Summer Hike - Part 6

Bonnie and I take a good drink of water from our bottles.  I'm feeling uneasy, but I have a resolve.  I need to ignore my misgivings and move on down the trail and find Vivie.

Vivie is a puzzle to me.  She's the sparkplug we need to move forward, put our ideas into action, but they've been our ideas, not hers.  When we lose faith in the reward of long effort, she stands smiling, cheering us from an inner source of joy we don't have in ourselves, a silent presence that reassures us.  She is a Kansan, direct from the heart of the heartland, and grew up taking her bearings on wheat silos standing tall above the small towns to the east and west of her family's farm.

She is earnest and naive and incredibly strong, with a bounce in her gait that I attributed to drinking a quart of coffee every day.  When I met her in college, she was busy reading a handbook on hikes in the Ventana Wilderness and said she wanted to stand on top of every high place she could find because she'd never had anything taller than the silos on the horizon all her life.  I imagine a hilltop view to her was like taking the first step to heaven.  At least it looked like that on her face when she finished a hike.  Hiking heightened her sense of introspection and gave her a feeling of possibility.  We were similar in that way, but I couldn't match her energy or strength.

I reach the bottom of the slope with Bonnie and we look to our left toward the steep dropoff we'd seen from above.  Its base is a bramble of scrub oak and broom.  It looks dense and a bad place to land.

"Vivie!" I call and pause to listen.  My heart leaps when I hear half cry/half sob.  "Bonnie!  She's over there in the thick stuff. "  I pat my pocket down for my knife, find it there, chuck my backpack to the trailside and set off in a trot to the brambles and scrub while Bonnie keeps calling.  We're yelling for Vivie to hang tight, we're coming, you're okay and our hopes are high that she's good and nothing's happened bad.

We reach the near edge of the brambles and begin to look for a way in, to find a way to get to the base of the cliff and find Vivie.  She's making a small whimpering sound now that makes my heart lump up in my throat.  I don't want to find her broken and hurt.  I fear the worst.  At least she's making a noise, I think.

"I see her!"  Shouts Bonnie and she begins a wild thrashing approach toward her glimpse of Vivie's form, half hidden in the brush and sticks.  Bonnie holds a branch back for me to get to Vivie.  I kneel down and crawl the last few yards.

Vivie's in a heap, face down in the dirt, one arm underneath her, legs bent up behind her and her other arm jammed in a crook of two saplings growing tightly near each other, crossing trunks at about 18 inches off the ground.  She looks like she cartwheeled into the brush from above; there are shreds of her shirt in trees up overhead.  I wonder when she had screamed, if she can breathe or move.

"Vivie, we're here, we're going to get you out and you're going to be okay," I say to reassure her, but I'm not coming up with a plan very quickly.  My heart is pounding and adrenaline is overwhelming me.  I have to keep calm, be smart, think this through.  I'm the one who's trained in first aid.  I check her pulse and see if she's breathing.  Miraculously, her heart rate is strong and steady.  More amazingly, she is breathing even with her face seemingly stuffed into the dirt floor of the ravine.

"Hey Viv, I think you bounced.  You are one tough cookie and you know what?  No crumbs!"  I groaned at my own stupid joke, but I had to keep talking.  I sent Bonnie back to my pack, to bring me the first aid kit and look for a clear spot to get Vivie to somehow.  I'm thinking about Viv's neck and how it might be broken, that I can't move it or it really would break.  It's awful to think about Viv paralyzed, but I torture myself with the prospect of it.  She needs to always move, to climb every hill and mountain, to beam us forward with her smile.  I need her to be whole and calm and capable.

I tell myself to just knock of the melodrama and get to work getting us out of this mess.  Vivie's body is essentially in a skydiver's pose with back arched, feet and one arm up and behind her with the one arm, her right, underneath her and her face down, a little to her left.  I scoop out the dirt from under her nose and mouth until just her right cheek is resting on the ground.  She can breathe a bit better.  I keep a running commentary whispering into her left ear, telling her what a tough cookie she is, not to crumble, be strong, think about how good she's going to feel once we get her out of here.

"Vivie, can you wiggle your fingers for me?"  I check her left hand and see a finger slowly curl and uncurl, a huge relief.  No paralysis.  Yet.

"Viv, Bonnie's gone for the first aid kit. I'm going to try to free your left arm from the crook of the tree it's stuck in."  I tell her what I want to do and how it's going to work, hoping it's a good plan, feeling like Bonnie's taking forever to get the kit back to me.  I worry about the right arm under Viv's body and the possibility of a break and Vivie going into shock.  Her pulse is still strong.  If it gets thready, it's a good sign she's going into shock and the stakes are going way up.  I can't lose Vivie, I can't lose her.

She's my blood sister, joined to me by a heroic act I'll be forever in debt for, one that saved my life three years ago.  Dear Vivie, look at you now, looking like a rag doll in the middle of nowhere with your clothes all ripped and your body all bent and twisted in the bushes.  My eyes close and I try to remember a quick prayer, but my mind's blank.

"Bonnie!"  I shout.  "Hurry up!"