Crossing the Threshold

From a chapter of the recovery book I am working on ...

February, 2017: I pull into a paid campground on the Colorado River, separating California from Arizona. I’ve spent a good deal of the day driving east from the Salton Sea in southern California, where I pitched a tent the night before, through agribusiness farmland and desert, much of it Lawrence of Arabia-quality, with pristine dunes cresting and falling like giant geological tsunamis. I can expect more desert when I get back on the road sometime around noon the next day, part of a great and diverse system that extends east from southern California and south from Mexico through Arizona and New Mexico and into Texas, and north through Nevada and Utah and Colorado and Wyoming and into central Oregon and Washington and Canada. The tonal palette ranges from the blinding white salt flats of Death Valley and fine gypsum granules of White Sands to the tinted canyons and red rock of northern Arizona and southern Utah to bleak black volcanic dirt in the middle of Oregon, not to mention incongruent green against rock as life - just about everywhere - somehow finds a way. Three days earlier I was scrambling around the megaliths of Joshua Tree and tomorrow I look forward to the signature saguaros and jagged peaks of southern Arizona. But now, on the Colorado, I unexpectedly encounter wetlands, tall grass and a variety of trees flanking both banks of the river. The sun is setting, the full moon rising. A formation of cranes flies past.

Next morning, up on my riverbank, sipping tea in my folding chair, a spectacular white bird (a small species of egret, perhaps?) swoops below me and alights near the reeds by the opposite bank. I’m on the phone with my daughter, who is now living in New York City, with her husband and four kids. I last saw her in San Diego, some eight months earlier. Three weeks following her visit, I experienced my moment of truth: Hospital tests revealed a totally blocked heart. They would operate on me first thing in the morning. Next thing, I was signing papers and contacting family and friends while nurses and technicians were prepping me for surgery.

Total surrender. It was all out of my hands, now.

That was then. Now here I am - refurbished heart - my whole life packed into my ‘99 Passat, with no home to go back to. I’ve been on the road for about two weeks. I have a vague plan that involves camping out in the southwest and sleeping on people’s couches as I head east to see my sister in central Florida, then up the eastern seaboard to visit my daughter in New York City. From there, I plan to drive up into New England, before heading west across the northern states and into the northwest. From there, perhaps down into California and back into San Diego where I started. Who knows?

I have no confidence in a successful outcome. I’m courting disaster, in questionable health, with a suspect car, zero finances, no knowledge of what I’m doing, plus a brain that should have been returned to the customer service counter of life ages ago. Nevertheless, I dare to give my journey a name: New Heart, New Start. If nothing else, I’m going to make it to my daughter across the continent, even if I have to hitch-hike. After that, let lightning strike. Just let me see my daughter one more time.

Eventually, all heroes on their journeys come to the end of the line. If they’re lucky, they get to die in bed, much loved and admired, as presumably happened to Abraham, father of his people, and George Washington, father of his country. Or they get their Viking funeral like Siegfried or are swept away to a mystic isle like Arthur. Heaven help that they meet an ironic end, as did Agamemnon, who returned from Troy only to be stabbed in his bath by his faithless wife, Clytemnestra. Or that they die forgotten and penniless, as do so many of our real life heroes, returning from distant battlefields.
Several years before: The narrative I had so successfully mapped out for myself way back in 1999 was drawing to a close. By now, my heart was no longer in my work. It was time to write a conclusion to my life as an expert patient. The website that I had been affiliated with for ten years obliged by firing me. I could no longer pay my rent. Then came my heart attack. To add insult to injury, a dear friend bailed out on me.

End of the road. On a near-stranger’s bed, with my life packed into boxes all around me, I drifted into the surrender of sleep-assisted extinction. My expectation was to awake into the type of depression I would never get over. Instead, I woke up to a crazy vision. Now here I was, seven months later, starting to live it.

I break camp and head off. In my mind, my journey begins for real once I cross the border into Arizona. Less than 30 minutes later finds me headed east on I-10. Won’t be long. I get out my phone and point it out my front window. Warning: don’t try this at home. A sign looms in the distance. When I begin to differentiate its features - yellow star and rays against a field of red and blue - I start clicking away. A few minutes later, I pull into a rest stop and step out of the car and onto Arizona. Pinch me, it’s real. I’ve crossed the threshold. I upload my Arizona sign pic to Facebook. GOODBYE, CALIFORNIA! I caption in capital letters. Ahead of me looms three million square miles of continental US.

I have no choice but to trust in the process. On a journey, trust is the feeling of the wind at one’s back. Its opposite, fear and uncertainty, is about facing a stiff headwind. The fear and uncertainty will always be there. Somehow, in my mind, I have to trust that I will somehow make it through the headwinds. Create, in effect, my own wind at my back. There are no guarantees. On any journey, there are many ways to fail. Lack of resolve need not be one them.

John McManamy is the author of Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder and is the publisher of the Bipolar Expert Series, available on Amazon.

Follow John on Twitter at @johnmcman and on Facebook.