Ken McAlpine's Blog: The Hesitant Blogger - Posts Tagged "cancer"

Hi: I'm not sure if anyone will even read this, but it's part of a book-in-progress about life lessons at the ocean's edge. If you do happen across this, thanks so much for reading.

Sincerely, Ken


When I was nineteen my friend Dennis and I drove to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for Thanksgiving. We were in college at the University of Virginia. We had a few days off from school. We drove past gray cities, then slow moving towns, and finally farms, ice-glazed and still. We drove across the wind-whipped Pamlico Sound. It leapt and churned, the water the color of chocolate milk.

We spent our first hour on the Outer Banks looking for the cheapest motel we could find. We found it in Nags Head. We stood at the front counter. The desk clerk looked out the frosted windows to where snow flurries now danced. His eyes took in our car.

“I hope you have the right gear,” he said.

“We do,” I said, and it was only half a lie.

“If you don’t, you’d be stupid to go,” he said.

We paid with a fistful of wrinkled bills. We had a little left for gas, a little for beer, and a little less for food. Food didn’t matter. We had a whole cooked turkey in the cooler we brought into the room. Dennis had cooked the turkey back at the house we shared with two other friends. Dennis loved to cook and he was good at it. Mostly he improvised. He would rummage through the cabinets, using whatever ingredients struck his fancy, making things up as he went along. He combined ingredients that would raise the hairs on the back of a real chef’s neck. He would shake in a little of this and a lot of that. If he used a cookbook I never saw it. I don’t know what he used to season this particular turkey, but whatever it was it was just right; the entire drive down, otherworldly smells tormented us.

The minute we got in the room, we opened the cooler and pulled out the turkey. Honeymooners don’t get down to business faster. Dennis had remembered to bring a platter for the turkey, but I had forgotten the silverware. It didn’t matter. Dennis had outdone himself. In short order everything, including us, smelled of turkey. Outside the wind roared and the snow moved in circles. Inside the heater clattered, and drafts pushed through the walls.

The motel was on the beach. Our room faced east. Over the tops of the dunes we could see the white-capped ocean.

Dennis rarely hesitated. He didn’t hesitate now.

“Let’s go,” he said.

We pulled on our wetsuits. Outside, the snow bit at our faces. It took us longer than it should have to get the surfboards off the car racks. Our fingers were already half frozen.

A small boardwalk crossed the dunes. The snow made a light dusting on the wood. Dennis walked in front of me. To this day I can still see the enormous prints of his bare feet. My own feet ached as much as my hands. Plenty of people surf in the winter but they are generally prepared, covered from head to toe – neoprene hood for the head, neoprene boots and gloves for the feet and hands - in wetsuit. I had lied to the desk clerk. We had brought what we had.

By the time we stepped on to the frozen beach everything ached, but I didn’t feel right about whining. I had no hood, boots or gloves, but at least my wetsuit extended all the way to my ankles. Dennis’s wetsuit reached only to his knees. His calves were turning a curious red.

Snow had gathered in Dennis’s hair. I knew what he would look like when he got old.

On the exposed beach the wind roared even louder. Brown gobbets of foam quivered on the sand.

Dennis stopped. He looked at the ocean, gray and heaving and then he looked to me because there was no one else to consult.

“What’s the water temperature?” he asked.

“Forty-six.”

“Are we stupid?”

“Yes,” I said.

Dennis watched me for another long moment.

“I hope we have enough turkey,” he said, and then he walked into the ocean.

I can’t recall how long we stayed in the water, but it probably wasn’t more than ten minutes. The waves were angry and roared in from every direction, clobbering us and punching the breath from our lungs and spinning us underwater in an oddly quiet brownish-blackness. But we were nineteen, and Dennis was an All-American swimmer with lungs like a Hoover vacuum and we were both so in love with the thrill of riding a wave that all the clobbering was worth it. You see, I had only half lied to the desk clerk. The right gear isn’t just something you buy.

I don’t remember how many waves we caught, but it was certainly less than we could count on one hand, and then we were running up the beach, half laughing and half weeping, partly because we were deathly cold, partly because Dennis jolted up the beach like a man on stilts, his legs now a nauseating shade of purple. Everything burned, and we were alive.

We surfed again the next day.

As I write this it seems like yesterday, but it isn’t. My friend Dennis died yesterday. His lungs killed him. That’s where the cancer started.

It’s stupid not to do the things you can.

Recently I met a woman. She was friendly and pleasant, with a warm smile. I listened to her closely when she spoke. I did this, in part, to return the favor. She had listened closely, and even asked questions, during the book talk I had just given.

“I want to go away and see things,” she told me.

Many people say this sort of thing. Not so many have Stage 3 cancer. She had a bucket list, she said. Ambling around the country, going nowhere in particular, was on it.

As a travel writer, and someone with a talent for getting lost, I have considerable experience with aimless ambling. Wittingly and unwittingly, I have seen my share of back alleys and back roads. Partly because she was so obviously sincere in her desire to travel, partly because talking with people with cancer produces in me a sort of hyper enthusiasm, as if a loopy smile and a lot of hand waving can wipe the disease away, I prattled on and on about the joys of travel. The chance to find hidden corners. The chance to meet people. The chance to see the sunrise in an unfamiliar place. The chance for so many chances. Here I may have paused.

She listened quietly through my babble. When I finished she said, “That’s exactly what I want to do.” The woman’s name is Hope.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Here in Ventura County there are events everywhere. An open house at the new Rolling Oaks Radiology Women's Imaging Center in Thousand Oaks. A “Relay for Life” event on the track at Camarillo High School, honoring cancer survivors and raising money to fight the disease. A cancer symposium, "Surviving and Thriving", at the Ventura Beach Marriott. Another symposium, "How to Cheat, Treat and Beat Breast Cancer", at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. On the first day of October our local paper the Ventura County Star printed the day’s edition in pink.

If I was a newspaper journalist I would have written this column at the beginning of the month. But I’m not. I’m writing this at the end of the month, hoping it carries into November and maybe on. Cancer will carry on. Procrastination too.

I don’t know if Hope has breast cancer. She didn’t say. She might have breast cancer, she might not. Sadly, there are many cancer options.

I may have been frenetically enthusiastic in my delivery, but I told my new friend Hope the truth. The greatest joy of travel is the people you meet. Travel has seen me to breathtaking places and moments -- lightning forking over the snowy Andes, mantas swooping through blue Hawaiian waters, evening shadows purpling the Grand Canyon’s deeps – but even these moments pale in comparison with the people I’ve met. They have surprised me. They have bewitched me. They have welcomed me into their towns, and sometimes their homes. Sometimes they have cheated me, or stolen from me or just been rude and cold. People come in many packages. But most of the people have been good, and many of them have given me a gift, a little piece of them I will carry with me forever. Lessons in living.

Once, kayaking off Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, I met a man named David. It was Thanksgiving and brutally cold, a hard, damp wind producing an uncountable army of whitecaps on Pamlico Sound. When I met David, he was bobbing at the mouth of Ocracoke’s tiny harbor. I saw him before he saw me. His head was down, consulting the navigational chart spread across the deck of his kayak. He had a compass too.

It is bad form to paddle silently past the only other kayaker for miles.

“Beautiful out here, isn’t it?” I said.

It was, in a frozen, gray, victory-at-sea fashion.

David’s head came up slowly, as if reluctant to leave the chart. He appeared to be in his fifties, though it was hard to tell, as only a small portion of his face emerged from the bubble-wrap of protective gear. I was wearing nothing but a wetsuit, and perhaps a bluish complexion.

David looked at me like the idiot I was.

“It’s a little cold,” he said.

We bobbed in the water, the wind beating between us, and exchanged pleasantries. David had come to Ocracoke for the long Thanksgiving weekend.

He didn’t smile as we talked, but his tone was amiable. I had drifted close enough to see that he had a small plastic orb affixed to the shoulder of his jacket. Technologically speaking, it resembled one of those Christmas snow globes, only instead of swirling snowflakes, it contained a winking light.

His eyes followed mine. “GPS,” he said. “I’m one of those people who like to plan.”

David asked where I was from, and when I told him California, he said his wife’s family lived in California. “My wife died about a year and a half ago,” he said. “Of cancer.”

The wind whistled.

“I was just paddling in a sluice back there,” David said, more to himself than me. “There were herons and egrets. It probably goes back two miles. I was paddling back there and I’m thinking, ‘This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.’”

I paddled to David’s sluice, a ribbon of gin clear water little more than paddle-length wide in most places, snaking into the interior of the island. I floated over its mirror surface to the whisper of marsh grass. Out of the wind it was warm. Birds sang, and egrets, snow-white and silent, swooped low, dropping below the grass line to their own secrets.

David was right, it was beautiful, but now, ten years later, it is David I remember, bobbing quietly beneath the marled sky, a meticulous man who couldn’t plan for everything.

“You know, she loved to kayak,” he said. “She really wanted to come here, but we just kept putting it off.”

You don’t have to travel far to meet people with cancer or bucket lists. I met Hope ten minutes from home. I’m glad I did.

Before we parted Hope gave me another warm smile, but there was something harder in her eyes.

“I mean it,” she said. “I’m really going to do this.”

If Hope reads this, I hope she doesn’t mind that I wrote about her. But I hope she doesn’t read it. I hope she’s miles from the internet, sitting on a weathered dock in the Florida Keys, watching baitfish ripple the surface as the sun rises.

By then it probably won’t be October. Not that it matters. Any month is as good for cancer as it is for following through on a bucket list.