Trusting the Ground Crew

As far as my phobias go, I would have to say "fear of heights" probably ranks as number three.

Do not be fooled by this into thinking that it is a mild fear. It is not. Let me give you a quick story to illustrate the point.

Once upon a time (actually, around fifteen years ago), while I was working for the North Carolina Outward Bound School, I found myself sitting on a platform near the top of the tree line in the Pisgah national forest. I was about 60 feet in the air, about to depart from the last element of the "ropes course" there in the woods.

If you have never had the pleasure of a ropes course, let me describe it. Imagine a skeletal fortress of telephone poles and guy wires that towers above you, standing on the ground. Then imagine someone points at this flimsy bastion of questionable architecture and says, "Climb that." The only way through is up, and the only way off is, well...

...That's usually a surprise they don't mention when you're there on the ground. I have been on a lot of ropes courses in my life (particularly when I was working for Outward Bound), and the last element is always pretty dramatic. You never just climb down off a ropes course, like you would expect a civilized person would. No. You have to make one last stab at conquering fears and team building and trust and all that. Which means that it's usually going to involve some sort of leap into the abyss.

By that point in my career as an outdoor adventurer, I was expecting the standard mode of ropes course egress: the zip line. But sitting on that platform that morning, there was no zip line. No. I was strapped in and harnessed to what basically amounted to a long pendulum wire. In other words, to get off this particular ropes course, I was going to have to fall off the small platform upon which I was sitting, free-fall in air until the guy wire I was strapped to pulled taut, and then swing back and forth until my momentum slacked enough that somebody could climb a ladder to catch hold of my foot and help me down.

My palms are sweating just writing this, by the way.

It took me a long time to move my butt off that platform. That, however, is not my evidence for my fear of heights. No. That evidence came later in the trip.

One of the guides with the crew I was with that trip was an Australian named Bruce (I'm not kidding). He had been leading a different activity that morning, so I hadn't seen him most of the day. The next morning he and I were together at the rock climbing site, and he asked me, "Were you on the ropes course yesterday?"

Yeah, I answered. But why was he asking?

"I was leading a hike up the mountain yesterday," he said, laughing, "and we heard you screaming."

* * *

Given that I am terrified to be more than a few feet off the ground (really, even stepladders can prove to be a challenge), you might well ask, how the heck was I able to get up onto that ropes course in the first place?

Ah. To explain that, I will have to tell you about "ground school."

A ropes course, like many other outdoor activities like rock climbing and rappelling, is a technical activity that involves a series of calculated risks offset by the implementation of safety equipment. In the case of a high-elements ropes course, that equipment includes a Swiss seat, a redundant pair of high-load bearing locking carabiners, a lot of nylon rope (referred to as "webbing"), and a crash helmet.

Participants would suit up in all of this gear, and then our leaders walked us over to a clearing about fifty feet away from the ropes course. There, on the ground, was a horizontal telephone pole, sitting just a few inches off the ground, with a horizontal guy wire stretched about five or six feet above it.

This was ground school. The crew had each of us, in turn, get up on the pole and lock ourselves onto the guy wire with the two carabiners. The carabiners, in turn, were attached, via short lengths of nylon webbing, to the Swiss seats at our waists. Once we were locked in, the leaders just had us walk, back and forth, along the length of the pole. Simple enough.

Then, right as a little boredom was starting to set in, a new instruction was given: "OK," the leader said," Fall."

Huh?

"Fall."

The task, basically, was to lose your balance and fall off the pole. Now, I don't know about you, but falling is not comfortable for me. My body resisted. It wanted to balance. It took work to fall off the pole. Then, just as I was getting used to the discomfort of falling, a revelation.

The webbing snapped taut, and the harness at my waist caught me. I was no longer falling; I was hanging. I was hanging in mid-air, and not altogether uncomfortably. I looked around. This seemed solid. I felt safe.

A few more minutes on the pole, and several more falls, confirmed again and again that the equipment could be trusted. It would catch me and hold me, even if I lost my balance. With each fall, my confidence in the process -- and my confidence in myself -- increased a little bit. By the time I got off the pole, I was still afraid of heights, but my body was slowly convinced that the equipment I was in was stronger than the danger I feared.

* * *

Bruce took some obvious pleasure in teasing me about my terror. Despite this, I can honestly say that -- except for that last part, swinging and freefalling in the unforgiving sky -- I was not overly uncomfortable with my time on the ropes course. By "not overly uncomfortable," I mean that I was actually able to function and not freeze in abject fear. Given my experiences of other high places (suspension bridges, theater catwalks, Rock City), this was quite an accomplishment -- for all parties concerned.

I remember the theater catwalk particularly vividly. I was in college, working backstage at the campus theater for my freshman-year work study. Most of my job had been sawing wood, hammering together sets, and painting (and painting, and painting). But one day, the boss wanted me to go up into the ceiling and rig lights. So I climbed up a set of stairs, through a cubby hole, shimmied past the pipes of a pipe organ, and climbed a long and somewhat precariously balanced stepladder. Reaching the top, I had to crawl through another hole, where someone had sawed through the wall up near the ceiling, and onto the catwalk.

If you have never been on a catwalk, don't. Just don't. You're some fifty feet in the air, and you are standing on a narrow plank of thin and (as I recall) queasily-flexible plywood. To my right, on the stage side, there was a metal bar that the lights were screwed on to. To my left, there was one steel cable. You couldn't stand all the way up.

So there I was, high in the air, with -- as far as I could tell -- absolutely nothing to keep me from falling to my death.

I froze. I froze solid. I remember the boss cussed a blue streak at me for freezing, but I froze. I might have timidly adjusted the light closest to me. I might have been able to move just enough to get to one more, but that was it. Utterly useless.

* * *

You might well ask what allowed for the difference between that frozen state on the catwalk and my relative success, years later, on the Pisgah ropes course. What was the secret to not freezing?

Simple enough to answer. The difference is trust. Sad to say, but I certainly did not trust my boss at the theater job to look out for the well being of my life and limb. In contrast, at the ropes course, that time spent on that pole a few inches off the ground accomplished two essential and profound things in my psyche that morning before I scaled up to the treetops.

First, it caused me to get comfortable with the equipment, and with how the equipment would protect me. That unexpected command, "Fall," and the feeling of being securely caught again and again when I fell, helped me trust the harnesses and carabiners and webbing holding me in place.

Second, and more importantly, these moments of growing confidence in the equipment increased my confidence, with each fall, in the folks who had put the equipment on me in the first place. It's hard to describe accurately -- maybe it was a strange equivalent of what they call "Stockholm Syndrome," where kidnap victims begin to empathize with their captors -- but I felt a bond with the leaders grow almost in an instant that was very strong. I knew I was going to be safe because I trusted that these folks were looking out for me.

I trusted my ground crew.

* * *

The goal of all the activities in Outward Bound, of course, is not simply to get people into the outdoors. If you only looked casually, though, that's exactly what you would see. But as you examine the pedagogical philosophy more closely, you begin to see that what happens on an Outward Bound trip in the woods could just as easily occur in the heart of a city. The secret goal of Outward Bound is not wilderness adventure. It is risk.

"Risk" is almost a dirty word these days. We insure ourselves and shield ourselves to avoid it at all costs. In contemporary living, "risk" equates with "danger." It is this vicious pairing that the pedagogy of Outward Bound seeks to uncouple. Many of us -- most of us -- surround ourselves with a zone of comfort and safety. Anything beyond this zone is, by the logic of our comfort, "dangerous." Think, for example, of all the books on public speaking that report (perhaps apocryphally, perhaps not), that a majority of Americans surveyed "would rather die than give speech."

That's a great example of this collapse of "risk" into "danger." To give a speech creates anxiety because there is the risk one will be embarrassed. But embarrassment won't cause you physical harm. Death, on the other hand, is just about the textbook definition of "physically harmful." The two aren't the same. In our modern cocoons of air-conditioning and antacids, however, we are quite likely to forget that.

On that catwalk in the theater you might suggest I was in actual danger, and I would not argue with you. That was a moment when my fear, perhaps, served me and my survival well.

At the ropes course, however, as I was told again, "Fall," and I fell and was caught, my body began to learn (slowly) that -- though this felt like danger -- I was not in danger. I was safe.

It is this zone, where you feel the danger but you are not actually in danger, that the pedagogy of Outward Bound is designed to explore. When you learn to function in this zone, you begin to discern the difference between your brain screaming at you that you are in danger and actually dangerous conditions. Facing the zone of risk, people begin to find in themselves reserves of strength and fortitude they had not previously suspected would exist. If that sounds idealistic, it should. It is hella idealistic, and I do not make apologies for that, because I've seen (and felt in my own bones) that it works.

The ability to function in risk, however, is not as simple as making a decision or mouthing pious words. It has to start deep within a person, as the soul learns, inscrutably and by mysterious increments, to trust that, in falling, the harness will hold.

* * *

It was about two in the morning when she awakened me. It was passing from Saturday to Sunday, and it was the dead of January and it was so very cold in Memphis. We were bundled up under the covers and had been sleeping well enough when, groggy, I figured out that she was telling me -- again, because I must have been asleep the first time around -- that she thinks her water just broke.

We had planned for this, sort of. We knew that this was just the beginning, and that there was still a long way to go. And it was two in the morning. And suddenly we were shit-sure wide awake and excited, and also trying to convince each other that we needed to go back to sleep; that we needed our rest for all that was ahead.

We turned on the little portable DVD player by the bed. Put on an episode of The Office to distract us with a little laughter. Snuggle back in again against the cold. Try to get a little sleep.

* * *

While the expectations in the Catholic Church are firm about attending weekly Mass, there are also generous loopholes for times of distress or concerns for health. Though I don't know that I have ever seen it mentioned explicitly in the Catechism, we took the liberty the next morning of skipping church on account of the fact that Kira was now on the near edge of labor. Every now and -- ouch! -- again there was a contraction. We thought they were big. We timed them, and then began timing the intervals between. But for the most part, we just had a nice morning and relaxed.

There was another episode of The Office to take our mind off things, and then we went for a walk into Cooper-Young and had lunch at the Deli. I forget whether we split a sandwich, or whether we each had one of our own. I do remember, though, that we were laughing about what we might say if one of the wait staff or another patron asked us (as had happened so often since Kira started to show), "When are you due?"

"Um...NOW!" we kept giggling.

* * *

Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which are, of course, the three mysterious women who arrive to aid Meg and Charles Wallace in the intergalactic and inter-dimensional search for their father -- the conceit that drives the narrative of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

Wrinkle entered my life through one of those Scholastic order forms in elementary school, where you can sign up to get Newberry and Caldecott winners on the cheap. Moreover, Wrinkle entered my life at a point when I was young enough that my parents were still together. Maybe it was second grade -- that feels about right.

Regardless of the exact details, though, I think I can safely credit A Wrinkle in Time for prompting me to be somewhat overly well-disposed towards a trio of crazy women who swoop into your house at all hours, coming to aid in the transportation to strange new worlds and mysterious new realms. In other words, you can thank the Scholastic Book Service for this ease I have when I meet three crazy women on a holy mission.

Needless to say, the first time I met the Full Circle Midwives -- Martina, Melissa and Missy -- I couldn't help but think, "Aha: Which, Whatsit and Who." They were quite a team: a German expat, a crunchy Earth-mama type, and a doula -- each with well over a decade (or two) of experience.

Midwifery practices are few and far between in this part of Tennessee, but as we compared the options available we knew we were very pleased with what we saw. From the first weeks we had been in Memphis, mid-way into Kira's pregnancy, we had been under their watchful care. They had conducted examinations of Kira and had given us access to numerous (and at times overwhelmingly explicit) videos and resources, as well as simply reassuring us and letting us know that we were not in this alone.

* * *

Martina came to the house once in the afternoon and twice later in the evening that Sunday.

Kira and I were, by turns, going on walks around the block and relaxing (as much as possible) back at home. We had rearranged the downstairs a couple of weeks before. Now, with the dining room table pushed to one side, we had cleared a large space for the futon mattress and all the supplies we had been told to gather. When Martina arrived she added to our stash of supplies, bringing along an oxygen tank and a couple of medium-sized duffel bags full of medical and midwifery stuff.

With each visit that day she only stayed a little while. She checked Kira's progress, and made sure everything was normal (it was), and offered praise and encouragement and helpful suggestions on how to get rest. For the most part, however, she exuded a steady calm that was very reassuring, if for no other reason than that, for us, "calm" was periodically in short supply.

By the time Martina left after her late-evening visit, Kira's contractions, which we thought were big at the start of the day, had become much bigger. In fact, at points, they were huge. The night became a groggy ballet for the two of us, as we alternated brief periods of sleep with Kira moaning and me massaging her lower back. But we did manage to sleep, there on that futon mattress on the floor. As before, The Office helped.

* * *

That Monday morning I awoke, and Kira was already up. At this point, she had been in labor for just around thirty hours. It was a good thing we were doing this at home (doctors tend to get impatient, I have heard, if labor goes on and on).

We were still timing the contractions, and noting the time between. They were -- how to say this? -- regularly irregular. Kira would call out, "Starting," and I would count Mississippis to myself until she indicated that she was finished. At some point, we graduated to a timer on a webpage that would count the times and intervals for us. We showered, puttered, and timed, spending most of the morning trying still to rest and relax. We made it through a good chunk of that Office season box set.

I was useful, though. When a contraction would hit, Kira found it comfortable to sort of wrap her arms around my neck and hang down against me, rocking softly back and forth. I got good at being a steady weight that she could moan against. I'll be honest -- I really liked this part. It made me feel not quite so on the outside of it all. I was part of the team, even if I wasn't the one swinging for the fence, like Kira was.

* * *

A Swiss seat is an odd contraption. The first time you pull one on, it doesn't fit you quite like you expect. You're used to belts that cinch tight around the waist, above the hips. A Swiss seat isn't like that. It grabs you around the thighs, mostly. Then, when you start getting into a weight-bearing situation, the harness pulls tight across your butt. The "seat" part is no mistake -- this thing is designed for you to sit in, not to keep your pants up.

The first time I ever got into one I was up repairing a roof in Sewanee, my old college burgh. It was a house down near the town market, as I recall, and we had gotten a bunch of students out that morning to help fix up the place. It was a student organization kind of like Habitat for Humanity (I think now they might even be a Habitat chapter), and I was one of the lucky ones who drew the short straw. The height bothered me, but as long as I stayed pretty far from the edge, the large flat surface of the roof kept my in the range of sanity. We used Swiss seats and long ropes that we borrowed from the wilderness program to make sure us undergrads didn't go cracking our skulls open in the midst of our good deed.

What I liked about the Swiss seat best, of course, was this: as you leaned into it, it tightened. The more you needed it to hold you, the more secure it felt.

* * *

Martina arrived around noon, and immediately started brewing an extraordinarily strong pot of raspberry leaf tea. Then she examined Kira again, and I showed her our dutiful log of contractions.

It's actually pretty funny. When you watch births portrayed on television and the movies, there's all this rushing and hectic energy. "Push! ... Push! ... PUSH!..." and suddenly you hear the telltale "Waaaaaaaaaa" and there are smiles of relief and everybody can't believe they did it and such. Time an on-screen birth sometime. From onset of labor to final "PUSH!" I will bet you that it occurs in under three minutes.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you, as one for whom the televised versions of birth were my sole training in the process before all of this began, real human births ain't fast like that.

Which is all to say, they also make it seem, in those movies and shows, that the timing of contractions is vital information, and that the contractions escalate like some sort of mad logarithmic freight train, doubling and doubling like Moore's law applied as much to wetware as it does hardware.

I was disabused of this fiction with Martina's perfunctory, "Hmph. Okay," as I showed her the timetables. Then she went back to tending to my wife. And I realized that, though the contraction timing may not have been anything close to vital information, it did give Kira and me something to hold on to, and something to do, that kept our minds away from panic until the real work needed to begin.

But now things actually were progressing, slowly, and the real work needed to begin.

* * *

The really extraordinarily strong pot of raspberry leaf tea, I learned, helps to spur the mother's body on to stronger and more regular contractions. It's a bit of midwifery wisdom that keeps at bay the need for drug interventions like Pitocin.

While we were waiting for the pot to brew, the three of us went for a walk around the neighborhood. Actually, I'm being generous. We actually just took a walk around the corner and to the end of the street. This is a distance that, under more usual conditions, would take Kira and I just a few moments to cross. On this walk, however, Martina and I took turns as Kira, every few steps, stopped and labored through another growing contraction. Sometimes she would hang onto my neck, or lean down against Martina.

I imagine we were an odd-looking trio, moving slowly down the street and stopping with a moaning woman doubled-over again and again. Like at the Deli the day before, we laughed thinking how we would explain ourselves if someone were to come out of their house and want to know what was going on. "Don't worry, we're fine...She's just having a baby..."

* * *

Martina's approach was nurturing and encouragement all the way. When she praised me for how well I was supporting Kira through this part of the labor, I felt like a million bucks. For a few hours, the three of us were a solid team, with she and I taking turns supporting Kira through the contractions. During this time, it really felt like Kira's body was the one in control, and anything that it did -- whether fast or slow -- was just fine.

But Martina had to leave to attend to some family obligations around 3:30 (though she was reluctant to leave us at that point), and so, with Kira now quite full of raspberry leaf tea and me continuing my role as human monkey bars for her to hang on during the painful moments, she said goodbye for now. Not to worry, though. Help was on the way.

At quarter to four, Melissa arrived. Help was here.

Now let me say this. If you would have just shown all this to me on paper, I would have been sure that, of the two, the earth-mama type (Melissa) would have taken the laid-back, "everything your body does is good" approach and the German (Martina) would have been the third-base coach. Shows you what I know.

As soon as she got situated, Melissa got us working to help that baby get ready to come out. Kira was up, switching positions, rocking hips and bouncing on the big exercise ball or laying on her side. As before, I was switching with her, being there when she needed to lean and massaging her lower back.

I felt a lot less essential to the process, but I understood why. Kira's contractions were shifting. They had been intense before, but she had been at this for so long that she risked exhaustion, and there was more intensity yet to come. If Martina's approach had been like someone coaxing a deer from the edge of a forest, Martina was breaking a wild bronco. Kira's body was still in control, but it didn't necessarily know the best direction to run. Melissa had every good reason to be stern in her approach.

It worked, too. About 4:30, Missy (the doula) arrived, and by that point contractions and dilation were steadily progressing. Nothing was rapid. In fact, Kira was feeling it was too slow, and worrying she'd have to transfer to the hospital. I remembered (from all the videos the midwives had given us to watch) that a lot of moms feel that way in labor right before things really shift into high gear -- so I encouraged her and reminded her of that. She was amazing, and rallied around that thought and hung in there.

Missy and Melissa were the team now. I felt the "woman energy" in the room rising markedly, even as my own energy was dwindling. Amazingly (to me, at least), Martina had predicted this, and left instructions with Missy to look out for me. So at five o'clock she sent me upstairs with a sandwich and suggested I nap, if possible.

* * *

We were out in the Pisgah forest for about five days, and on the next to last night the leaders gave each of us a tarp and sent us off by ourselves to make a camp and shelter ourselves with nothing but the materials we had immediately at hand. So I found a good, low tree with cooperative branches and fixed up the tarp with my shoelaces and (since I had a ponytail at the time) some of the elastic bands I had brought along to tie my hair back.

That time alone that evening was profound. I remember I spent a long time brushing the tangles out of my hair, and listening to the sounds of the woods. When you go on an Outward Bound trek, part of the gear you bring along is a book of inspirational readings that they have bound up in a pocket-sized folio with some blank pages for your own thoughts and reflections. I read a while, and then I wrote a while, and, strangely, I found myself crying for a while. Today I could not for the life of me tell you what those tears were about. Exhaustion? Alone-ness? Beauty? I don't know. But I cried. That's for sure.

Dusk came, and as the daylight fell away, I felt my body become heavy and sleep came easily as the sun disappeared. I remember this was the first time I had ever felt that sort of slippage into slumber. I am so used to electric lights and fighting the dark that I was surprised to find how naturally my body tuned itself into the circadian rhythm. It remembered something I did not; my body knew how to do this better than I did.

Most of my life, thinking I was the one in control, I had really just been getting in its way.

* * *

My eyes were open at seven sharp.

I was disoriented for a moment, and heard voices downstairs. I found out later that, at almost that same time, Kira had gone into what they call "transition," the final stage of labor. The baby drops into position in the pelvic girdle, and that's when all the muscles shift from stretching open to pushing the baby down and out.

I have been told that mothers often make a very peculiar moan as this occurs. I do not know if I heard the moan, or if that was what caused me to wake. I do know, however, that Melissa heard it, and shifted into action.

During my nap, Martina had returned, and as I came downstairs I beheld for the first time the three of them together. Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who had descended on our home in this cold and windy night, and magic was afoot. Time was wrinkling. Dimensions were shifting. Without knowing the mode of transport, we were arriving on a strange new planet, a new world.

* * *

It was hard not to feel like an outsider, like I had missed something important. The woman energy was in full swing, and I had none of it to offer. Groggy, I fretted over this, but almost at the same moment, I was put back to work. I was rested; Kira needed my strength now.

She tells me she remembers almost nothing of that last hour. In the moments between the stabs of pain, she would black out. When she did manage to remain awake for a few minutes, Missy or Martina made sure she took a bite of some food to keep her energy up. Meanwhile, Melissa was there, in the "catcher" position, keeping track of the progress.

I was shifted in behind her, and she leaned into me again. As much as I could be, I was with her. I wanted, prayed, that I could absorb her pain through my skin and away from her.

As we had those many months before, our bodies found a rhythm. Holding on to her, we rode the storm together.

* * *

At 8:04, the telephone rang. The next day I checked the message. It had been my father, calling for an update.

* * *

What caused those tears, that evening in the forest? I wish I knew. It was so many years ago.

But I remember how lost I felt at that point in my life. I was in my mid-twenties, and -- though I was careening ahead into life and debt and decisions and age -- I had no discernible direction. I was a trajectory without a bearing, without a compass. I felt good for nothing and nobody, least of all myself. If I were to bet, something of that was wrapped up in those tears, that evening in the forest.

What had changed, in all those years since? Had enough changed?

* * *

"Do you want to reach down and feel the top of your baby's head, Kira?"

"Oh my God. Oh my God."

* * *

After all the waiting, after forty-two hours of labor, the final distance closed so quickly.

I think it surprised Kira most of all, suddenly to be holding our child, but I can't say I was any more prepared for that little pink face suddenly so close to mine. We forgot to ask what it was at first. All that mattered was that a moment ago we had been alone in the world together, and now we were shared. Healthy and pink and breathing, a new story for the world.

No longer a "Kritter." Maggie. Beautiful pink Maggie.

* * *

Midwives are shamans. They are field medics. They are crones and anchors. When my wife was hungry, they fed her. When, after the labor was done, she was bleeding from the effort of that last instant of distance, they mended her wounds with salve and suture.

As I held Maggie for the first time, they washed dishes and laundry. The house was returned to normalcy with a humble and efficient speed. The triumph was Kira's, not theirs. They were there to accompany and to serve, to encourage and to guide.

What physician, tell me, would have done this?

The triumph was Kira's, and now she rested, cared for by a trio of three mysterious women -- Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which.

* * *

There's still a chill in the air, and a bit of morning mist. My skin is tingling from the bite of November, but I'm not cold. I feel good.

One step at a time. I unclip the caribiner from the hook sunk in the wood, and stretch my arm above my head until I can lock it in place on the guy wire above. Once it's secure, I'm linked both to the pole I'm coming from and to the pole I'm moving to. Redundancy.

I hitch my leg a bit and shift my weight, and then I'm swinging up. Once my feet are solid, I reach down and unhook the second caribiner and lift it above my head to the other guy wire. Once it's in place, I dial my fingers across them both to lock them tight. As I come out of the stretch, I feel the Swiss seat tightening a bit across my backside.

I look up. I'm above the treetops now. The autumn patches of yellows and red dot the forest into the distance up the mountain. Turning the other direction, I lean out, and the harness catches me as I hang out from the pole, secure.

The sun has risen high enough now to have burned off the morning haze.

I can see for miles.