Accident

I've never had a near-death experience of the type JP described last week. I did get in a car accident once that scared me more than anything else. At the time, I used to soothe and/or entertain myself by writing songs, and I wrote one extrapolating a much worse scenario than the one I was in—the character in the song has indeed had a close brush with death, and maintains a continuing relationship with it. I call the song "Accident."

For a long time, I had a fantasy that I would figure out how to arrange music to go with the lyrics and vocal lines I wrote, but it's been years and I still haven't. So here it is raw, with apologies for the poor quality of the recording:

Mortified

by Giselle Renarde

I'm somewhat at a loss.  This fortnight's topic (near-death experiences) isn't one I can related to.  The only time I've ever lost consciousness was last year, when I sliced my finger open with a kitchen knife and fainted.  Woo!  That was something else!  But not a near-death experience.

I asked my girlfriend, just now, if she's ever had one.  Nope.  No luck there.

But it got me thinking about something that happened to her a couple years back, when she was having lunch with a friend.  In case I haven't mentioned it lately, my girlfriend (I call her "Sweet" online) is transgender.  She identifies as female, but she's not out of the closet with her family.  A few of them know, but most see her as a man, and she continues to present as male when she's around them.

Among friends, she's stealth--that is to say, she presents and identifies as a woman. Not trans. Not genderqueer.  Not "other."  Just a woman.

Many of the trans women I know are older people--say, sixty-plus.  One big difference I've noticed between trans friends in the "older adults" versus "younger adults" age category is that the older ones tend to be stealth.  Only their inner circles know they're trans.  Many also lead lives in which their time is split between two distinct identities, two distinct genders. In some situations they present male, even though they identify as women.

By contrast, the younger trans women I know tend to be out.  They don't mind people knowing they were raised as boys.  They deal with any repercussions that might arise because they don't feel ashamed of their identities.  This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, of course--just something I've noticed among friends.

Anyway, back to this non-near-death-experience.

My girlfriend was eating lunch at a restaurant with a friend with whom she was stealth.  They were enjoying a perfectly pleasant conversation when everything went black.  The next thing Sweet remembers is regaining consciousness in an ambulance, with a paramedic holding her wig in one hand and her driver's license (with her male name) in the other.

She was mortified.  She had no idea what had happened. There was only one thing she was sure of: her friend would abandon her, hate her, tell all their mutual acquaintances what a freak "she" was...

That's not what happened.  Her friend filled in the blanks as much as possible.  Apparently Sweet started nodding off as they were eating, then just collapsed.  She kept breathing, but nobody could bring her back.  Restaurant employees called 9-1-1.

When the paramedics arrived, they couldn't get her to regain consciousness.  They loaded her onto a stretcher and carried her to the ambulance.  Her friend came along and witnessed Sweet unmasked and revealed in a way that made my girlfriend very uncomfortable.

Sweet was absolutely sure the incident would dissolve a friendship she'd spent years cultivating.  She was far more concerned about the social fallout than her health. Her health was an afterthought.  (She's been scheduled for an MRI twice, but each time she's had an anxiety attack at the prospect of entering that machine.)  When I talked to her that day, she was freaking out.

And then... nothing happened.  Her friend drove her home and called the next day to make sure she was okay. Her friend emailed, as usual, to schedule their next get-together.  Nothing changed.  Their friendship went on, as usual.  Maybe this woman read Sweet as trans all along.  Who knows?  It's hard for me to assess my girlfriend's "passability."  We're just too close.  To me, she's the most beautiful woman in the world.  Could be that others view her differently.

Doesn't really matter, though, because the point of the story is that the scariest thing in my girlfriend's world happened to her.  She was "unmasked" in front of a friend and in front of strangers.  (Those paramedics put the "professional" in healthcare professional, by the way.)  And she lived to tell the tale.

Come to think of it, it's not even a very exciting story.

Skirting the Precipice of Death

By Lisabet Sarai

Our topic for the coming fortnight is "Near Death Experiences". I hate to recycle posts, but this one is so appropriate, I couldn't resist. Besides almost all the members of the Grip have changed since April 2012 when this post appeared!

We went to Peru because, that winter, there was no snow in Austria. That fact scuttled our original vacation plans for a ski holiday. Hustling to find an alternative (I'd already secured time off from my job), we found a relatively cheap package tour to Lima. We'd had positive experiences traveling with this tour company to Jamaica. They provided airfare and lodging at a ridiculously low cost, then made their money on extras. In Jamaica it had been easy to use the hotel as a base for exploring on our own. We found out a bit late that Peru was a different sort of place altogether.

It was the early eighties, and quite frankly, the country was a mess. Vicious bands of Shining Path guerillas made overland transit perilous. Strikes and civil unrest occurred on an almost daily basis. At Lima Airport, we waited three hours for our luggage because the baggage handlers had stopped work. Rolling electricity outages afflicted the city of Lima, many regions of which we were advised to avoid due to the danger of being mugged or worse. Aside from the amazing gold museum, there wasn't much to see in Peruvian capital. In any case, we had loftier goals: Cusco and Machu Picchu.

The only practical way to Cusco was by air, and that turned out to be almost as expensive as our flight from the U.S. Nevertheless, we decided to bite the bullet and bought non-refundable round trip tickets to the old Incan capital nestled in the Andes.

Arriving in Cusco, we were informed that the narrow gauge railroad to Machu Picchu had been out of service for three weeks, due to a combination of rainy season mudslides and another strike. Apparently the strike had been settled, but it still wasn't clear whether the trains were running. We were devastated. Cusco was an astonishing place in its own right, but to come all that way and not get to see the fabled Incan terraces and the Temple of the Sun...!

Two days before we were scheduled to return to Lima, our guide told us we could catch the Machu Picchu train the following morning. We were up at six AM (a real sacrifice for my husband!) and on the train by seven. By ten AM we still hadn't left; there were new landslides blocking the tracks, we learned, that had to be cleared. When the train finally crawled out of the station, we cheered – but prematurely, as we were halted by a slide after an hour. Bulldozers were mustered, mud was cleared, the train proceeded for an hour or two, before our way was blocked once again.

Normally the trip from Cusco to the base of Huayna Picchu (only fifty miles!) takes about four hours. In our case, we didn't arrive until after four in the afternoon. The heart-stopping bus ride up the steep mountain flank, along the Hiram Bingham Highway, required another half hour. And the ruins closed at five thirty.

So we had less than an hour to explore one of the great wonders of the world. It was worth the journey, but way too short. Some members of the tour planned to stay over at the mountain-peak guest house, but our plane back to Lima left the next morning and we were worried about losing our money. In addition, my husband was showing signs of the flu. We climbed back into the bus, trundled down the side of the cliff and onto the train, and – waited.

The locomotive finally inched forward, into the inky darkness. We hadn't eaten. My husband's forehead felt hot enough to fry an egg. Although we were both exhausted, the hard wooden benches on the train were not really conducive to sleeping. I remember that trip as a kind of endless hell – creeping along the tracks that clung to the mountain side, the rain-swelled Urabamba River audible even though it was seventy feet below us. We'd stop for obstacles, wait, move, stop... My husband was hallucinating. I could have believed it was all a dream myself if I hadn't been so physically uncomfortable.

I finally must have drifted off into some kind of slumber, when an awful roar yanked me awake. The train lurched to a stop, throwing us to the sticky floor. It sounded as a building was collapsing around us.

The terrible racket finally stopped. Echoes of the tumult died away. Along with some of the other passengers, I stepped off the train to check out the situation.

A massive wall of steaming mud blocked the tracks, less than ten feet in front of the locomotive. Trees poked out of the muck at weird angles. Boulders twice as large as the stones of the Incan temples lay scattered on the narrow shelf the builders of the railroad had cut into the mountain side. As I stared in disbelief at the debris, a few more clods and pebbles clattered down from the heights on the right. Far below us, at the bottom of the cliff on the left, the rapids of the Urabamba seethed and boiled.

The railroad crew hurried us back into the train. I was in shock. If the slope had given way thirty seconds later, the train would have been buried. We might well have been swept off the track into the river coiling below.

My husband had fallen into an uneasy sleep, moaning and tossing on the unforgiving seats. As for me, I didn't close my eyes. I heard the grunt of the earth moving equipment they somehow managed to convey from further up the route, the shouts of the workmen, the background mutter of the swollen river. I was awake when the train nudged forward, rocking on its earth-dented tracks. I kept watch on my beloved, giving him water, praying his fever would break. I stared out the open window into the black night, not quite sure we'd really survived.

I watched dawn turn the terra-cotta roofs of Cusco from gray to red as we crawled down, back into the valley. We could have died. With a smidge less luck, we might have been lost in the Urabamba.

As the sun rose over the ancient city of the Incas, I found it hard to believe. I still do. Maybe the old gods were protecting us. Or maybe, that time at least, we were just lucky.