After a couple of days in Portland, I decided I needed to get out of the house. Plus, Aaron said, “Hey, why don’t you get out and go somewhere on your own today?”
Okay, husband. Message received.
I looked up some easy trails to find one I could do on my own— get my exercise for the day and see a new park. Be a real Pacific Northwesterner (snort-scoff).
I chose Forest Park, which looked huge and had a ton of trails. I wanted to do the trail that led to Pittock Mansion, but the trailhead names on whatever listicle I was reading didn’t match up to trailheads that I could find on Google Maps. And I was not about to drive around Portland without an accurate place to go. After 4 tries, I finally found one I could get to directions to, and so I left.
(By “I left,” what I mean is, I took my time putting on sunscreen, then stretched, then looked at my phone until Aaron asked if I was actually going anywhere.)
It felt good to be out. Good to be on my own after being stuck in that hot, small house for a couple of days. Good to be driving by myself and listening to my choice of podcast. Good - - oh wait, no, super scary to be driving up onto a big curving bridge that led to another even bigger bridge.
Let me back up for a second.
As far as I can tell, I have vertigo. Is that a thing you just have? I don’t know.
But I do get “vertiginous migraines,” which is a fancy way to say that roughly once or twice a year, I wake up in the middle of the night with the sensation that the room is spinning around me for an agonizing 30-60 seconds, and all I can do is lie on my stomach with my hand braced against the wall and wait for it to stop. This is followed by 30-60 agonizing minutes of feeling incredibly nauseated, dizzy, breaking out into a cold sweat, and wondering if I’m going to vomit (sometimes I do).
Next, I find a creative way to take one of my migraine medications. Normally I take pills with a dramatic backwards head toss, but when I’m feeling dizzy, that’s a no-go. Instead, I either stumble to the kitchen to take my pill in a spoonful of ice cream or yogurt, or if that’s not available, I sit on the floor, lean my back and head up against a wall, and take my pill with water or juice and as little head movement as possible. After all that, hopefully, I can get back to bed and lie very still until the medicine kicks in and puts me to sleep.
These actual migraines, thankfully, have become a bit more rare in adulthood, and I’ve learned some ways to avoid or mitigate them.
But what I still regularly deal with—and I do believe is related to the migraines— is a general feeling of unsteadiness/dizziness/discomfort in certain situations. It’s frequently related to standing in a high place: edge of some kind of cliff, or bridge, or whatever other tall things people might stand on. (When Aaron and I drove out to Seattle nine years ago, we named it The Mountain Panic.) But it can also be related to looking up—looking up at a tall skyscraper can give me the same feeling, and I think I’m going to fall over. I don’t usually look up in cities unless I can lean against a wall while I do it.
So now maybe you can imagine that, when you are a person who has these feelings, driving a motorized vehicle over a bridge that stretches up into the sky and out over a body of water, especially when you had no idea it was coming, is pretty fucking uncomfortable.
You’re just driving along, and things are fine, and then you start to realize that you’re going up, or that there’s a drop-off on one or both sides, or that the highway is extending into a tall bridge, and you get a panicked tunnel vision. And you feel like you can’t move, because if you move, you’ll fall. Even in a car. You and the car will fall over the edge. But it’s also more than just You might fall, it’s like… will you drive yourself over? Will you jump? Will you be able to stop yourself? It feels like there’s a force pulling you toward the edge and you’re working very hard to ignore it.
Obviously, I don’t want to drive myself over. I’m not suicidal and nothing about this feeling has anything to do with ending life. It’s a physical feeling that feels uncontrollable. It’s like gravity goes into overdrive and pulls on me, hard. My body says, we’re not supposed to be up this high and we must get to the ground as soon as possible.
In fact, one of the times I experienced this was on the top floor of the San Francisco MOMA where there’s a bridge in an atrium that for some reason you’re just allowed to walk on. I tried to step forward on to the bridge and my legs gave way until I just…sat down. Thirty years old, adult woman, and I just dropped and sat down in a public art museum and then scooted backwards on my butt until I was leaning against a wall. My body was telling me to be on the ground NOW.
So that’s what it feels like. Back to the bridge.
My body froze. I didn’t turn my neck more than what was absolutely necessary for driving (and I definitely did not change lanes). I absolutely did not look over at what I’m sure was a gorgeous view. I took deep, slow breaths. All I could focus on was the few feet of road in front of me. Just keep going. One tire in front of the other (yeah, I know that’s not how cars drive).
And then, it was over. “I did it!” I said out loud to myself. I breathed a sigh of relief and finished the drive to the trailhead.
I studied the map, snapped a picture of it with my phone, and decided on my route: a 4.4 mile loop, starting and ending on the Leif Erickson trail. Ready to go.
The first mile was a very wide, open path. People walked, ran, zipped by on bikes—one guy even rode his Segue. I realized that everyone was following the rules of the road and sticking to the right side, passing on the left. But the edge of the mountain, the drop-off, and the views of just exactly how high we were? That was all on the right side.
I could feel my legs weakening. At times, I really just wanted to plop my butt down on the ground and stop moving. But I also wanted to complete my 4 miles. Complete it for myself, for my first time out of the house, and, if I’m honest, for closing those damn rings on my Apple Watch (disentangling myself from diet culture and fitness tracking is a whole other topic).
I reached the turn for the Dogwood trail and sized it up: a thin path, going up into the woods at a much steeper incline. It looked a little scary, but I could only see a small section of it. Most of it was probably fine, right? I took two steps up the dirt path, and to the right of my foot, I heard a rustle. A small—and I do mean small— black snake slithered away from my foot into the brush.
“Nope, nope, nope!” I turned around immediately, back onto the wide trail.
It wasn’t just the snake, though that didn’t help. I may be a Mississippi girl, but I’m also a city girl, and dangerous (or non-dangerous) outdoor creatures are not in my wheelhouse. Camping is not in my wheelhouse. Quite honestly, hiking is barely in my wheelhouse.
And though I know just enough to know that the tiny snake was most likely not a threat, I also had the sudden realization that I was alone. My husband was at home. I was in a new city, on a new trail, by myself. I didn’t have anything with me except my phone and water. And I certainly didn’t have any first aid supplies, or knowledge, should I actually get injured.
So I decided I’d get my 4 miles by simply walking 2 miles up this wide path and then turning around to walk back down. And that’s what I did.
I was never, ever in danger of falling, but I did constantly battle my feelings of vertigo. I didn’t check out the views a ton, but I tried to stop and look every once in a while. And I also went against every fiber of my rule-following being and spent most of the first two miles up walking on the left side, hugging the inner mountain wall instead of staying on the untethered and open right side. Did some people think to themselves that I was a dummy walking on the wrong side? Maybe. But I walked where I felt safe.
At the end of my 4 miles, I was back where I’d started. I chugged some water and got in the car. I felt proud of myself—for accomplishing the gentle hike, for pushing myself a little out of my comfort zone, and especially for making it across that bridge unprepared. I felt like I could stretch past some of my limits, and that was a really great feeling.
And then I opened Google maps and immediately selected “Avoid highways” so I could skip that huge bridge altogether as I drove back home.