I shouldn't have been there.
This is one of my favorite photos I've taken and, still, I shouldn't have been there at all.
While I'd normally wake up before sunrise and start hiking in the dark to go splitboarding in a place like this, I ended up heading out around mid-day this time, on a whim.
For context, I'd been in a pretty bad collision some months before. Someone hit me while I was snowboarding and I wound up with a traumatic brain injury. In those months that followed, I was mostly bed-bound, couch-bound, and house-bound. My doctors told me to avoid light, screens, and thinking. So, no brain-teasers, puzzles, or even reading (gasp!). Basically, I'd been sentenced to create the kind of conditions where severe depression thrives.
And so it did.
By the time I took this photo, I'd gone completely stir crazy.
One of the biggest issues in my day-to-day was that my eyes were taking forever to heal. They couldn't track like they were supposed to... they followed movement at different speeds and sometimes struggled to follow anything at all. It created this double-vision sensation that'd make me nauseous to where I'd throw up. My working-memory really sucked, too. I'd forget things people had just said to me moments before and I struggled to keep up with conversations. Years later, I actually suggested a TV series to my friend, Ethan, who'd been my roommate at the time, only to discover that we'd watched it in its entirety during my recovery (once I'd been cleared for screens).
Whoops.
After a lot of physical therapy, when I could finally get around normally and drive myself places, I could not for the life of me remember what it felt like to have a sense of purpose. I hadn't been able to do a lot of the things I liked to do, to go places I'd normally go, to socialize with the friends I'd usually hang out with, or to work at the job I'd built my whole life around. I was stuck in a mountain-town in Wyoming unable to do... anything... surrounded by people who just did not understand how disconnected I felt.
So when I could actually start doing some of that stuff again, I packed a daypack, threw my camera in it at the last minute, and drove myself over to Grand Teton National Park to go splitboarding. Alone. In avalanche terrain.
I just wanted to see if any part of me would come back to life... if it was still in there. You know, figure out if I was still me. Which is why I went and picked a mellow route that I knew really well, and why I told myself it'd be fine if I'd just stick to the ridge and ride down by the skintrack.
It was like hitting the surface and gasping for breath after being underwater for too long. I remember hearing the swishing sound of my splitboard and skins on the snow. The light at that time of day was bouncing off of everything in tiny little droplets. But when I reached the first steeper pitch, my mind went blank. I was trying to remember how I was supposed to move in order to make the platform in the snow I needed to change direction and switchback my way across the slope. While I was trying to figure it out, my body just did it—executed a textbook kickturn—and my uphill leg slid into place as I kept walking.
It wasn't a perfect day. Plenty of stuff still felt really fuzzy. And looking back, I know I shouldn't have been there. But all I can think of when I see that photo is the steam coiling off of me when I reached that spot on the ridge, and how my smile turned into a laugh when I realized I'd let out a happy sigh instead of a sad one.
It was the first time that'd happened in months.
I didn't know how badly I needed that.
* * *
When you start wondering, do you ever go looking?
onward.
For more on this daily column, read the backstory here. And if you know someone who'd appreciate this, pass it along.