Window Closes…Another Opens
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010New York Times
The Summer That Ended All Summers
By JOSH WEIL
Published: August 21, 2010
Leverett, Mass.
No one — not the doctor in Cairo with his egret-feather hair and bad-news eyes; not the spinal surgeon, with his broad Egyptian shoulders and eagerness for the knife — knew how it happened. It might have started during Ramadan, out by the pyramids, on a spine-rattling, bareback gallop. It might have happened 13,000 feet up in the Alpine swamps between Uganda and Congo, as I leapt from tussock to tussock with 50 pounds of gear on my back.
But whatever caused the disc to burst and splatter against my spinal nerve, it brought the endless summer of heat and adventure that I had found while living in Northern Africa for a year suddenly, surely, to an end.
Ever since I was a kid, I’d lived for summer — and, until a few years ago, sharing it with my older brother was what brought summer to life. We used to crouch on the bank of the Deerfield River where it wound south of Vermont, taking turns blowing up our Kmart raft, bulge-cheeked and frog-eyed, our mouths on the inflation valves, dizzy and sputtering with laughter. We’d buckle on bike helmets, paddle into the rapids and spill.
If you’ve ever been hurled head-first into white water, you know the feeling: your world upturned, your hold on it spun loose, the current pitching you forward so fast you struggle to grasp what has happened to time. When you come up to breathe, the air is pure exhilaration.
Zoe