| Can't Live Scared |
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| Saturday, 01 March 2008 09:05 |
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From the day doctors told them they had cancer, somebody was admonishing them to take it easy, rest, sleep late, go to bed early, play another day. The counselors at First Descents have different advice: Do it today. Do it right now December 25 is a long shot. So is December 24 for that matter. So the doctors told Ethel Morrow to celebrate Christmas early this year. Her oldest son, you see, hasn’t been doing so well these past days. He’s down to 108 pounds. The cancer he’s been wrestling for seven years has spread from his lungs to his kidneys. And a steady trickle of narcotic painkillers has him wandering in and out of consciousness. So instead of digging into the stockings as they do on Christmas Eve, Ethel had her three boys—Travis, 19, Tanner 17, and Tyler, 13—scrounge through them yesterday on December 19. Travis got some cologne, some scratch-off lottery tickets, and some packages of Starburst and Runts—his favorite candy. If he has the energy tomorrow, they’ll open Christmas presents then. Travis doesn’t know this yet, but his 38-year-old mom bought him those video games he’s been wanting for his Xbox 360—NBA Live, NASCAR, and John Madden Football. She also bought him a pair of fleece pants and a sweatshirt. He might wear the fleece pants and the sweatshirt, and, if he has the strength, he might gnaw through a Starburst or suck down a Runt. But he’ll never wear that cologne out on a date. And he’ll likely never play those video games. I first saw Travis six months earlier. On that warm afternoon in June 2007 I didn’t know anything about the skinny kid with the strawberry-blond Mohawk—except that at some point in his life, he had battled cancer. That, and judging by the tension in his blue eyes, I knew his fingers were seconds from releasing his 5-foot-10, 140-pound frame from the railing of the crumbling arch bridge and into the Middle Fork of the Flathead River 25 feet below. Travis did everything right when he leapt from that bridge. He pointed his toes. Aligned the lower half of his body with his torso. And most importantly, he tucked those lanky arms along his hips. Good form, I thought. He must have done this before. That Friday afternoon—June 23, 2007—was the first day of Travis’ week with First Descents, a camp for young adults with cancer based seven miles from Glacier National Park in northwest Montana. After the bridge-jumping, Travis and his 14 fellow campers gathered with a dozen volunteer counselors and medical staff around a patio campfire. There, he partook in the first of many First Descents rituals: Shed the birth name. Adopt a new one. Lindsay Harwell, the 19-year-old blonde from John Grisham’s hometown in South Haven, Mississippi, became “Mrs. Sippi.” Jessica Fitz’s dual obsession with fashion and comfort earned the Santa Cruz art student the name “Zsa Zsa.” And Travis Morrow became “T-Money.” This, he muttered quickly and quietly, with a burning face and a slumped posture that seemed to beg “next person, please.” If T-Money were begging at that moment, it was to 26-year-old Brad Ludden and 37-year-old Corey Nielsen. Those two were the ringleaders, the founders of the camp. As Nielsen would later put it, “Brad is the Batman of First Descents. And I’m Robin. I’m cool with that.” Nielsen had taken charge of that campfire circle with his game-show- host smile and with his self-targeted humor. Ludden did it by turning his notorious wit back on Nielsen and himself and by impersonating the Tony Soprano-accent of Omar Muca—“O”—the 24-year-old camper from Staten Island. That was the beginning of Ludden’s 17th camp, Nielsen’s 18th. At first, Ludden had seemed too young, too mischievous to have spent 17 weeks with surrounded by cancer. But he had started young. Very young. Ludden was 15 when he realized he wanted to be in that circle of cancer. He had by that point in his young life already kayaked on some of the world’s most glamorous stages—throughout the United States, Europe, and South America, in junior world championships and in front of filming crews. The kayaking experience that roused his soul, however, was the one he spent in a “swampy lake” in the summer of 1995, not so far from his Kalispell, Montana, home. The lake was the primary water resource of Bozeman’s Big Sky Kids camp for children and teens with cancer, where his mom, Jinny, had been volunteering. “Get on up here,” Jinny told her son and daughter Courtney. “And bring the kayaks with you.” Brad and Courtney taught those kids how to kayak. How to sit. How to wet exit. How to roll. “I recognized then that there was a transformation (in them),” Ludden says. “Something was happening.” That lake sank into his mind, and churned there for the next five years. Years when his peers were registering for college classes. Years when his dad, a gynecologist, was asking him what he planned on doing with his life. Years when sponsors, such as Nike and Dagger, and production companies were throwing contracts at him and sending him on expeditions in Morocco, South America, and Asia. In the last of those years—2000—Ludden bunked with Nielsen in a Sumatra, Indonesia, hotel. They were both there to win the Asia Cup, a competition combining freestyle kayaking and downriver racing. Ludden was 19 then, a quick-witted, sponsor-stamped creeker and freestyler. Nielsen was 30, disciplined, focused, and at one of the now-or-never periods of his 10-year U.S. Olympic slalom team aspiration. “We instantly connected,” Nielsen told me. “I think he really looked up to me in the beginning. I remember taking him to eat at the hotel for some real food and I thought: ‘This guy has an old soul.’ ” On the bus ride from Lake Toba to Medan, Ludden told Nielsen about his idea and told him he’d need a partner. “I didn’t even think twice,” Nielsen says. He didn’t need to because he had already anguished over the decision on a miniature golf course four years earlier. Nielsen was enjoying the bronze medal he’d just won at the 1996 National Whitewater Championships and his decision to move to the University of British Columbia to train harder and study for a master’s in experimental psychology. “I was on Cloud 9,” he says. Across the hole, however, Nielsen noticed a man in his mid-30s. And beside him was his son, a boy, Nielsen realized, plagued by polio or cerebral palsy. Right there, on that putt-putt course, beneath the warm Tennessee sun and in the midst of the athletes with whom he had trained, Nielsen began sobbing. Six months after that Indonesian bus ride, Nielsen helped Ludden duct tape together First Descents’ inaugural camp of 2001 in Vail, Colorado. This, they accomplished with their own collections of Dagger kayaks, a couple of donated condos, the time of a handful of volunteers—mostly his family—and $200,000 from fundraisers. With all that, they had just enough funding and just enough organization to do one camp. A camp with no fee. To this day, neither Ludden nor Nielsen takes a salary from the camp, which is partly how they’ve been able to keep it free. “Cost will never be an eliminating factor for anyone,” Ludden says. It’s grown since. First Descents conducted five camps in 2007, and its budget has nearly doubled to $383,000 in 2007. In that time, the camp has improved its base from those Vail condos—three hours from the river—and added the Glacier one: The one with the rented lodge, the rolling lawn, the beach volleyball and driveway basketball courts. The base where the North Fork Flathead River serves as the property line. And Glacier National Park is a 10-minute drive. Its most significant transformation occurred in 2005, however, when Allan Goldberg—“Popeye”—took over as executive director. Goldberg, now 40, was already an expert on the culture of cancer when he first met Ludden in 2004, a status earned through his master’s in public administration from Harvard University, his 18 months at the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and through the two years of chemotherapy he began enduring as a 12-year-old. Goldberg scrutinized First Descents in 2006, and the soaring numbers of unrecognized young adults with cancer, and told Ludden and the board the camp needed to shift its focus from children and teens to young adults. “There’s more than 60 camps for kids,” Goldberg says. “But if you look at the statistics for young adults, you’ll realize there’s nothing out there for them. We are the first program that’s doing what we’re doing.” Last winter, Ludden, Nielsen, and Goldberg took this message on a 10-city, 10-day tour, preaching the gospel of First Descents to oncology staffs at the nation’s most respected cancer centers, such as New York City’s Sloan-Kettering and Seattle’s Fred Hutchison. The hospitals’ responses convinced the nine-member First Descents board to plan for eight camps in 2008. “Eight in ’08” is the slogan. Goldberg and the board want to add a trekking- and climbing-themed camp in Jackson Hole and a couples’ camp in California’s Otter Bar. By 2010, Goldberg is hoping to teach 1,000 young adults how to kayak. Lofty, considering in 2007, T-Money was one of just 75 campers. But even that doesn’t represent Goldberg’s ambition. I grasped the depth of his devotion on Wednesday, when I entered the shower he had exited a few minutes earlier. There, sprinkled across the bathtub and wadded in the drain, I found clumps of his short, brown hair. Three months after completing the April 2006 Ironman Arizona and two weeks after starting the job at First Descents, doctors discovered the chronic aching in Goldberg’s back was actually a slow-growing tumor, a tumor likely conceived by the chemotherapy he had endured as a boy. For Goldberg, cancer was an uninvited guest that barged into the house at the worst possible time. But for the young adults at that First Descents camp in June, cancer barged through their doors just when they were on their way out—during that fragile period of early independence, when they were moving into their dorm rooms, entering the workforce, or meeting their soul mates. Sean Shettle, 26—we called him “Slim”—discovered the tumor in his groin at the beginning of 2007, less than two months after a Maui vacation during which he met the woman he would later ask to marry him. “I was more nervous telling her I had cancer than asking her to marry me,” he said. Leah Biskup, “Flex” to us, 21, felt the first affects of her brain tumor while playing right field during a high school summer-league softball game. Before that game, she played every sport her school offered and had the best grades in her class. After brain surgery, a relapse, and another brain surgery, she has to study “10 times more than anybody else” to achieve average grades, and the right side of her body is so much weaker than her left, she limps and sometimes stumbles to the ground. “It’s not fair,” she says. “It doesn’t end. It never stops. I have to deal with this forever.” With his job building light panels, O was closer than he’d ever been to renting his own place in New York City. Then came the migraines. And eventually blindness. The tumor doctors found in his frontal lobe reversed any of the independence he had slowly been acquiring. And like Goldberg, O’s brain tumor was most likely caused by the chemotherapy he endured as a 4-year-old, when doctors diagnosed him with Acute Lymphonic Leukemia—blood cancer. “I had depression,” O says. “Short-term memory loss. I wasn’t too thrilled after that happened. I had a job. I was finally making some money. I took a step forward. Now I’m taking a few steps back.” With the diagnoses comes the coddling, the ‘Just rest.’ ‘Don’t strain yourself.’ ‘Be careful.’ ‘Quit your job.’ ‘Take a break from school.’ ‘Tell your friends tomorrow. Today you’re too weak.’ Ludden and Nielsen don’t coddle. Their message is ‘Do it today. Do it right now. I’ll pick up your paddle if you swim.’ And so, for that one week, 15 young adults from the nation’s urban streets, cornfields, strip malls, and community churches took Ludden and Nielsen up on their deal. O swam three times on that first day: once during the kayak polo game and twice while “trying to get that two-man roll thing [bow rescue] down.” An eddy on the out-flowing North Fork of the Flathead (Ludden’s first river) was so careless with Jodie Poorman—“Crush”—she cried. Four swam during that first session—seemingly all at the same time and in all different places. But they all got back in their boats. That night, thunderstorms roared through the valley, dropping the snowline to a few hundred feet above the camp. The rain came in violent binges and purges throughout the next day. So by the time the campers had paddled the Middle Fork of the Flathead that next day, showered in one of the lodge’s two bathrooms, and ate dinner at the nearby restaurant, they were content to settle in. Play Rummy. Read Glamour and People. And talk. This, they did in groups of two or three or four. T-Money had been quiet those first 36 hours. But on that second evening, he began talking. To me. About his relationship with Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy and how he calls him once in a while. About the time he called Dungy to congratulate him for beating the Bears in the Super Bowl, not knowing in that moment, the President of the United States was doing the same thing at a dinner in the White House. I didn’t know whether to believe him. But I kept listening. So it makes sense to me now, as I write this, that instead of playing volleyball with the others on that third day of camp, T-Money joined me on the black asphalt driveway to shoot a quiet hour’s worth of hoops. Eventually we played ‘PIG.’ And eventually, I won. The next day, we played two-on-two. Allan Goldberg—“Popeye”—was my teammate. T-Money’s was camper Elizabeth Baker—“Vegas”—a nurse in the children’s cancer ward of Columbus’s Children’s Hospital and a former community college basketball player. Goldberg and I played that polite brand of Ned Flanders basketball, passing when we should have shot, looking when we should have driven. T-Money didn’t care about such manners. He took the threes when I was smothering him, drove right when I forced him left. He did this over and over again, despite the ability and complaints of his teammate. And every time he did it, he aimed his intense blue eyes directly into mine. Goldberg and I were beating them 6-2 when T-Money began hitting his shots. And when that happened, we lost 13-11. The loss didn’t bother me for a while, because I knew if I had really wanted to, I could have beaten him. If I had disregarded basketball manners and the fact that my opponents were sick, I could have rolled over T-Money. That’s what I had thought at the time. Then T-Money began talking. Nothing vicious. The trash talk actually stumbled out of his mouth all tangled up in reluctance and remorse. Nonetheless, it accomplished its purpose. So after kayaking the Middle Fork of the Flathead the next day and after the late-June sun had baked that black asphalt, we met for a game of one-on-one. T-Money was housefly quick and as fundamental as a fifth-year senior. He blocked me out. Followed his shots. Stripped the ball, and forced me to settle on shots I’d normally never consider. Despite this, I took a 5-2 lead on him early. After I scored my sixth point, I heard his lungs wheeze and gasp mechanically, as if they belonged to a 50-year-old coal miner. He kept dribbling. “Need a break?” I asked him. He nodded. A minute later, he grabbed the ball at the top of the key. “I’m ready.” He then pulled up and nailed a two-pointer. 6-4. For the next five minutes, we both scrapped for shots that just wouldn’t fall and resorted to defense to compensate. I heard him wheezing again, his mouth gaping and his chest heaving erratically. “Break?” I asked. In between breaths, he gasped, “No.” His lungs continued to wheeze. “Well,” I told him, “I do.” And I did. In that moment, my heart-rate monitor said my heart was thumping 188 times per minute—two beats off the standard peak heart rate for a 30-year-old dude. My effort didn’t seem to matter. T-Money beat me 11-9 that first game. Then, he walloped me in the second game 11-6. He talked more freely afterwards—mostly about my lack of game. But I couldn’t get him to talk about him until Thursday, the second to last day of camp. Evening had come, by that point, but the grass and air were still clinging to the day’s warmth. Most of the campers and staff were gathered around the Leann Rhymes-like voice of camper, Lindsay Harwell—“Mrs. Sippi”—who was singing Dixie Chicks and old hymnals to the strumming of a guitar. T-Money and I sat near the basketball court in the grass, free from the interruptions of other people. I asked T-Money about his life, where he was from. “All around me is cornfields.” His family. “I live with my mom and two younger brothers.” First Descents. “To be able to say ‘I can kayak,’ not many people from Indiana can say that. To be able to come here and the see the lakes and mountains, it’s like something on TV.” His cancer. “Melanoma,” he said. “Skin cancer.” And then he did something that still baffles me. He smiled. An apologetic smile that, in tough-guy-speak said: “Sorry to ruin the mood, man.” “Oh,” I had said, relieved. “That’s not too bad, then?” He looked at me calmly. And smiled again. “Actually,” he muttered quietly. “There’s no treatment for it.” He was staring straight into my eyes and smiling faintly. “No treatment?” I said, stupidly. When he was 12 years old, Travis Morrow was playing basketball with his friends. Sweating. Driving. Trash-talking. Thinking about future high school game-winners. When he returned home, his groin was aching. So he iced it and went to sleep. He woke up the next morning to a golf-ball-sized lump in his pelvis. It was so painful, he couldn’t sit up. The doctors found a three-inch-long malignant metastic melanoma in his pelvis. They also found a couple of tumors on the bridge of his lungs. Chemotherapy or radiation wouldn’t shrink them. And cutting them out would almost certainly be lethal. They told his mom, Ethel, she’d have another six to eight months with her first-born. The only solace they could offer was a regimen of experimental drugs. A few weeks before camp, oncologists had put T-Money on his fifth experimental treatment in seven years. That treatment had looted his energy. Others had made him nauseous. All had accomplished one task. “Basically, all they’re doing is prolonging my life,” he told me. The doctors might have been prolonging his life, but T-Money was still—and was from birth—determined to live it. That was evident by the milk-stain-shaped scar sprawling across his lower back, a skin graft that 19 years earlier was a gaping hole of undevelopment. To cover it and give the newborn a chance, doctors had to borrow skin from other parts of his tiny body. Fifteen years later, he made Rensselaer High School’s varsity team as a freshman. In a rivalry game against Kankakee Valley that year, he scored 29 points and pulled down 13 rebounds. He played wide receiver on the varsity team as a sophomore. And just before he traveled to Glacier National Park for First Descents, he finished up another term at Ivy Tech Community College for architecture. “I haven’t changed anything,” he told me. “I live a normal day. I can’t do anything about it. Can’t live scared.” That Thursday morning, T-Money had flipped three times—I bow rescued him once—while running the meat of the Middle Fork’s three biggest rapids. A few years ago, the Make-A-Wish Foundation offered T-Money a dream. What T-Money wanted most was to watch a Colts game, meet their head coach, and get the autographs of every player on Indianapolis’ roster. The other dream Make-A-Wish fulfilled was a vacation to Orlando with his mom, two brothers, his aunt, and a couple of friends. He described this trip with a smile so nostalgic, it was puzzling. “Why Orlando?” I asked. T-Money looked over his shoulder into the grass and stared. His nose twitched. His jaw clamped down, like a vise. When he looked up at me, tears were streaming down his cheeks. “My mom never gets to go anywhere so we just went somewhere to get away,” he said. “My family never gets to go anywhere, so I wanted to take them somewhere before …” He didn’t finish. The next night, Nielsen, Ludden, and Goldberg gathered the medical staff, counselors, and campers into a circle surrounding a children’s plastic pool full of hose water. And into each person’s cupped hands, Ludden’s mother, Jinny, placed a candle, a flicker, she explained, that represented the lives cancer had already stolen. Then she knelt toward the plastic swimming pool and laid her candle in the water. It rocked gently and flickered, illuminating her maternal face in a dim yellow glow. It was a quiet moment, accompanied only by the hum of a faraway train, the wind whistling through the tall pines, and of 19-year-old Travis Morrow sobbing gently into his hand. Travis died December 26. Originally Published, Paddler March-April 2008 |
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