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By Root 844 0

got better quickly. I learned how to tie my shoelaces and even tie a necktie one-handed. Improving rapidly, I practiced my left-handed print and cursive (I had been a righty prior to my accident) and began typing on my laptop with just five fingers. My occupational therapist got me a rocker knife so I could cut meat. With either adaptive equipment or new techniques, I relearned how to do just about everything I needed. I figured out how to put on my watch and fasten that tricky left wrist button on my dress shirts using my teeth. Still, there were things I needed help with. Sometimes my independence drove me not to ask. Other times, though the offered help was well meant, I wanted to figure things out for myself. In the kitchen one afternoon, I caught my sister trying a little too hard to be sensitive while watching me start to peel an orange.

“Do you need a…” She let the question die.

“Do I need a hand?” I finished for her. “Of course I do, silly; I’ve only got one now.” I smiled at her, and she blushed. Getting out my rocker knife, I cut the orange into unpeeled eighths, just like I used to eat at Little League soccer. I secretly stuck a slice in my mouth so it covered my teeth and started hopping around doing my impression of a gorilla. Just at the moment my sister thought I’d totally lost my marbles, I flashed my goofy grin at her, revealing the orange peel. It caught her right as she was taking a sip of water, and she snorted back into her glass, splashing her face. After that, it was a joke for us, her asking me if I needed a hand even when I wasn’t doing anything.

Because of my margarita comment at the press conference, people sent me all sorts of related gifts: twenty-dollar bills with yellow stickies labeled “Margaritas,” gift certificates to Mexican restaurants with reputations for making good margs, even bottles of tequila. Periodically, I got large packages that usually turned out to contain margarita supplies. When I opened one particular box, the contents briefly stunned me. I called my sister into the kitchen. There, besides the bottles of tequila, triple sec, and margarita mix, was a box containing a Black & Decker rechargeable-battery-powered blender. No way. My sister and I became giddy imagining the possibilities—hiking up high peaks, pulling out the backcountry blender, and making margaritas right from the snow. How cool was that? I called out, “High five,” and raised my arms, facing my sister. She put her hands up, ready for contact, and at the last split second, as we both realized the problem, she redirected to give my left hand a high ten. “Ha-ha! You totally forgot!” I teased her. “No, you put it up there, you forgot, too.” She was right, I had. We still laugh about our whiffed high five.

Highlights from the next few months sound so improbable that I can barely believe they happened to me. Four of my friends and I were invited to dinner with our rock idol, Trey Anastasio, and his eight-piece band before their June performance at the Fillmore in Denver. Another of my favorite bands, the String Cheese Incident, ran a major benefit auction and poster sale at Aron’s Incident, a July concert held in my name in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that raised seventeen thousand dollars for the five volunteer search-and-rescue groups in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico that assisted with my rescue. Kristi and Megan, the two women from Moab whom I met in Blue John Canyon, came to the concert, as did my sister and my parents, and about two gazillion of my friends.

I made my return to the mountains with a visit to the avalanche site on Resolution Mountain, where we recovered the belongings Chadwick, Mark, and I lost in the Grade 5 slide in February, including my Sony digital camera, which, when I changed out the battery—despite the shock of the avalanche and the facts that it melted through a ten-foot-deep snowpack, was exposed to four months of rain and sun, and got chewed on by marmots—started working again on the spot. It’s still taking great pictures. (Well done, Sony.)

In July, I went on David Letterman’s show,