This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [15]
In the final tally, Papa had a ruptured kidney, three splintered ribs, a broken arm, and a fractured neck. “It’s only because he was in such good athletic shape that he survived,” Tony claimed, relieved to have been spared the death of a friend. After the internal bleeding was stabilized and Papa’s neck set in a brace, his life was no longer at risk, but he was immobilized and confined to the hospital for a month and a half to recover.
“I’ve never been very introspective,” Papa told Tony. “But sitting in this damn hospital is making me look over the merchandise for the first time, and there’s not much of note.” He began to read anything he could get his hands on, from health books to tales of adventure. When Papa was finally released from the hospital, able to walk but still fragile, the doctor recommended he avoid school and physical activities for the rest of the year. Convalescing at home in Rumson, he began to see more clearly the depths of his father’s quiet despair and the casual alcoholism of both his parents. Skipper and Skates smoked and drank as much as their friends, so they never worried it might have been too much, using alcohol to soothe some unnamed feeling of discontent created by the relative ease of their existence. The gnawing sedative made pale a world where Papa wished to find brightness and the grit of more difficult challenges. Skipper arranged an apprenticeship for Papa on the floor of the stock exchange in Manhattan, and a couple weeks later he received a Christmas bonus, a whole week’s pay. Papa was dumbfounded at landing all that cash for such little effort.
“If I follow this path, all I’ll ever make in life is money,” he told his father, and to his surprise, his father agreed. “If you end up doing what I’m doing, you should have your head examined,” Skipper remarked. That’s when Papa’s search for another way of life began in earnest. He didn’t say outright that he was rejecting his parents’ lifestyle, he just began to slip away.
“Oh, but he had everything going for him,” Skates lamented.
Age twenty-one and fully recovered from his near-fatal motorcycle accident, Papa wanted to celebrate his luck. His love was outdoor sports, so he began to pursue that passion full-time, getting a summer job as a ski instructor in Chile. Any sport he heard about, he had to try—rock climbing, mountaineering, and whitewater kayaking. His instinct was ahead of his time; back then, if you saw a kayak on a car, you likely knew the person. After finishing Williams, Papa received his master’s in Spanish literature at Middlebury’s program in Spain, then landed a job at Colorado Academy teaching Spanish and coaching the ski team. In summers he ran a whitewater kayak program near Aspen, helping kids build their own fiberglass kayaks. Teaching provided the perfect schedule to support his habits—during school vacations he could climb volcanoes in Mexico and summit Mount Logan or go on kayak trips down the great western rivers with his students.
“Bootsie’s off on some expedition or other,” Skates began to brag jovially to make up for the fact that he wasn’t settling down to make a good living like her friends’ sons. Soon he was offered the job at Franconia College, which seemed like a good place to continue his chosen lifestyle.
My relatives might have marveled as Mama milked the goats and sawed firewood with me on her back, carried water from the spring, and used the woodstove for cooking, baking, and canning, and were amazed when Papa showed off the root cellar stocked with the summer’s bounty from the garden and talked of plans for clearing more land. But at the end of the day they were glad to retreat to a nearby ocean-side guesthouse with electricity, running water,