damn rock with face ashen and swaying packs, Linda giggled.

It used to drive Paul crazy, especially when he was the one hurt or in danger and she appeared to be scoffing or ridiculing him. She wasn’t. She couldn’t help it. When her innate joy vortexed near the stress of something “really bad”, stuff most her life she kept at arm’s length or suppressed, the collision with her own fright for some reason emerged as apparent mirth. A simple nervous reaction, just letting off steam, she showed concern during crisis moments in a uniquely bizarre “Linda way”, smiling or giggling.

Paul grew to understand, but in the moment it rankled. It hurt. But she did reach out her arm from above to steady him while he called frantically for help from Tom and Christian below. He made it and really couldn’t complain, all things considered.