Up a Tree

As Gavin slowly wakened from his nap he wondered why the cabin temperature was so low. Beyond low. It was freezing. When his eyes opened groggily he saw pine branches partly obstructing his view of a cloudless starry night sky. His first thought was, “Oh, that is why it’s cold.” His second was that this answer raised a host of new questions. He sometimes woke up disoriented when he traveled; in the morning when waking in a motel room somewhere, he might struggle for a few moments to remember where he was and why. But he never had awakened to sky before. He didn’t remember ever having debarked from the commuter aircraft on which he had booked a flight from Nashville to Roanoke. His face stung as though scratched. He grew conscious of what felt like bruises on his torso. He felt beneath himself with his hands. He was still strapped to his passenger seat… and he was in a tree.
 
Gavin patted his body for his cell phone. He then remembered it was in the inside pocket of his jacket. His jacket was missing. He had removed it earlier because the cabin temperature was too warm. He realized his shoes were missing, too. He had not removed those. They must have flown off in the aftermath of whatever happened to the plane. He recalled a story years ago of a woman whose seat landed in an Amazon forest canopy after her airliner broke up in midair. She survived. He was probably in the hills of North Carolina or Virginia. His odds should be at least as good.
 
Gavin took stock of his surroundings. His seat was lodged in branches with his face to the sky. He leaned to his left and looked down. His eyes took a minute to adjust to the darkness below. When his pupils dilated enough to at least see the ground, he realized he was some 40 feet in the air. The chair shifted suddenly from the change in the center of gravity. Gavin held his breath expecting to be in free fall, but the branches held. He exhaled and gently undid his seat belt. He reached carefully to a branch above his head. The tall pine had climbable branches at this height, but from what he could see the lowest 20 feet of the trunk had mere stubs where it wasn’t bare. He pulled himself out of the seat and cautiously worked his way down the tree. As he reached the bare section of the trunk his hands and shirt already were sticky from sap. He smelled like one of those evergreen car fresheners. The lower part of the tree contained enough branch stubs for useful hand and foot holds but they also stabbed into him as he climbed down past them. He scraped and scratched his body repeatedly through his clothes on the way down, but he was sure the wounds were superficial. By the time he reached the ground he was physically exhausted.
 
Gavin’s shoeless feet were cold. At least there was no snow on this winter day, but there was frost on the ground that turned damp from his own body heat. His socks already were moist to his ankles. He wondered if he should stay put and wait for rescuers. He quickly rejected the idea. The rest of the plane apparently was someplace else – or someplaces else. How would anyone know to look for him here? And when? He might die of exposure by morning if he didn’t move. Downhill was not only easier than uphill, but seemed more likely to lead to civilization. He chose the direction that seemed to be descending and began walking. A survival tip he remembered from childhood – though he couldn’t say when and where he heard it – said to follow water downstream. That will take you to people. If he encountered a stream he would follow that.
 
There was no clear path among the trees. Repeatedly he was forced to push through tangles of vines, brush, and small branches. Thorns did minor violence to his hands and branches smacked him in the face. His wet, cold, shoeless feet seemed to find every possible loose rock on which to step. He was sure his feet were bleeding. At least the cold numbed them. His early determination waned as he plodded on for seemed like hours, though occasional peeks at the sky through the trees revealed that the stars and moon hadn’t changed nearly enough for so much time to have passed. Exhaustion and melancholy overtook him. The desire to sit down, rest, and perhaps sleep, grew nearly overwhelming. His rational mind told him it would be a permanent sleep. He would die of exposure. The non-rational side of him didn’t care. At each stumble it became harder to motivate himself to get back up and resume walking. He pushed onward one foot in front of the other. He no longer could feel his feet. His lungs hurt. He found he had to stop frequently or else grow lightheaded. He took to counting 25 steps, halting to catch his breath, and then pacing another 25.
 
Gavin swore he could hear something in the woods in back of him. Was it just deer or was something tracking him? Coyotes had spread into the area in recent decades but this sounded bigger. A bear? Black bears were fairly common in these woods but he always had been told they are not naturally aggressive with humans. Yet they were predators after all. And he did reek of blood. The idea of sitting down was suddenly less enticing.
 
One foot stepped in water. He had found a stream. He followed the stream to a larger stream. He no longer could feel anything below his knees. He wasn’t sure how he was managing to stand. The stream eventually debouched into a small grassy area, and in front of him was a culvert. He climbed up the embankment next to it on all fours and found himself by a country lane. Headlights appeared. He stood up and waved to the oncoming sedan. The driver honked at him and swerved around him.
 
At least the commotion on the road had scared away the bear if that is what it was. He was too tired to walk any further. He stood until a new set of headlights approached. This time he walked into the middle of the road and waved with both arms. The SUV slowed and came to a stop several feet in front of him. He could not make out the driver but she shouted out the driver’s side window, “Stay there! Don’t come any closer! I’ve called the police!”
 
“Good,” he called back. “That is what I want!” The plane crashed,” he added. His words were oddly slurred. His chattering teeth were interfering with his pronunciation. He sat down in the road.
 
In the back of a police car a half hour later he repeatedly refused to be taken to a hospital. The officers complied with his request to turn up the heat. The warmth felt wonderful.
 
 “We’d really should take you to the hospital.”
 
“If you do I’ll simply call a cab and leave. I just want to go home. I need some dry clothes,” said Gavin.
 
“Your lawyer is at the police station. Ask him.”
 
“My lawyer? Bob Miller is there?”
 
“No, an Anders Something. The lieutenant called in just before we picked you up. She said he was there. He claims to represent all victims in the county of the air crash, though I’m guessing that might be just you. Most of the plane came down over in Rockbridge. I don’t know who tipped him off about you.”
 
At the police station Anders Grunwald, Esq., stopped police from taking Gavin’s statement until he had a chance to consult with his client.
 
“Hi Gavin,” Anders said.
 
“Who are you?”
 
“Someone with experience in the area of airline liability. We have an exceptional case against the airline – much better than if you had died.”
 
“I’m rather pleased about that, too, but ‘We’? And is there any chance I can get some dry clothes?”
 
“I’ll send my assistant. There is an all-night Walmart down the road, but I’ll have to bill you for her time.”
 
“Uh, OK.”
 
“Here, jot down your sizes.” He handed the note off to an overdressed woman in her 20s. “The work on the suit against the airline won’t cost anything, of course. We’ll just take a percentage of the settlement.”
 
A middle age woman in a severe business suit approached the table. “Hi Gavin. Sorry to interrupt you two, but I’m from Schiller and Schiller. This is my card. If we won’t be representing you I have to ask if you made any effort to find other survivors while you were in the woods.”
 
“I’d advise you not to answer that,” Anders said
 
“If not, there may have been hate crimes committed, at least to the extent of civil liability. We’ll have to check who else was on the plane.”
 
“Hate crimes?” Gavin asked.
 
“Don’t worry,” said Anders. “We can represent you in that, too, though we’ll have to bill by the hour.” To the other attorney he said, “I need some privacy with my client.”
 
She nodded and backed off.
 
“Look, I just want to go home. My family has to be worried sick.”
 
“April will be back with your clothes and she’ll drop you off, Gavin. Your home is only an hour away. Now let’s get that statement to the police out of the way. The FAA will send someone to speak to you, too.”
 
The sun was up when April pulled into Gavin’s driveway off a suburban street in Roanoke.
 
“Our office will be in touch with you,” she said. “Once again, we strongly urge you to refrain from commenting on last night’s events without our presence. That includes to news media people.”
 
“Right.”
 
Gavin exited the car and walked to the front door of his simple but pleasant two story home. His feet hurt, mostly from the rough treatment they had received during the night but in part from chafing on account of his new shoes. He patted his pockets for keys but realized they were in his missing jacket. The front door opened in front of him. It was his son David.
 
“Hi dad. Can’t talk. Here comes the school bus.”
 
“OK, we’ll talk later.”
 
He entered the small foyer and smelled the familiar aroma of home. A gray tabby cat slept on the sofa in the living room.
 
He climbed the steps to the second floor and opened the door to the main bedroom. His wife was still in bed. She opened one eyelid and then closed it again.
 
“Hi, honey,” Sarah said. “Today is a work-from-home day, so I’m sleeping in an extra hour. You’re late. Flight get delayed?”
 
“There were problems. Didn’t anyone call you during the night?”
 
“I don’t know. My phone is off. Can we talk about this later?” she asked.
 
“Sure.”
 
Sarah turned away onto her other side.
 
Gavin walked down the steps and sat next to the cat who ignored him. He reached for the TV remote but hesitated to push the power button. He wasn’t quite ready to watch the news. He put the remote down, closed his eyes, and stroked the cat. The cat purred.

 

Leftover Wine

My lifelong relationship with alcohol has not been entirely untroubled. It is conventional wisdom that those with conservative lifestyles are most apt to run wild when they do give into temptation. My experience does nothing to challenge that wisdom. That experience is not limited to alcohol use. I’m not referring to pharmaceuticals, but I’ll leave my dabblings in other vices for another essay – or perhaps not. Early caution with alcohol in my teens was followed by reckless excess in my twenties followed by a teetotal stretch in my thirties, at last mellowing out to “normal” (light to moderate) consumption in my forties.
 
I was not precocious with my vices pre-college. An all-male prep school (1964-70) and observant parents probably would have made that difficult even if I were inclined toward them at the time. I was a literally sober young man my first two years of college as well. I enjoyed those years, the tail end of hippiedom, for their music and free love values but felt no desire to alter my mind even with so old-fashioned a drug as alcohol. That changed when evenings at a local pub with the boys left me on each occasion with a pleasant buzz. The buzzes were legal: the drinking age in DC at the time was 18. So, in my junior year I began stocking my own shelves in my dorm room. At the time I favored wines – nothing stronger than port and sherry. It was from overindulging in merlot in a fellow student’s dorm room that I experienced my first full-blown hangover.
 
Hangovers are at least as old as the technology to brew alcohol. That technology is prehistoric, but the English word “hangover” is fairly recent, the earliest known appearance in print is in a 1904 slang dictionary. Before then the preferred word was “crapulence,” which I rather like better. But no matter how you say it (“cruda” [rawness] in New World Spanish, “resaca” [flotsam] in Old World Spanish, “Kater” [tomcat – you figure that one out] in German, etc.), it’s an unpleasantness with which most of us gain familiarity in life.
 
After that dorm evening of bibulous conviviality with friends and merlot, I returned to my own dorm room three floors below. It was the size of a walk-in closet, but it was a single, so I never had to endure a roommate in college. I fell into bed in the small hours of the morning with my stereo playing a stack of LPs. Sometime after 4 a.m. I awakened to an awful sensation. Whatever was inside me had no intention of staying there. I leapt out of bed and hurried down the hallway to the bathroom: no simple task with the walls seeming to swirl around me. I entered a stall, dropped to my knees, and hugged the toilet. You know what happened next. I could not understand how so much liquid kept emerging. It seemed to exceed by far what I had ingested. At length the heaves became dry and then subsided. I returned to my room still nauseated. Playing on the stereo (no kidding) was Melanie’s Leftover Wine, a song that to this day I cannot hear without queasiness. A couple more hours of sleep did not prevent the subsequent daylight hours from being less than my happiest.
 

Dorm room at GWU 1972

A wiser young man than I might have concluded that this was no experience to duplicate. I did not draw this conclusion. Instead, similar events recurred with alarming frequency over the next several years as I remained willing to pay for nights before with mornings after. The first real nudge toward change came at age 26 on a Sunday morning in New Orleans when I crossed a traffic-free one-way ten-foot wide street in the Quarter. A police officer called out to me, “Sir, you just jaywalked!” I was thoroughly hungover and dehydrated from the night before – also lightheaded. I stood in the glaring sun as he wrote me a ticket. The world turned weirdly gray and in the next moment of awareness I was on my back on the sidewalk as the sky slowly came into focus.
 
“Sir, are you OK?” the officer asked.
 
“Yes.”
 
“Sign here,” he said.
 
I at last concluded hangovers shouldn’t be duplicated. My intake declined thereafter. Still, it wasn’t until age 30 that I became a full teetotaler. I remained so for a decade, which had the mixed blessing of making me the designated driver for every evening out with friends. After age 40, tentative experiments showed I no longer sought the buzz and so no longer needed to shun the bottle. Since then entire years have gone by when I haven’t consumed as much as the CDC’s recommended maximum for a single week (14 drinks), and there has been no year with a week in it that met that maximum. Never again have I felt anything like those long-ago dorm room blues. I might even play a Melanie album tonight including Leftover Wine. As nostalgic flower child music goes, it’s actually pretty good.