I Almost Died Falling Down A Waterfall. But It Gave Me A Reason To Live

This article originally appeared on Backpacker

It was supposed to be Tom’s hike. His wife Lana had died in a car accident two weeks earlier, and I, along with our group of friends--Ron, Suzanne, Su, Claire--was trying to keep him busy with loving distractions. But that's not how the day worked out, for him or for me.

I was a mess at that time of my life. I didn't really get sexuality when I was in high school. The drive that united male and female classmates was missing for me. But then, during a college internship at a magazine publishing company in Knoxville, Tennessee, I met Janie (I've changed her name for privacy), who was an editor there. Suddenly I got it: sex--with a woman--was the best thing ever. But it was also the worst thing ever, for a privileged, rule-following, perfectionist girl like I was back then.

This was the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president, and a newly identified malady-AIDS--was targeting gay men in New York City. Religious conservatives of that era declared that it was God's retribution for an abomination. In that climate, I couldn't be lesbian. And yet I was.

After college, I was hired by the publishing company, and Janie and I continued our relationship. The job went well enough, but life with Janie became fraught: We were in love, and I was delighted to discover I was a sensual being after all. But I was still so confused about being a lesbian. The world offered me no vision of how I could be out, happy, and successful. Regrettably, I kept giving Janie mixed messages: I love you, now go away! So in late 1984, she left Knoxville for New York, and I crashed hard. When spring arrived the next year, I was still struggling: I had no energy, there were lots of tears, and my mind was a depressed dog chasing its own ragged tail.

Then Lana died when her car was rear-ended at a stop light. I got a call from Ron on a Friday night in late April. He was organizing a hike in the Smokies. Did I want to go to support Tom?

The Porters Creek Trail is a typical Smoky Mountains hike--a canopy of trees overhead, rhododendrons in patches, a babbling brook nearby, and a lovely cascade for a lunch break. Better still were my babbling friends--talking about their lives, keeping Tom in the conversation, supporting him in unspoken ways. Despite the camaraderie, I felt terribly alone.

We stopped for lunch at the base of the waterfall, admiring the graceful way the water plunged over a series of ledges; it was almost like three or four waterfalls in one. People were pulling out their food, sharing it around. But I chafed in company, and I couldn't hold up my end of the small talk. So I wandered off to take a closer look at the cascade. Craning my neck, I saw water spilling over a ledge; after a cool misty morning, the sun was finally coming out. I huffed 150 feet up the steep face next to the falls, and stopped at the top, where the stream began its descent to the pools below. That's when I spotted a rock just across the stream, basking in a beam of sunlight.

I looked at the wet, mossy stones between me and the sunlight. I thought, "Looks dangerous." Then the despair spoke and said, "Oh, what the hell." And I stepped from one chapter of my life into another.

Even before this hike, I had been taking increasingly outrageous risks. Driving too fast, drinking too much, ignoring the consequences of my actions, because--what the hell--I wasn't sure there was a place for me in this world anyway. I was exhausted with confusion, with the feeling I didn't belong. I know now what I didn't know then: I was unconsciously working to erase myself exactly the way my homophobic country wanted me to.

So I stepped toward the sunny rock--and immediately crashed down on my backside. In an instant I was falling downhill with the water, slipping and sliding, clawing at rocks, but I couldn't get a purchase. I picked up speed even as time seemed to slow down. As I bounced side to side with rising force, I observed with a weird, out-of-body curiosity: "So now I'll know what it's like to die by bashing my head on a rock."

I flew over one ledge and dropped hard on another, a freefall of about 20 feet. My left hip and leg took the brunt of the fall and the incredible pain snapped me back into my body. Water was pouring down onto me but I was no longer falling. The agony was all consuming. I began to scream.

Poor, grieving Tom led the charge up the slope. As the most experienced hiker in the group, he took control. He dispatched Ron--a triathlete and fitness nut--to run for help. "I'm going to set a land-speed record for trail running," Ron said, disappearing down the root- and rock-tangled path.

Meanwhile, as I yelled in fear and pain, my friends heaved me out from under the pouring stream. Now there were five of us trapped on one of the narrow ledges that punctuated this cascade. We were all at risk, as the cliff face fell further below us. Claire ended up with her arms supporting, but also pinned beneath, what would turn out to be my broken left femur. Her slightest twitch sent a paroxysm through me and I kept begging her not to move. X-rays would later show that my femur had an oblique break near the knee and a large, 8-inch splinter off the femur's side near my hip. The femur is the strongest bone in the body, but it was no match for my crushing despair.

Claire became a human splint, holding my rapidly swelling leg in place while her hands until her arms went blue and numb with the effort. Meanwhile, Tom stripped off my soaking-wet clothes, wrapped me in every piece of warm and waterproof gear we had with us, and knelt to press his upper body against mine, surrounding me with an inferno of support and warmth. Suzanne held my head and Su steadied Claire's trembling arms with her own.

In the movies, when a hero is badly pummeled, they black out and simply wake up in the hospital later, asking, "What happened?" I was desperate to black out, but Claire, a first-aid class valedictorian, kept on saying: "We can't let her go into shock." To keep me present, and stave off panic, my friends started talking about books they'd read and movies they'd seen, and asking my opinions. It was like being rescued by the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times.

Time crept along, searingly, achingly, for four hours. Finally I shouted, "Where the f-- is Ron?"

"Here he comes," said Tom. "And he brought help!" Soon, a strapping young forest ranger was kneeling at my side. I begged for drugs and was crushed when he told me he wasn't allowed to administer them. The next news was even worse: "I have to pull your leg, to set the bones in place. Hold her for me, everybody." As Tom pressed his chest into mine, I reached around him and, improbably, grabbed his ears. "I think I'd like to keep those," Tom said, as he moved my hands to the back of his neck. The ranger yanked, and the resulting scream--I later learned from other hikers--was audible a mile down the trail.

A rescue team belayed me down the falls on a stretcher, and rolled me along the trail on some kind of wheeled contraption. Still no drugs; every bump rocked me to the core. Finally we reached an ambulance, and the strongest painkillers they had, as they transported me to the medivac helicopter. They must've been righteous drugs, because I remember thinking: "Oh, cool, I've never been up in a helicopter before!"

I was in the hospital, in traction, for nine weeks. I didn't regret it. I knew I'd literally hit rock bottom, and I felt safe from myself there. Friends and family showered me with concern, and gradually I began to heal my emotional fractures, too.

One morning, in the few moments before I was truly awake, I sensed someone there with me, though I knew no one could be. Someone who was loving me, completely and deeply. I don't believe in a God beyond nature. But I do remember feeling that this presence--whoever or whatever it was--approved of me just as I was. I had years of struggle ahead of me in a society that still wished I didn't exist, but I was done falling. It was my time to rise.

After I left the hospital and recovered for six weeks in a cast, I joined a group called "Knoxville's Ten Percent" a mutual-support and activist group of gays and lesbians that was a haven for me in those dark times. Those days weren't all that different from these dark times, if you're following the news about the war against trans and non-binary kids. Progress is not a superhighway, it's a switchback trail, and it can curve backward. But through KTP I met Greta, the woman who is now my wife. We've been together for 37 years, and despite the resurgence of homophobia in this country, we are flourishing.

A few years ago, Greta and I returned to Knoxville and randomly chose a pretty-sounding hike along a stream toward a waterfall. It was April (again). As we walked, I realized with wonderment that we were on "that" trail, whose name I'd forgotten. I think it was a coincidence, but maybe not. We stopped for lunch at the base of the waterfall (again), and I cried with Greta, who had turned out to be my reward for surviving.

In my journal entry about that day I wrote: "I spent a moment with my 1985 self, broken and lost; my present self whispering to her 'Don't worry! You're OK! You can't imagine all the joy that is yours to come!'"

There's nothing like a near-death experience to help you to answer the question: "Do you want to live or die?"

I want to live.

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