Disturbance of Birds

A Disturbance terry tempest williams of nonfiction 233 Women are words. —Thomas Howell, Devises (1581) How strange the way change comes, without warning , and never the way we think. Like a flash flood in the desert, it doesn’t have to be raining before the water hits. I always believed my mortality would arrive on wings of grace, not through a numbing of my body that would prevent me from walking or finding my way toward words. I close my eyes. Let me run this scene through my mind once again. I was at the movie theater in Ellsworth, Maine. Inglourious Basterds. The film ended. The violence stayed with me. As I stood up to exit, the right side of my body went numb. I was having trouble walking. Once outside , I called my husband, Brooke, and I could hear that whatever was 234 ecotone happening was affecting my speech, as well. It was dark. I was in my car, being guided to the emergency room through online directions delivered to me by Brooke from our home in Utah. I pulled into the parking lot and told my worried husband I would call him as soon as I knew anything. Once inside the Maine Coast Memorial Hospital, primarily used by injured lobstermen, I apologized. For what? I can only remember thinking I was overreacting. Sitting in a bright white room where I waited after my symptoms had been described, blood pressure noted, and temperature taken, I watched a fifteen-year-old boy walk into the hospital screaming in pain. He was accompanied by a policeman who by law had to place him in handcuffs. “I’m not a criminal! I didn’t kill anybody,” the boy cried. “I just wanted to kill myself.” After several hours of tests, including a CAT scan and an EKG, a physician’s assistant finally came into my room. Without a preamble, she said, “There is a soft-tissue density on the left side of your brain measuring 11.8 by 8.6 millimeters in maximal dimensions.” I asked her to speak to me in a language I could understand. “I don’t know exactly how to say this,” she said. “But it appears you have a brain tumor and you’re in the middle of a stroke.” I started to laugh, unable to take in what I had just heard. By then the doctor had walked into the room. Overhearing the conversation and the edges of my humor, she interrupted, “How about this: on a scale of one to ten, you are at an eight.” That got my attention. I called Brooke and told him what I knew. He listened and said little. Between the long silences, I shared medical terms like meningioma and aneurysm. He said he would do some research and call me back. He also told me that our home in Castle Valley, Utah, was flooding. Friends and neighbors were sandbagging the banks of Placer Creek even in the middle of the night. He took the phone outside and I could hear what sounded like thunder as the rising river roared through the arroyo past our house. What if I do have a brain tumor? How shall I live? What if I am in the middle of a stroke? How shall I live? 235 terry tempest williams We hung up and for the next seven hours I lay in the dark hospital room alone. My mind became a falcon following its prey, darting through canyons above a turbulent river with the velocity of a bird flying blind around each sandstone curve. I recalled the afternoon when Brooke and I were running Westwater Canyon, a narrowing of the Colorado River known for its intensity, especially during high water. If you paddle poorly through a set of rapids called Skull, named for a set of boulders resembling bones, you end up in the Room of Doom, helpless to escape the violence of a whirlpool where the only way out is by helicopter. I was in that room now, caught in the circling terror of my own thoughts. I kept thinking, This is not my story, this is not my story, this is not...