Tornado

On the morning of Saturday, June 15, 2013, my brother Sam sent me a link to an AP wire service story. The headline said, “Rangers Rescue Hiker Hit by Fallen Tree in Smokies,” and the hiker was identified as “Nathan Lipsom.” They’d misspelled our last name, but it was close enough that someone Sam worked with had forwarded it to him, asking if this person was any relation.

“Nathan Lipsom of Cambridge, Mass., was hiking on Low Gap Trail on Thursday when the storm hit around 4 p.m,” the story said. “A ranger discovered the injured hiker around 11:30 a.m. on Friday.”

That was how my family learned that my brother Nate had been caught in a freak tornado. By the time we were reading about it, two days had passed.

Sam called the ranger station mentioned in the article and got through to a Ranger St. Clair. Apparently, Nate had only been on the trail for a few hours when the weather turned. He was trapped in a gully with nowhere to shelter when the forest began bowing and twisting, and one of the big trees fell on him. He managed to drag himself out from under the tree and crawl several yards in the direction of the trail. He pulled out his sleeping bag and lay awake all night with five crushed vertebrae and a broken shinbone sticking through the side of his foot, and that was where he was found eighteen hours later by a ranger who was checking the trail for damage.

After several hours of trying to clear a path through the downed trees, the park rescue team called for a National Guard helicopter. Nate was strapped to a stretcher and lifted up through a hole in the dense forest canopy, the line swinging so wildly in the wind that his face smashed into the metal on the edge of the hatch door. The operation had taken from 11:30 Friday morning, when he was discovered, until 6:45 that evening. Ranger St. Clair told Sam that Nate had stopped by the ranger station on his way into the park and left my mother’s phone number in case of emergency, along with his planned route. Several times during the seven-hour rescue they asked for permission to call her, and each time he’d said no.

We knew he’d planned an ambitious solo hike. Going into the woods was what he did when he was feeling overwhelmed by life. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder while in his twenties. That spring he’d been rattled by a disturbance in the building where he lived with our mother, and a manic episode had been gathering steam ever since. After many weeks of fitful preparation, he’d borrowed her Civic hatchback and driven from Cambridge down to Tennessee.

According to the article, he’d been taken to Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. While Sam spoke with the ranger, I was on the phone with a hospital switchboard operator, who told me there was no Nathan Lipson (or Lipsom) in the patient registry.

I asked if there was another hospital in town.

“Sometimes,” the operator said, “a patient does not give permission to be listed in the registry. Even if he’s here. In the hospital.”

I flew into Knoxville on Wednesday and took a hiker’s shuttle to the Cosby ranger station to retrieve my mother’s Honda. Ranger St. Clair was waiting for me with Nate’s pack and the car key, which he’d found in an outside pocket. He looked exactly like a park ranger: solid, bald, and kind, with a Smokey Bear patch on his short-sleeved shirt. He spread a map out on his desk, marking in ballpoint pen the place on Low Gap Trail where they’d found Nate, and then he showed me the conveyance with which they’d first tried to evacuate him: a sort of plastic toboggan, with wheelbarrow handles and a big front wheel. Imagining Nate bumping down the trail over stones and roots, I was grateful for all those fallen...