Chasing Spring An American Journey Through a Changing Season

Chapter OneThe Pumphead in Winter November 219 HOURS , 43 MINUTES OF DAYLIGHT When setting out on a journey I always take note of the light. In this way, I orient myself and track my course. And so from my hospital bed this morning, awaiting surgery to repair a busted heart valve, I look out at the dawning wintry sky through windows streaked by New York City soot and note that though my view extends across the East River and its phalanx of still-lighted bridges, I see no sign of the sun. I wonder what this gloom might portend, perhaps because some primal part of me believes light has meaning -- that sunlight brings clarity and hope, that an overcast sky invites vagueness and disappointment.Or I might just be feeling the effects of whatever drugs they gave me a couple of hours ago when, while still dark, they wheeled me to an examining room,stood me up under harsh lights, threaded a tube from my groin to my heart, and through it streamed a dye that searched for arterial blockages. I had to be awake, the doctors explained from behind their blue masks, and I understood this to mean there was nothing to be done for the searing pain that accompanied the tubing's every vermiculation. If they found nothing, that was good, and they would then operate. For most of my life, I've been aware of my murmuring heart. Whenever I am alone, in the car, at my desk, lying in bed, I can feel it. I can count its beats until I fall asleep. I've even timed my hiking to its rhythm. Sometimes my heart gulps as if it is trying to swallow something too large. Sometimes it leaps into double time. I never thought this was unusual. I thought everyone could hear his or her heart. Back in my room now, I'm waiting.The pain from the inserted tube is already unrecallable. But I'm wondering how much more is to come. I'm wondering if I'll live."I have to tell you,"my surgeon put it, "that there's a one-out-of-a-hundred chance you might die during the surgery." I had not yet signed on the dotted line, had sat in his office only long enough to see the photos of his family, his sailboat, and the framed crayoned thank-you notes from young patients. I nodded, tight-lipped, as I'd seen it done in the movies, and I signed. Not out of fearlessness: the fact was that if I didn't have the operation I could well end up with inoperable congestive heart failure. The odds that I'll die today, you can look it up, lie somewhere between those of coming up with a straight and those of a full house, both of which, in playing very few hands of poker, I've been dealt. So the dull dawn is beginning to get to me and I find myself thinking what I'll do come spring and realize this is what we all think when stricken by wintry doubts. We think, Come spring... and mean that we're ready for change and that we'll get to it in the season when everything around us begins changing, when vagueness fades and we can proceed with purpose, one with the greening shoots, swelling buds, and lengthening days, attuned to Earth's durable rhythms of light and time. Even those of us whose lives might be barely touched by nature the rest of the year will, come spring, be seduced into a hazy synesthesia wherein smells beget hopes and light induces longings. How does it happen? In my hospital bed I close my eyes and recall my springs of the past, remember the first day when it was suddenly warm enough to ride my bicycle to school or take out my baseball glove (oiled, folded over a hardball in its pocket, and stored all winter with a rubber band around it) and could quit flipping cards across the bedroom floor while it snowed outside. I remember the first top-down days for my yellow 1966 Corvair and warm nights making out in it while fully and painfully clothed. In college, marijuana wafted through the air on good spring days. IStutz, Bruce is the author of 'Chasing Spring An American Journey Through a Changing Season', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743262477 and ISBN 0743262476.