I am the product of some very hardworking parents. I love them very much but the fact that they are so diligent in their work makes it very hard for me to be lazy. Actually, I still find it easy to be lazy, it just comes with a certain degree of shame. In last week’s blog post I mentioned a little about my parents getting married. My mom was 20, my father was 21 and they had about 200 dollars between the two of them. Crazy. My dad was already in the military, he enlisted straight out of high school, and my mother was in college. After finishing college and working as a substitute teacher and paraprofessional in the various schools my brother and I attended, she has now been teaching second grade for almost 4 years. My father was a Marine for 20 years before he retired and now works for an oil and gas technology company while also completing his second Master’s degree. These are two crazy, cool people.
I say all this to say, after being so hardworking for so long, we have finally started to go on family vacations. The majority of our extended family lives in Alabama so ‘family vacation’ in the past translated to “taking vacation time to visit family”. Three years ago we took our first actual vacation to Hawaii. It could have been a fluke, going on a fun family vacation, but the next year it happened again! Last year, for spring break, we packed up and drove six hours to a cabin in Oklahoma, and this year we left the country for the first time as a family, on a trip to Costa Rica. Both vacations proved my father to be the unluckiest of us all.
My mother and I were worried about going to Oklahoma. We are not super wilderness people, though we do enjoy a good hike, and “cabin in Oklahoma” invokes some very rough, Bear Grylls-esque imagery. We were pleasantly surprised when we ended up in a spacious, solid wood cabin with a wood-burning fireplace and river just downhill. After getting necessary accoutrements, like toilet paper, (that we weren’t warned we needed ahead of time) from the general store a few miles down the road we were set for a few chilly days in the country where we hiked, chased the dog, and watched my dad catch zero fish. The day before we left my brother and I were throwing around a football in the steeply sloped yard. It was a nice ball, all heavy, rough leather, and being that I am about as nonathletic as they come, after a few decent throws I relieved my sore hands and passed the ball over to my dad, who was standing on the raised deck. They had thrown a few passes when my brother threw a pass just slightly to the right of my dad. Though my father spent much of his youth an athlete, at 46 years old there was no logical reason for him to attempt to leap from the deck and catch the ball in the air, and, as might be expected, he landed roughly, twisting his right ankle and sliding a little ways down the hill on his butt. By that night the ankle was heavily swollen, and the next morning he drove the 6 hours back home. If that logic doesn’t follow to you, welcome to the Hughley family. Keep in my mind, there were 4 people in the car with driver’s licenses. Ask my father, or any Marine, and they will gladly tell you there is no “retirement”: “once a Marine always a Marine”; for my father, this definitely applied to injuries and ignoring the toll that a 20 year military career had taken on his body. He’d had worse so he continued to walk on his swollen and sprained ankle for two months- until he broke it. After a surgery, a boot, a few days off work, and some physical therapy this may have been the most expensive vacation we’ve taken.
We deemed the injury an accident, and after he spent several months healing up, the whole endeavor was mostly forgotten. In March of this year, we excitedly left America for a few days in a beautiful resort near Guanacaste, Costa Rica. On the way to our spacious condo inside the gated resort, we noticed several signs marking hiking trails. We wasted little time in going out to explore in the hope of finding monkeys. My brother and his girlfriend went with us, but being the GoPro-ing, adventuring type they quickly departed to climb what was possibly the largest hill that could still be called a hill. My dad and I stuck to the trail which turned out to be a lie; it lasted maybe 3 minutes of walking before it just ran out and gave way to thick trees. We tried several of these fake leads, reaching the same conclusion, before we found one that was the most promising. We walked for a while, the leafy path below us sloping upward- and then it too ran out. We didn’t want to walk all the way back the way we had come, so my dad broke himself a small path to the edge of the trail using a heavy branch he had picked up along the way. Our gently elevating path had a very steep drop-off back to the road. Fresh peach in his left hand, large “walking” stick in his right, my father tested the distance with his stick and figured he could make it, before suggesting that I, the younger and more easily healed of the two, walk back a little ways where it was lower. Instead I stayed to watch, because if he could make it, surely I could as well.
If you have never seen an adult fall, be glad. There is something about watching a person who has been not-falling for decades, and clearly mastered that skill, succumbing to gravity that throws you for a loop. It is literally a train-wreck: something that is not supposed to be happening that makes you want to watch it all the more. My father rested his body weight on his stick, peach still in hand, and attempted to walk himself down, when something gave way (whether it was his feet for the stick, I could not be sure) and he fell, rolling a short way to the bottom. At the bottom he stood, brushed himself off and held his left hand up to me proclaiming, “I saved my peach”. We walked a while more, climbing a hill for the view when I took the picture below and noticed he had two long and bloody scratches down his arm. I, on the other hand, had not a scratch on me. After watching him tumble I heeded his advice and walked back down the path to take my own, less dangerous leap.
