Travel. Workout. Write
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but a group of men dipping a dead body in the river was not on the list. Only about 20 feet in front of me, his thin body blocked by those still inhabited by a consciousness, I caught a glimpse of a limp wrist hanging to the side.
I didn’t spend 12 days in Varanasi, only 3. But it was a pretty amazing place; one of my favorites in India for sure. I mostly just wandered around taking photos. I wanted to post the photos of “daily life” in the religious city. It’s probably the pain killers, but I decided writing about Varanasi would be more fun to the tune of “Twelve Days of Christmas.” So bare with me….
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
12) Twelve Boats a Floating
Obviously not just 12. Many, many more than twelve. The evening Aarti at Dashashwamedh Ghat is attended by thousands. We were on the boat and could barely see through all the boats. Then another crowd comes by foot and observes from the ghat. The Aarti is performed by seven priests who commit to the Lord Shiva, Mata Gange, Surya, Agni (Fire), as well as the whole universe made by the Lord Shiva.
11) Eleven Birds a Flying
Early morning on the Ganges, a man feeds the birds.
10) Ten Bags of Laundry
People use the Ganges for everything, include laundry. These men wash clothes on these boards, undeterred from their extremely close proximity to a small burning ghat (area on the river where bodies are burnt)
9) Nine Bathers Bathing
The Ganges is probably most famous for its bathers. Changing rooms dot the ghats. The river is considered sacred and the water is used in rituals and for purification. (I’m counting the two bathers further up on the ghats to get to the #9).
8) Eight Players Playing
I can’t tell you how many times I saw kids playing cricket along the river. One guy even let me play catch with him briefly.
7) Seven Priests at Aarti
Aarti is performed in the evening as well as the morning. My first day in Varanasi I woke up at 4:45am in order to see the morning ritual, and I’m glad I did. The ritual was much more impressive up close.
6) Six Vendors Selling
Markets. Markets everywhere.
5) Five Holy Cows
Cows are considered God-like in India. Beef and cow-killing is banned in many areas. Cows generally roam the streets (including walking with the cars). Here are some just sunning on the ghat.
4) Four Sleeping Sadhus
Sahus are religious ascetics/holy men. Their divinity is shown through their departure from material wealth and mainstream society in order to focus on the divine. They spend most of their time contemplating Brahman and meditating.
3) Three Scared Goats
Goats can also frequently be found wandering the city. Like foreign tourists, the goats have similar trouble crossing the busy streets. This morning, a mother goat and her two kids took off during a brief lull in the cars and bikes. Only one kid made it to the other side. The other freaked out and ran back to the starting point. In a moment of true humanity, one of the vendors picked up the baby goat and walked it across the road back to its mother.
2) Two Vendor Kids
These two kids paddled their boat along the Ganges to sell flowers to tourists and pilgrims for 10 rupees for a little cup (15 cents). People place flowers in the water as an offering.
1) And an Elephant by a Palm Tree
This morning I wandered around the old city, including the parts not frequented by tourists. One of my favorite things about the little alleys was how decorated the doorways and walls could be, often with little elephants or flowers.
Dealing with a broken bone anywhere, I’m guessing, isn’t very fun for anyone who isn’t a masochist. Mostly, I’m considering the broken bone in India a general blessing as opposed to the Untied States. To date, I’ve only spent about $130 total on: 3 doctors visits, 6 X-rays, pain killers/other medication, a sling, a cast, and the removal of said cast. Not bad at all in my opinion.
Today I was less than thrilled with my hospital experience. I don’t have any complaints about the actual doctor. He’s been fine (though very persistent that just putting a cast on me and not performing surgery was a medically sound practice and insisting all American doctors would have performed surgery). I like the doctor. I was really excited to get my cast off today.
UNTIL I saw the cast removal device. It was literally just a saw. And the person in charge of sawing it was not my doctor. I had no idea what his credentials were. He definitely couldn’t speak English. So, first he picks up the scary saw, plugs it in the wall, revs up the drill, and immediately walks too far from the wall and the plug rips out. This does not inspire much confidence.
It’s then I realize the device is literally held together with duct tape.
He tries plugging it back in with no luck. The other two sockets don’t work either. It takes three men to find another saw and plug it in. They start sawing and I’m terrified my arm is going to get chopped off. He is pushing down really hard on the cast until the saw goes through and starts cutting into my skin and I jerk away. Not speaking English, the guy very lightly touches his finger to the blade to show me it won’t cut me. He then proceeds to jab the blade through the cast and deep into my skin some more. At this point I’m physically pushing the second man (whose job was to keep my arm still) away.
A woman comes over and tells me it won’t cut me, its just vibrating. I tell her its hurting a lot and they all just proceed to let the man saw some more. Eventually he just cuts it off with scissors and I can see the mark on my skin and a bit of blood.
The cut wasn’t that deep, a bit like a cat scratch, but I expect more from a hospital. After my X-Rays I went back to the doctor who was absolutely horrified to see the cuts. I didn’t bring it up at all. He just took one look and told me “that’s not supposed to happen,” and said he should have cut it off himself. He apologized a number of times. They aren’t so deep but it means I can’t wear the temporary cast for support until the cuts heal.
I didn’t realize how much more my wrist would hurt now that the cast is gone. I still can’t work out so I’ve gained like 5-10 pounds this month and feel absolutely giant. Luckily I have a maid do my dishes 3x a week for 100 rupees ($1.50) but I still feel bad making her do them. Then Rohit cooks for me. So really, besides the being fat thing, its not the worst existence. I’m going to try to do an hour to two hours of simple walking everyday until I can go back to the gym.
This, of course, is my private hospital experience. Government hospitals are even cheaper and, according to the people I’ve talked to here, quite good. The problem is overcrowding. People will wait in line for hours to be seen. According to the few people in India I’ve discussed this with, the ideal is to know someone at a government hospital who can get you in and get you a bed. Otherwise you have to pay more or wait. I can’t even imagine how healthcare is being affected by demonetization and what that means for people without bank accounts.
“Pre-conception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act”
I broke my wrist in India. I’m not even really surprised.
I arrived in Palestine during the 2014 conflict; only a few days after the James Foley video circulated, and the moment the ceasefire was broken.
My experience trekking to Everest Base Camp not including the last 24 hours. There are no pictures of my trench foot included, so don’t be afraid to look at the photos 😀
(Read about me developing trench foot and getting trench foot in “24 hours to escape Everest Pt. I”)
Only 24 hours ago from writing this, I was sitting on the side of a road sobbing uncontrollably, unable to put any pressure on my foot as the top layers of skin had ripped away, leaving only raw, sensitive flesh that felt like razor blades every time I took a small baby step. The closest drivable town named Salleri still remained 2 whole hours away. This is where a jeep of my friends was waiting for me so we could leave the God-forsaken mountain trek and return to Kathmandu. I had put myself through hell for that jeep and 2 hours from the finish line I was left immobile. In 48 hours I had walked for 15 hours and around 50km up jagged rocks, through thick mud, over landslides, straight up for 4 hours, straight down for 2 hours, up a waterfall, through a river, exposed to leeches… I had done it all. For 4 days every action I took had been in order to leave the Everest region and return to Kathmandu as quickly as possible. Mentally, I was over it. I wanted to go home. I had waited 3 days for a plane that never came. I had agreed to pay for a helicopter but the weather was too bad for it to fly. I was feeling jittery and ready to get back to India to enjoy the few days remaining on my new tourist visa before my flight to the US. So jittery, I actually agreed to redo the most taxing and difficult part of the entire trek in half my original time. And it seemed like, just as I was almost there, just as I could almost taste the freedom, everything was caving in on itself.
Unfortunately, my foot would prove to be only one of many problems that occurred in those 24 final hours.
Taking a moment to back up, I have just finished my trek to Everest Base Camp (yay!). Most people doing EBC (as I discussed in my last blog) fly from Kathmandu to a mountain town named Lukla to do a moderately difficult 12- to 14-day trek. However, for those of us that like to make life difficult for ourselves, you can also take a jeep to Salleri, a town 55 km (34 miles) away from Lukla. This adds an extra 4 grueling days and the path is significantly more rugged and demanding compared to the more popular route. I told everyone that would listen that this was the hardest part of the entire trek, and I was happy about being able to fly from Lukla back to Kathmandu instead. Even on the third day of white fog blanketing Lukla and preventing anyone from leaving, I was telling my new trekking buddies in foul language how horrible that trek was, how crazy they were to attempt it, and that I was never repeating it.
Ten minutes later my bags were packed and I was walking down the mountain with them. I had panicked. The weather looked bad for more than a week and I worried that I’d get stuck in Lukla forever. I desperately wanted to get back to India for the mere week I had on my new visa. My friend’s Nepali guide said if we worked hard we could do the whole trek in two days and then take an overnight jeep. It seemed like a sure thing. The flights didn’t. So I took off.
Our group consisted of 2 Nepali guides from different tour companies, their clients (1 Aussie guy I had met early on, 1 Chilean girl no one knew), an American guy I met near the beginning of the trek, and 1 solo, lazy chick (me). We were all pretty desperate and determined to get out for different reasons and I believed we would, no matter how terrible it was. You can only drive to Salleri, after that the path is too choppy for a vehicle. Let me stress this: the only reason I agreed to this trek was because it would only take two days and a private overnight car. Any extra time and I would have mortgaged a house in Lukla and just given up on leaving the country.
The first day was taxing, but we made it halfway. The second day was brutal. It consisted of a 4-hour steep uphill climb full of blue skies in which we could watch airplanes and helicopters happily busing relaxed tourists out of Lukla while we sweated and panted underneath them. We had made the wrong decision. The weather was beautiful. It taunted us. By the time we were only a few hours out, I was significantly behind my group due to a pain in my foot. I told them to go ahead though, I’d hobble down the mountain as fast as I could to the jeep waiting for us. The hard part is over, I thought. Now it’s a gentle downhill for only about 2 hours. No worries. I even joked with one of the guys about the two of them leaving me in Salleri since I was too slow and he said, “that would never happen, we’re in this together.”
So let’s return to 5:24pm September 19th: Gwen is sobbing uncontrollably trying to remove a wet sock but the pain of even that is so much she can’t take it.
It will get dark in an hour and I’m two hours out. How do we solve this problem? Two Nepali men walked by on the path and saw me bawling and stopped to see what was wrong. They made a moaning noise upon seeing my foot. One tried to touch it and it made me sob more. The overly saturated skin was falling off leaving raw flesh. Luckily one spoke English quite well, better than most of the locals I had met. I explained that I needed to get to Kathmandu and my friends and a jeep were waiting for me in Salleri. I told him I had no phone and no number to contact them. I asked if I could arrange a horse; they said they didn’t think it was possible but convinced me to stand up and start walking with them. One of them took my bag and the other gave me an extra walking stick.
They stopped other locals to inquire about a horse but it wasn’t a possibility. They suggested I stop at a house for the night but I explained again that the jeep was waiting for me and I had no way to tell my friends that I wasn’t coming. Maybe my friends would wait for me for hours or even cancel the jeep. What if they sent a rescue party? No. We needed to get to Salleri as fast as possible. Plus, selfishly, I desperately wanted to leave. I guess I was hobbling at an extra pathetic pace because then one of the guys turned to me and said, “Ok. We carry you.”
And that’s how two Nepali guys started carrying me down the mountain.
The taller one took my bag and my walking stick. The smaller one, no taller than me and probably around my weight, bent over and threw me on his back and took off down the mountain in flip flops. After about 5-6 minutes he would get tired and I would go back to hobbling.
I guess two Nepali guys carrying a beat up looking blonde down a mountain sparked some curiosity among the locals (there were no other trekkers in the area at this point in the day) because eventually another random Nepali guy joined our group of aid workers. Mostly only the small English teacher took me, but once the taller one gave it a try and, despite his appearance, he wasn’t as strong as the little English teacher.
At one point the English teacher, carrying me best as possible, came across a small flood on the road. Instead of just walking through the ankle-deep water, he decided to walk to the edge of the cliff, and in a moment of sheer terror, he jumped on a large rock on the edge with me on his back and then proceeded to hop from rock to rock. We were literally playing a piggy-back hop scotch game on a rocky ledge.
Anything to get to Kathmandu.
Yet another guy joined us, bringing our entourage number up to a whopping 4 Nepali locals and me, the sun-burnt, trench foot ridden, smelly trekker. The fourth to join our crew was a similarly short guy but it didn’t take long for us to realize he was the strongest of them all. He carried me for significantly further than the other two had at any point and would put me down for only a second before lifting me again and running across a swing bridge or up a river bank.
Dusk set. We stopped and asked a woman if we could borrow her motorcycles parked in front of her house but she said they didn’t work. More carrying. We stopped for tea and they ordered a jeep to be brought as far up the road as it could go. They said only 15 more minutes of carrying me. It was 7pm now and pitch black so they strapped a headlamp to me.
At first I felt a bit guilty for what these men were doing for me, but at some point I had a feeling they were enjoying it a bit. It seemed like they wanted to see who could carry me the longest and go the fastest and they would laugh and joke around. I heard one of them saying he wished he had a head strap to carry me the way porters carrying their 50 kilo loads through the mountains. At some point they experimented with innovation and slung a jacket under my butt to help support my weight without touching me anywhere inappropriate.
15 more minutes. I suspected my team arrived in Salleri at 5pm. I had mentioned to them that I may be an hour or so behind them so I hoped, knowing that I was injured, they were waiting patiently and weren’t too worried about me. I hoped they wouldn’t be angry at having to wait; I knew how desperate we all were to get to Kathmandu. More than anything I hoped they hadn’t assembled any sort of search party for me yet. As we finished our trek, I scrutinized every flashlight-holding passerby to determine if it was one of my friends or one of their guides.
And then finally we got to the beautiful jeep and drove to Salleri. And then we drove around Salleri looking for any foreigners in lodges. And then, when I didn’t see anyone familiar, the jeep driver called his jeep driver buddies and told me,
“Yeah, a jeep with some foreigners left an hour ago.”
But no. It couldn’t be my foreigners. I barely spoke with the Chilean girl so sure, maybe she left. But the two guys? We had been in it since the beginning. We’d talked about life and death and every juicy detail in between. They knew more about me than most of the Indian people I’ve been hanging out with for a year. They knew I wanted to be back in Kathmandu so badly that I had agreed to walk 48 hours in the worst trek I’ve ever done. And the one had even laughed at the idea of leaving me behind as if it was a ridiculous statement only 5 hours ago. He told me we were a crew now. We were in this together. And I had told him, “You guys leaving me in Salleri is the only thing I can think of right now that would bring me to tears” while chuckling at the absurdity of the hypothetical situation.
“Yeah, its your friends,” the English teacher said, “They are in the next district over.” He handed me a small cellphone that looked like it had been rejected from the year 1998.
“Hello?”
It was one of the guys.
“Where are you?”
He said something I couldn’t understand. I asked him to repeat. Again just gibberish. I asked a third time as politely as I could muster.
“We had to go,” he said.
Four words. We had to go. And then silence. He hung up. Just like that. So I was stranded in Salleri, alone, with a destroyed foot, 4 Nepali locals looking horrified at the situation, and a driver who wanted his 800 rupees ($8) for rescuing me. The English teacher told me to spend the night in a lodge and I could go to Kathmandu in the public jeep the next morning. But I was devastated. I felt totally dejected and abandoned. Betrayed. Friendless. Plus, I wanted time to see a doctor about my foot in Kathmandu and I wanted to get back to India.
So I told them I wanted to take the jeep to Kathmandu that night and we agreed on a price: 16,000 rupees for the 9-hour ride. $160. It was a lot. Cheaper than most tourists get a jeep for (the going price is $200), but they typically split the cost between multiple people. More expensive than my plane ticket from Lukla to Kathmandu. I can’t stress how upset I was in this moment. I hadn’t washed my hair in three weeks. My foot was swelling and tingling. The time on my India visa was dwindling. And at this moment in time I really hated Nepal and really wanted to leave. Plus, emotionally, I was wrecked. I had opened up and been kind of these people and felt as though, since I was the weakest link, I was too inconvenient to wait for.
So I agreed on the price and it was agreed that two of the Nepali guys would accompany me to Kathmandu for free (my way of saying thank you for their help). And we left.
I spent most of the car ride thinking about this kind of balance, about how these men who didn’t know me had gone out of their way to help and the people I felt closest with hadn’t. I thought a lot about the type of person I wanted to be and how Westerners are so much more selfish than the people I have met in India (and Nepal) when it comes to favors.
A lot of emotional stuff went through my head that night. Eventually I drifted off around midnight with the jeep bumping manically up and down the rocks of the jagged rock and dirt road from Salleri. But soon I would wake up at 4 am on the side of the road to an empty van….
I’ll post the second part of my 24 manic hours finishing my EBC tomorrow. Before you hate too hard on my friends, the pt. 2 involves a bit of redemption and a visit to the police station.
I was completely blown away with the response I got from my last blog. I’ve never had so many shares, comments, and views. In three days I had over 600 people from 25 different countries read my blog. Yes! This is the most exciting thing to happen to me in months. Seriously, I check my blog stats like a crazy person and get really excited when anyone comments. I then wondered how I would ever top that, especially since yesterday my Indian visa expired so I had to flee the country.
No, I’m not back in the US. Despite how much I complain about India (sorry, Indian friends), I’m not ready to leave. Since I can’t convert my employment visa to a tourist visa while still in India, I’m currently sitting in Kathmandu, Nepal! I’m going to apply for the 30-day e-tourist visa which usually takes about 4 days to process. I considered just waiting a few days while my tourist visa processes and returning to Chandigarh to write full time. But then I thought, “why not make it a memorable visa run?”
So I’m climbing Mount Everest.
Ok, so not for real. But sort of. More or less, I am “climbing around Mount Everest.” A friend jokingly quoted this to me a few months ago (its from a movie, I have no idea which one). But now, reflecting, that’s basically what I am doing. To actually climb Mountain Everest (to the summit) you need about $100,000 USD, months of acclimatizing, and years of experience. Let’s be honest, I don’t want to spend $100,000 that way (if I had it). Also, I’m just not that in shape and I’m 100% fine with not being in “Climbing Mt. Everest shape.” I also don’t love heights. And I hate cold. So I don’t think it’s right for me.
But I am trekking to Everest Base Camp, so technically I’ll be at the base of Everest, which is (5,380 meters or 17,6000 feet). I’m pretty excited about the trek, though also questioning my own sanity. I did a trek to 3,600 meters last summer and thought I was dying. I’m extremely sensitive to altitude. Honestly, it’s probably going to be horrible. I’m expecting to complain most of the way.
But like I said in my last post, I spend a lot of time obsessed with my own mortality and in a month I could be 6-feet-under from a freak disease (I’ve had one), a gun/terrorist attack (see last blog post), or, let’s be honest, just crossing a street in Delhi (that many cars should not be in one place at one time going that fast). So I should take the opportunity now. And I tend to enjoy these things even when I hate these things (like scuba diving). Plus, it looks absolutely stunning and I love the idea of actually getting to stand on Everest, even if just a little bit.
The best part of EBC is that there are tea houses (little lodges) all the way up since people actually live in the area, which means I don’t have to camp. It also means I don’t have to hire a porter or a guide. This sounds riskier than it actually is. I visited Nepal in April and everyone I spoke to told me the same thing: there is no point in hiring a guide, there are so many people on the trek that you won’t get lost. Also, my colleague from Jaipur, April, put me in touch with a guy she met traveling in Northern India from the Netherlands. We met up yesterday and are going to go together (for at least some of the trek). So I won’t even be alone as I originally thought.
Most people fly to Lukla from Kathmandu. Instead, we are waking up and leaving at 4:30am in order to take a shared van to Salleri and we will walk a few extra days than required in order to better acclimatize. I found an itinerary from a travel company and we basically decided to just follow what they do (except not pay them or have a guide and just rough it on our own). It looks a bit like this:
Day 1: Drive to Salleri (9-10 hours)
Day 2: Salleri to Taksindo (5-6 hours)
Day 3: Taksindo to Kharikhola (5-6 hours)
Day 4: Kharikhola to Paiya (5-6 hours)
Day 5: Paiya to Phakding (5-6 hours)
Day 6: Phakding to Namache Bazaar (5-6 hours)
Day 7: Acclimatization Day
Day 8: Namache Bazaar to Tengbuche, 3870m (5-6 hours)
Day 9: Tengbuche to Dingbuche, 4350m (5-6 hours)
Day 10: Dingbuche to Loboche, 4950m (4-5 hours)
Day 11: Loboche to Gorakshep and to Everest Base Camp, 5365m (8-9 hours)
Day 12: Kalapatthar, 5545m to Pheriche, 4200m (6-7 hours)
Day 13: Pheriche to Namache Bazaar (5-6 hours)
Day 14: Namache Bazaar to Lukla (5-6 hours)
Day 15: Fly from Lukla to Kathmandu
Day 16: Return to India
You can see the actually itinerary here. Also, I booked a flight back to Lukla for September 17th instead of September 15th just to work in a few extra rest days/exploration day. I think my trekking partner wants to spent more time in the mountains than I do, so at some point we may split off. Let’s see.
People are living in all of these places, except for Everest Base Camp. But even there, the Everest mountaineers are essentially living there for a few months as they slowly ascend and descend Everest in order to get used to the altitude. Altitude is the biggest danger. I even bought travel insurance (which I NEVER do) just because one blog I read said that they saw 12 people airlifted off the mountain in 15 days from altitude sickness. Essentially, I paid $90 so that if this happens I won’t owe $25,000 to the Nepalese rescue services. Also, I read that the next biggest danger is yaks. People have been herded off the mountain by yaks passing on narrow paths. That sounds absolutely terrifying so I’ll try not to die by yak or altitude. Both sound like pretty obnoxiously strange and preventable ways to go out.
So, how does one prepare for trekking to EBC?
I spent a large chunk of the day buying supplies from a nice lady who gave us pretty decent discounts on everything in the store. I’m going to put the costs of everything for the trip so people can get a good sense of how much a trip would cost:
Kathmandu:
Hotel stay in Kathmandu for 2 nights: 800 rupees ($7.50)
Taxi from the airport: 1000 rupees ($9.30)
3 (nice) meals in Kathmandu: 1400 ($13)
Supplies:
Trekking Boots: 3800 rupees ($35.45)
Sleeping Bag rental: 65 rupees/day + 2000 rupee deposit ($18.65, which I will get back)
Coat +rain jacket with hood: 2500 rupees ($23)
Socks: 150 rupees ($1.40)
Sunglasses: 250 rupees ($2.33)
2 boxes of water purifying tablets (50 tablets/box): 400 rupees ($3.73)
Snacks (including medicinal lip ointment): 1900 rupees ($17.72)
Walking sticks: 750 rupees ($7)
Transportation:
Jeep from Kathmandu to Salleri: 2500 rupees ($23.32)
Permit: 3390 rupees ($31.62)
Total so far: 20,840 rupees ($194)
Then we will be paying for places to stay, food, charging our phones, showers, etc… I’m planning to bring about 50,000 rupees with me (though I’ve read that people get by with much less). Since I’m not sure I will have internet for the next 12-20 days, keep a look out for my future stories which will (hopefully) be entertaining and not disastrous.
*Featured Photo from Kasol, India. It is NOT of Everest. But I’ll have plenty of those soon 😀
My eldest cousin is 19 years my senior. I have a feeling I’m “walking in his footsteps” so-to-speak. He spent two decades living in New York City in the film industry, now he owns a Drive-in theatre in the Catskills, dabbles in mixology, and even hosts his very own podcast, “Cinema with a Twist.” Considering the atypical career goals I’ve been harboring for awhile now, leading me to experiment with a year of self-employment, I’m happy there is someone else in my family going about life the way they feel works best for them, even if that doesn’t mean a steady 9-to-5, a pension, and a suburban home.
If you are thinking my cousin tried to shoot me at some point, he didn’t. This is not where the story is going. Thank God. Actually, years ago, the studio in which he was working in NYC was robbed at gunpoint. Since then, he celebrates a holiday on the anniversary of this incident, aptly dubbed, “Happy to be Alive Day.”
Today, I’d like to borrow this tradition for myself.
Exactly ten years ago today, on August 30th, 2006, I was sitting outside Orange High School’s cafeteria on the lower patio for lunch. My friends and I always sat at the same picnic table everyday near the railing, about 30-40 feet from the student parking lot (or something like that, I’m not exactly spatially inclined). On this particular day, I remember hearing a popping noise and looked in the direction of the sound. On the edge of the parking lot I saw a cloud of smoke. Senior prank, I thought. But then, from the smoke, a figure emerged with a long coat and a gun.
I didn’t see anything else. I didn’t hear any gun shots. I didn’t even think. All I know is that I clamored out of that picnic table bench and took off running up the stairs. I don’t remember any of the other people running, just that they were definitely also running. I didn’t check to see if my friends were following me, just that they weren’t ahead of me. I ran from the upper patio to the doors where two things happened:
So I ran in the hall connecting the patio to the cafeteria but I didn’t stop there (like many others). I kept running. I turned the corner of the hall and took off to the end and ran in a random classroom. As in, there was no one in the hallway. Just me. And I ran in an active science classroom without saying anything, ran directly past the teacher and the shocked students, and into the large storage closet. I ran to the very back, and sat down.
People must have been following me because within a fraction of a second, a whole heard of people were also sitting in the closet with me. I remember deciding in my head that if the shooter came into the closet and began shooting that it would be very chaotic and since I was small and in the very back maybe I could pull their dead bodies over mine and the shooter would think I was dead too. (Yes. I actually had this thought. Call it dark; I call it thrifty.)
I also prayed for the first time in maybe a year or two. It was also the last time I prayed. I prayed that, if there is a God, and he let’s me survive, I would go to church that Sunday and I would consider believing in God again. I know they tell Christians in church that “you can’t bargain with God,” but I didn’t have much to lose. So I did. And I did survive. Obviously. And I did go to church that Sunday. And, no, I don’t believe in God again. Not the one you learn in church anyway. Maybe I should, but it’s hard to forced yourself into these things. But I’m eternally thankful to…..well, I’m not sure. The universe? Chance? The deputy that stopped him? My survival instincts?
We waited inside the storage closet for a very long time. Some of the girls cried. I only cry for useless things like when there is mold in my refrigerator or when my boyfriend leaves for the weekend without telling me. For some reason I don’t cry over serious things like when someone I know dies or when a man with a gun starts shooting at me. Maybe I was in too much shock. But at some point, after some period of time that is now lost to my murky memory, we realized that no one was coming to shoot us. And then we started chatting and calling our parents. We took turns borrowing the cell phones of people who had theirs. Mine was somewhere with the gunmen outside on the picnic table. Or confiscated by the police as evidence. Who knows.
I’ll never, ever forget the conversation with my mom that followed. My mom picked up and I explained the situation. Ten years later I don’t remember the exact words but I believe it went something like this:
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom, this is Gwen.”
“Oh whose number are you calling on?”
“____Insert name of person I forgot about____. There is a guy shooting at the school. I’m okay, I’m hiding in a storage closet.”
“Damn.”
After about 5 minutes we all started getting phone calls from our parents again. They, being the little researchers all parents seem to become, gathered as much information as possible on the subject and reached out to us to quell our little worried minds. The first phone call was to a girl. Maybe I knew her at the time. Maybe not. I definitely don’t know her now.
“It’s okay!” She announced. “My mom just called. She said that she called the police to tell them what happened.” A minute later a boy who I actually was friends with also announced that his mother had called the police. In quick succession, something like 5-6 people proudly publicized to the group, still sitting cross-legged in the closet, that their mothers had called the police. The police were not giving any information at this time but officers had been dispatched.
Finally my turn came. The boy who had lent me his cellphone got a call from my mom and he handed me the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi? Gwen?”
“Yes, hi.”
“Ok….I called the news….”
Hundreds of parents calling the police and mine calls the news?! My mom defends this decision to this day, and she should, she was the only parent who called who was able to provide any new information. But I still can’t stress enough how hilarious this was to me. I narrowly escaped death and moments later I was back to laughing. I love my mom.
Seriously though, she did get better information. The news confirmed that the police had been dispatched, the shooter had been taken into custody, no one at the school died (though a few suffered minor injuries), and the police were still investigating a second shooter (there wasn’t one). And that was that. They took him into custody. We spent the majority of the day in lock-down and writing witness reports to the police. And then they let us go. We weren’t allowed to take any of our things that we left outside.
My friend, Cory, drove me home. On the way he made a sharp turn around the bend of a road and I joked, “We survived a school shooting and Cory kills me on my way home!” He didn’t find it funny. Too soon? I have a habit of finding my own jokes particularly more entertaining than anyone else does.
Some people said that since no one died, it wasn’t a big deal. But in reality, the shooting actually did mess me up more than I realized at 16. Some of it seems pretty typical. For a few weeks I kept seeing people with guns everywhere. I still wake up sweating thinking that I am running away from shooters (though in the last ten years they have become more and more infrequent). Recently I considered running the Bombay half marathon and hesitated thinking maybe there would be some attack. Large, crowded spaces still make me a bit nervous. And when I eat at a restaurant, my anxiety goes through the roof if I have to sit with my back to the door.
That being said, I don’t think the shooting has made me more afraid of life or people besides these random quirks. I’ve actually gone off in the opposite direction. I’ve become very accepting of the fact that I am going to die, which has been good and bad. Bad because, well, becoming obsessed with your own mortality can make it a bit difficult to get out of bed some mornings. When you don’t believe in an afterlife (I so wish that I believed in an afterlife), it’s hard to deal with the fact that I simply live and die and in the end, I don’t think it matters that much when or how. And even when I don’t feel emotional about it, turning a fun night of drinking into a discussion of how strange it is that only humans are self-aware of their own death doesn’t generally lighten the mood. I’ve noticed I’m very good at bringing people down at parties….
But I actually owe a lot to that day. I’ve done a lot of really amazing (perhaps risky) things in the last ten years that I don’t know if I would have done otherwise. Feeling like life is all you have really inspires me to live it well: to travel, to meet people, to understand, to do exactly what I want and feel passionate about. I have housed strangers and they have turned into friends. I’ve been to over 50 countries because I’m not sure I will live until 70 or 80 or 90. So why not now? Ultimately what one person defines as success is how they define success, I can agree or disagree. It doesn’t matter if they think I am living my life “successfully” or “stupidly.” That doesn’t mean I’m afraid to work hard or to create difficult goals for myself. It just means I’m not going to pursue something I don’t love because I may never have the time later to do something I care about.
My sister once told me, after a solo trip through the Middle East (including Southern Lebanon and the West Bank during the last war), that my mom once mentioned that maybe my “risky” behavior is partially due to the shooting. I’m not totally sure, but I agree to an extent. Compared to the majority of people I have met, I do seem to be less cautious than them. How much of this is related to the shooting? I have no idea. How much is this related to traveling solo my year out of college? Potentially a lot. It’s hard to judge.
I do sometimes think, “If I die right now, am I okay with the things I have done so far?” And I’d say, 95%, yes. Not 100% because now I really want to write a novel before I die. So that’s what I am doing. And when I finish that, I’ll have some other goal. But who knows? It’s India in the monsoon. Maybe I’ll get dengue and that will be that.
My mom wasn’t thrilled about me moving to India. She, like any sane parent, was worried about my safety. Fair enough. But I still rather have died in India than have lived longer while being bored in Chicago. And after the shooting, why am I guaranteed more life staying in America? I didn’t almost die in the Middle East. I didn’t almost die in India. I didn’t almost die couch surfing in Ukraine. I almost died in high school in a small, safe town in North Carolina.
*****
When I was 15 years old, 9 months before the shooting, my parents and I visited the Eiffel Tower in Paris. For whatever reason, I was afraid to go to the top. What if there is some sort of terrorist attack and I am stuck up there and die? My dad told me that, yes, it is a possibility. We can’t avoid these things. But, ultimately, we can’t stop living just because some crazy guy on a suicide mission, or an emotionally disturbed man with a gun, or the numerous other people who make bad decisions based on mental health problems, anger, and indoctrination, decide to cause a panic. We can’t stop living because we are afraid of dying. I know that sounds cliche, but it’s honestly the best advice he has given me.
And I’ve taken this advice very seriously. I definitely don’t want to die and some days it absolutely terrifies me that I will. I feel guilty for watching television or not waking up at 6am to go to the gym and I feel absolutely overwhelmed that I need to do everything because I don’t have very long. I need to learn the guitar, and speak 7 languages, and how have I not visited North Korea yet? And Brazil? And the moon? Shit, I need to join NASA and learn to fly a helicopter, and become a professional chef, and pet a kangaroo.
But then other days I feel completely fine with it. Some days I think about the last ten years smugly, like I crashed a party I wasn’t invited to, and so I might as well mingle with every single person, eat all the food, drink all the alcohol, and just enjoy this free ride I was given. I won the lottery, I got TEN extra years that maybe I shouldn’t have gotten. Statistically, I shouldn’t have even been born. So let’s go!
Memes of girls standing on mountains with inspirational quotes about traveling and living each day to the fullest don’t appeal to me. Yes, I am aware that my main photo for this site is me standing on a mountain. But its me. It’s something I actually did. And I was shit scared on top of that mountain. And the other day on the train the cops were investigating a mysterious package behind my chair and I got nervous about that too. And, yes, I felt scared that time in Palestine when I went to a protest and couldn’t see anything because of clouds of teargas and canisters and rubber bullets rocketing through the air. The first time I went scuba diving I was 99% sure that I would die. And don’t even get me started on trying to cross the street in Delhi….
The point is, despite being scared, I still do this stuff because I rather die climbing Everest than living an extra ten years and dying of cancer after spending my life behind a desk in a corporation that doesn’t even know I exist. Not everyone wants to climb a mountain, fine. Some people have “normal” jobs and are happy. Great! Go for it! But the point of “happy to be alive day” is just to appreciate that you’ve made it to wherever you are in life now, and to remind yourself of the things and people that are important to you, and to do whatever it is that you want, even if it is shit-scary and possibly stupid to someone else oven if it is dull and boring to one person but you are super happy. Just do you.
And now, two somewhat unrelated videos, and yet ones I still watch on repeat when I feel like I’m not making good life decisions. I don’t have very good advice to give, so maybe you should listen to these people instead:
*UPDATE 2017: Recently a friend in Buenos Aires asked me about my feelings for the shooter. I harbor no resentment. My friend seemed to think this wasn’t normal. I should hate him. But I don’t. I’m not angry in the least bit. I’m thankful. I’m thankful no one died and I’m thankful for the way this incident has made me appreciate life. Plus, I honestly believe his mental health was suffering drastically and he mad a series of very bad decisions based on this state. Having delved deeply into depression after the shooting, I don’t feel like I can judge anyone when they are in such a state.
You can read about his conviction and trial from CNN here.
(1) http://images.usatoday.com/news/_photos/2006/08/31/shooting.jpg
(2) http://chapelboro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ohs2.jpg
(3)http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/newsoforange.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/3/41/341c33d6-f9b1-11e4-b0c4-43d374492501/5553b92b61c78.image.jpg?resize=760%2C570
(Feature Photo ) http://il3.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/6035231/thumb/3.jpg?i10c=img.resize(height:72)
