Alone

[jayfurr]

I will never forget the sight: close to fifteen hundred bright pink tents, shrouded in the darkness of night, lined up row by row on the fields of Occuquan Regional Park, not far from our nation's capital in the Virginia suburbs south of Washington, DC.

Steaming.

Literally.

It was o'dark thirty, late-late-late on the first night of my first Breast Cancer 3-Day. I'd spent the day walking the streets and roads of the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC and, a bit footsore and blistered, had arrived at our campsite on the banks of the Occuquan River, a lovely tract just made for events like ours. Clean, quiet, peaceful, ... lonely.

I had no tentmate that year because our little four-person 3-Day team included one member, Heather Phillips, who had young children to go home to each night, and because we'd craftily listed her as my 'tentmate' I didn't have to share a tent. That may strike some as a bit antisocial, but years of traveling for work have given me a strong preference for a bit of alone time at the end of each day, free from the necessity of social niceties... allowing me to reflect, unwind, and re-center.

So there I was. It was somewhere around two o'clock in the morning. Chilly. Rather dark except around the scattered light standards hooked to portable generators to provide a basic safe level of nighttime illumination for the campers. The hot, humid day had passed and the air had that crisp October edge to it that makes one think of autumn and the changing of leaves and the coming of Halloween. I'd spent the day dutifully drinking endless bottles of water and sport drink as I walked my twenty miles... and now I found myself waking every sixty minutes or so to visit the port-o-jons discreetly arranged around the perimeter of the encampment.

Joy.

There is something about crawling out of a pink two-person tent on your hands and knees at two o'clock in the morning, desperately needing the bathroom, stiff-legged and aching, groping in the dew for the flashlight you've just dropped, that really makes you stop and go "what the heck am I doing?"

And that's when I noticed that the tents all around me were literally steaming as warm, rising air, made humid by the breath and perspiration of thousands of sleeping walkers, became visible in the cold night air. It was strangely fascinating and a bit eerie.

When I came out of the port-o-jon, my business complete, I saw that I wasn't alone in answering a call of nature. Here and there in the gloom I saw other walkers shuffling through the murk, heads down, all lost in their private worlds, intent on quickly visiting the facilities before stealing a few more hours of sleep.

There we all were: all united for a common purpose, and yet, all alone in the night. I felt acutely alone.

My maudlin woolgathering was not solely due to the stillness, the shadows, and the cold night air. I had retired for the evening several hours earlier feeling a bit depressed, not because I was stiff from walking or because I had accumulated a good many more blisters than I had expected, but rather because ... well, I wanted some recognition and appreciation for taking part in the event. I wanted to be seen by people who knew me as some sort of hero, okay, engaged in a deeply noble cause, giving my body and my time and my money and my will to try to make a difference.

I had been using my cell phone to record LiveJournal voice posts which my wife Carole, back home in Vermont, had dutifully transcribed for a faithful audience of followers... which turned out to be three people: Carole herself and two other friends (hi, John, hi Susan!), and ... well... as far as I could tell from the number of comments people had posted, no one else. My many donors had apparently elected to follow my progress in silence... if they recalled I was walking that weekend at all.

No one had come out to the cheering stations along the route to cheer for me -- a natural consequence of walking in a 3-Day 500 miles from home -- and I'd found myself really envying those walkers who had family members by the dozens lined up waiting for them at each cheering station, a mad, crazy gang of supporters bearing drinks and snacks and flowers and hugs and going nuts when they spotted Mom or Aunt Susie coming down the sidewalk.

That's not to say that I was entirely down in the dumps. I'd met wonderful people along the route, fellow walkers with stories that were uplifting and stories that were sad. I wasn't utterly lost in my introspection, woebegone because the event wasn't all about me. I'd enjoyed the event a lot so far.

But, selfishly, I guess I have too say that I wanted something more. I knew my feelings and thoughts didn't really make sense, but...

That lonely hour, as I stood there in the darkness and the mist and the dew, feeling pathetic, was my personal "dark night of the soul". It wasn't a good time, not at all. I crawled back into my tent and zipped it up behind me and just sat on my sleeping bag, head cradled in my hands until I finally put my head down and drifted off to sleep again. (And woke up again ninety minutes later needing another trip to the bathroom, but okay, I understand, it's time for this part of the story to move on.)

The next day I tried harder to involve myself more in the real purpose of the 3-Day. I felt rather bad about my selfish brooding in the middle of the night and promised myself to do a better job living the Komen spirit. My unspoken mantra that I kept repeating, wordlessly, at every corner and every intersection, was simply "It's not about me."

After all, I had never suffered breast cancer. Nor had I lost a family member to breast cancer. Nor had to endure the agony of repeated visits to a doctor's office with my wife or my daughter or my mother, dreading what the doctor might say. I had never known what it was like to suffer through harsh treatment regimes and the humiliating loss of dignity that comes from losing hair, losing one's sense of taste, losing body weight and shambling around like a human skeleton, praying for a chance at a normal life. Yet people who had experienced precisely that were walking right next to me on the route and they weren't sad, weren't upset if no one was there to greet them at a cheering station. They were glad for a chance to take on obstacles and show the world that a little thing like breast cancer wasn't going to stop them from doing something pretty damn incredible. They might have looked like natural candidates for the ICU but they were out walking sixty... long... hot... MILES.

I often tell the story of the great hill that greeted us at one point on the third day of that Washington, DC Breast Cancer 3-Day, the mighty Alp that caused many walkers who rounded a corner and saw it looming before them to audibly moan. But the moral of that story was that we all shut the heck up and counted our blessings when a skinny, bald, pink-capped woman in her sixties sourly looked at us all and said "It beats chemo" and powered right on up that hill.

It's not about me.

It's not about me.

It's not about me.

And I made it through to the end. Walked every foot of the sixty miles. My feet were hamburger when I finished because I'd stupidly elected to walk the 3-Day wearing my favorite pair of mountain hiking boots which had served me so well on the trails and summits of Vermont... but which were far from appropriate for the monotonous, repetitive pounding of feet on asphalt and concrete of which city walking inevitably consists. I didn't mind, though... because along the way I had learned a lesson from my fellow walkers that was worth every blister. A lesson that was even worth the toenail of my right big toe. (Said 'goodbye' to that fella about three days after the walk, but hey, among some people losing a toenail on the 3-Day is a badge of honor.)

It was a lesson that was reinforced with each survivor I met. Driven home when a woman I'd never met saw me looking a bit weary at lunch on the second day and asked, "Do you need a hug?" Made clear, abundantly clear, when I trekked along for a mile or so with a man who was walking the 3-Day despite losing his wife to breast cancer less than two weeks earlier.

People ask me why I signed up for two 3-Day events the next year, 2009, one as crew, one as a walker. People ask why I was so insistent about getting my wife involved as well so she could find out first-hand what it's really like. They ask why I signed up for four events this year, 2010 -- one as crew, three as a walker. And why I took time out over and over again while in Boston on business this winter to make it to as many Get Started meetings as I could.

I try as best I can to answer the question, but I don't think one really can understand why until you've been to a 3-Day yourself and seen the iron will alloyed with boundless love that informs each survivor.

But the answer is also made clear when you encounter a fellow walker, someone you've never seen before in your entire life, moping because they got a stress fracture or missed a few miles of the route riding a "sweep van" because of dehydration or hyponatremia... and when instantly, without question, you've known what to do. You've offered them a hug, and just as instantly, had that hug tearfully accepted.

The answer is made really, really clear when you meet a walker who lost her mother to breast cancer. And lost her aunt to breast cancer. And intended to walk the 3-Day with her sister-in-law, only to lose her to breast cancer less than a month before the walk. And that walker had a rotten day because of blisters and heat exhaustion. And is feeling perhaps a tiny bit resentful because all around other walkers are happy and celebrating and giving one another enthusiastic high-5s and no one seems to care how sad and bad she feels.

You give that poor walker a hug. And you do whatever the heck it takes to make her feel appreciated and to listen to her story. She deserves no less.

It's a terrible thing, being alone. And no one should ever have to feel alone on a 3-Day -- and it's my job, and the job of my fellow walkers and crew, to see to it that no one ever does.