Writer in the Forest

Chapter 12

I needed a good long walk into the woods to think things through, so I headed up the other side of the Skoke to see if I could make it to Big Log Camp, over five miles in. I don’t have much energy. I’m edgy, and from the get-go I hear noises in the woods, but the only thing I pass that has a face is a guy with a chainsaw doing some trail maintenance.

Mom’s world consists of smoking cigarettes while she lay on the sofa with a heating pad. Some days I go to their house and Mom is still in bed, looking kind of dazed, hopeless. If she gets up at all, she sits at the kitchen table in her dustcoat, smoking for hours and staring straight ahead.

She is dependent on prescription painkillers, sleeping pills, and anti-anxiety drugs. She rarely leaves the house or gets dressed.

They can no longer keep up with the house or yard work. The entire width of their small lot is a border of Mom’s pink roses. As she neglected them they quit producing and now the dead blossoms are left on the stem year-round.

In between trips to the hospital (and by trips, I mean all night), working, buying their groceries, cleaning the refrigerator, mowing the lawn and handpicking the grass out from the brick pathway, washing curtains and making several failed attempts to clean the basement, I’ve tried to save Mom’s roses. I’ve consulted books, asked questions, and did my best. I can’t seem to stop them from dying.

I understand that elderly folks don’t metabolize drugs very well, and are often over drugged because of it. Her back pain is so great that she’s taking more and more narcotics with less and less benefit. Harry is worn out with the midnight rides to the hospital for more drugs. Now he just calls an ambulance because Mom figured out the wait was shorter if you arrived by aid car.

I don’t know what to do next. I just go with the flow, whatever hits me each day and make decisions when I need to. I’m really too tired for this long hike and where is the river, anyway? Why would anyone construct a trail that doesn’t stay by the river?

[Note to journal]: In the end I documented 63 hospital visits in one year. We’d have Harry in the ER one night with heart failure or infections from dialysis, and Mom in the ER the next night with pain, a heart attack, heart failure, or breathing problems. If I had known what was in front of me, I  swear I would have thrown myself in the river.

I trudge on, figuring I’ll know it when I see it. I take breaks sitting on bumpy rocks and getting my butt all muddy. Finally I get there, and Big Log Camp and the river are both revealed. Now we’re talkin’.

Big Log Camp

And it appears someone is up here besides me. I relax my death grip on my pepper spray. Funny how when you’re in the deepest woods people can be all around you and you don’t know it.

To sleep in there must feel like a giant green and brown god has its arms wrapped around you. Cranky or not, the tree doesn’t mind. Just come on in and sleep awhile.

I reached my goal and it’s the end of the trail for me. I’m jumpy as hell about bears way up here by myself. I’m in too deep. No answers here today.

I hiked out a little faster than I hiked in and made a bee line back to Bremerton to the one person who knew all the answers. There, all sweaty and bedraggled in my hiking gear I barged in and blurted out my question: How will I know when it’s time for a nursing home?

Mom’s voice rose above the Wheel of Fortune as she said, “You’ll know”.

I hoped to hell she was right.