Autumn is always a transition season in the high country. Changes in weather are vivid and rapid. Warm days are precious, and storms come violently.
Our early autumn was no different, but something special happened this year. There was cause for celebration in our little town of Grand Lake because a life that many thought lost was saved.
It all started innocently enough. A physician and his brother from Texas came to the mountains above town for a day hike in the wilderness. They started early, well prepared with provisions, adequate clothing and water, eagerly taking to the trail. By mid-afternoon, they became separated, had one brief cellphone conversation, and then a silence descended that can be heard only in the empty Rocky Mountain highlands. Only the brother emerged. Night came quick and cold.
The next morning, close to 100 people were at the trailhead: volunteers, emergency teams and Forest Service rescuers. The searchers knew that time and luck become inextricably woven in survival situations. Life or death can be granted in four short days. No luck on this first day; the trail of hope became dark.
At the other end, a man in the elements watched the last of his food and water disappear; loneliness and desperation set in. Lost, disoriented, everything became new and strange.
On Day 3, some of the searchers voiced what most were thinking: You don’t live long without food, water and shelter in a foreign environment. Some left the mountain to comfort the family left waiting in the valley below.
Day 4 had a changed energy. Hopelessness, grinding fatigue, and dull finality was setting in.
Then, a miracle happened. The physician was spotted by one of the rescuers lying among a broken boulder field, miles from where he was expected, at the twilight edge of life.
He beat the odds.
I was thinking of that lone human when twin hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped like a Brahma bull through the lives of several million humans on the Gulf Coast. I watched with horror as one day bled into the next and survivors laid trapped in filth and dark, nothing to eat or drink. And I read the newspaper accounts, watched the images of compassion and chaos.
So what happens to the human psyche after four days of constant destruction, death, hunger and fear? Sure, there were the images of looting, crowding and inhumanity. But there were images of courage, too. Some would blame poverty, or race, or government for the chaos. But let’s not judge what we saw by anything but the yardstick of time.
Four days. What would we do without our favorite reading chair, big-screen TV blaring, hot latte and cellphone close at hand? How about our compassion and humanity, with no light, heat, power, food or water? What about a sense of charity and goodwill with nothing but despair and dead bodies floating by?
Some called the Gulf Coast the Third World. What about those billions who inhabit a Third World reality full-time? Isn’t it so easy to claim a one-time catastrophe and donate a few dollars, then change the channel? Maybe it’s just that we forgot we are all in this life together, and what wounds one touches us all. Maybe we forgot that homelessness and poverty and loss are a whim of life for good people just like us; those who have loved ones and ambitions, hopes and dreams just like us.
The winds of late autumn are a good reason to reflect upon the folks that live in conditions we can only imagine still, along the Gulf Coast and across most of the rest of the world. The Third World is part of our world, too, nearer to our doorstep than most would admit. The stories of kindness and sharing continued to inspire as our state opened its arms to the evacuees.
But let’s not forget. What could happen to us in just four days if our world came unplugged? We may not always beat the odds like that man on the mountain. This life is a gift. We needn’t ever take four days for granted again.
Paul Johnson (compasserve@comcast.net) is a consultant on organizational change and renovates old houses.
