Take life's challenges a quarter mile at a time

Life isn’t like television, although most of us have probably wished it were at one time or another, particularly when we are facing a challenging time in our lives and we need sage wisdom.

Sadly, most of us didn’t grow up with an Andy Taylor or a Steve Douglas who could sit us down and, in profound terms, explain the world to us in a way that just made sense.

Most of us grew up with honest, hard-working fathers who showed their love in actions instead of words and passed on their wisdom in deeds instead of sermons.

When they did impart some sage bit of advice it was often folksy and laconic, and we probably didn’t understand the full import of the message in our youth-addled minds.

My dad was not a TV dad. He didn’t give big speeches, he didn’t have the patience to be a good teacher and he was patently callous when it came to dealing with emotional issues.

And yet, two years after his passing, he is still teaching me life lessons that leave me feeling woefully, inadequately, unprepared for carrying on without him.

The two years since his passing have been some of the most challenging in my life. I’ve lost a father, an aunt, a handful of beloved pets, a quack doctor botched an operation that has left me mutilated beyond repair and every financial endeavor I’ve undertaken has failed miserably.

All of that and the combined weight of my father’s last words to me, “You have to take care of things now,” has sent me into a spiral of depression and self-destruction that I’m only now beginning to claw my way out of.

Thankfully, it wasn’t drugs or alcohol I turned to but, in an attempt to control some measure of my life and find something to bring me some minutia of joy, I took to online gaming.

One retirement portfolio and three maxed out credit cards later and I’m waking up from this nightmare realizing how far back I’ve set myself in life and the inevitable despair that has followed hits like a freight train carrying a ton of bricks.

To say I’ve hit a low point might be an understatement and to say that the idea of cashing in my chips and calling it all quits has crossed my mind is also probably an understatement.

At a particularly low point recently I expressed my feelings to my brother, Josh, and that’s when one of dad’s life lessons came into focus.

Josh and I were not what you’d call “athletic” children. We perhaps got too many of our mother’s side of the family genes and we ended up being more on the rotund side of things than, say, the “knees and elbows” side.

Dad, however, grew up running everywhere and he was as athletic as they come.

He’d hunt the mountains around Timberon on foot from before sun-up to well after sundown and learned the game trails of those peaks long before roads ever breeched their precipitous pathways.

My “uncle” Terry, can tell you a tale of my dad running a wounded coyote down on foot and many of my biological uncles can tell you of times he “walked them to death” hunting deer.

Dad was 73 years old when I watched him through binoculars hike miles across a South African mesa after a wounded wildebeest and then go miles further to bag his kudu.

All of this is to say, as children, hunting with dad was often in the nature of an endurance test for Josh and I as we trailed behind him in the desert sands after mule deer, our stubby legs dragging our stumbling feet along mile after mile with no end in sight.

Needless to say, we weren’t going to be sneaking up on any deer with Josh and I huffing and puffing like a pair of iron works and dissertating every 100 yards or so our demoralized state with quails of, “How much further?”

I remember a hunt now that seems so long ago where we were playing out this exact little dramatization, begging dad to take us back to the truck. He finally agreed we’d head back to the truck. Only later did I realize that his assent to take us to the truck did not mean we would go straight back to the truck.

Trudging along behind him, dad lead us on a circuitous route through deer country, our heads bowed, sweat dripping into our eyes, he could have lead us over a cliff and we’d not realized it until we hit bottom.

We walked and walked and walked some more and finally, unable to bear it, began to plead, “How much further?”

“It’s just another quarter mile,” he said, pointing to a hill in the distance. “The truck is just over that hill.”

Mollified, we labored on for what seemed like miles before suddenly realizing the hill that was just a quarter-mile away, was far behind us in the distance.

“You said it was just a quarter mile,” we moaned in unison as we made the discovery between us. “It’s been more than a quarter mile.”

“Well, it IS just another quarter mile now,” dad said. “We’re almost there.”

Again we bowed our heads and muddled on, stumbling over our own feet with exhaustion. Time and distance stretched on and soon another “quarter mile” churned beneath our feet leaving a mile in its wake.

“You said a quarter mile,” we cried. “We’ve gone at least a mile.”

“It’s just ahead,” he said, a smile on his lips. “It’s definitely just a quarter mile now.”

I cannot tell you how long it took us to cover that “quarter mile” or how many “quarter miles” we left behind us in doing so, but eventually we found ourselves stumbling the final few feet to the truck and collapsing with groans of sheer exhaustion.

In 2021 when dad, mom and I all got Covid, dad was hospitalized for nearly a month. Hospitals were full and I fought my battle with Covid at home, coughing up blood for several days during the worst of it. I likely would have joined dad in those happy hunting grounds if not for a forward-thinking lady doctor who prescribed me Ivermectin probably only hours before it was too late.

Josh came to stay while mom and I suffered at home and he took care of things, including visiting dad daily. Mom and I were not allowed in the hospital because of our active Covid.

Over the course of dad’s last weeks, Josh would sit by his side for the two hours of visitation allowed and talk about childhood events while dad struggled for each breath through his oxygen mask.

At some point Josh turned to the story of “it’s just another quarter mile,” reminiscing about how mean we felt it was dad did that to us — on more than one occasion — when we were so tired we didn’t think we could go another step.

Dad smiled through his mask and turned to Josh, “Yeah, but you always made it, didn’t you?”

He had purloined from us the will to keep going with the promise of “just another quarter mile” when quitting was all we thought about and untold miles lay ahead.

None of us know how many miles we have left ahead of us and so the path ahead often looks daunting and undoable in the face of our struggles.

But, if we can imagine that our goal is just ahead and achievable, how many quarter miles can we churn beneath our feet on the razor’s edge of despair?