An Almost Not Quite Encounter with Despair
A Search for Christian Hope at 4,000 Feet
Go ahead and dim the lights. Pour yourself a drink. And settle in for a good, long story. An adventure story. The best kind of story.
The Timber Ridge trail drops steeply down a stone-cut staircase from the summit of Reddish Knob. The entrance to the trail is technical and dangerous, the kind of feature that results in gestures and finger-pointing from any group of mountain bikers who come to ride its first 15 yards. “No, the best way down is here,” a rider will say, with a hand waving toward the slightly lower height between steps on the right edge of the staircase. A second rider might select the inside line, placing him- or herself in a better position for the hard left hand corner at the base of the stairs; a third rider, the most prudent of the group, might prefer to simply walk down the staircase and begin the ride at its base.
The Reddish Knob descent begins technical and dangerous, and remains that way for the length of its 8.5 miles. You can watch a video of the descent for yourself. When combined with the Wolf Ridge Trail, the descent from Reddish Knob offers the experience of a world-class downhill: 2,820 feet of vertical right in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains southwest of Harrisonburg, Virginia. The descent is a classic of mid-Atlantic mountain biking. The trail moves steeply through alternating patches of deciduous and coniferous forest for several miles, punching up and over several sharp knobs along the ridge before settling into its swooping crash to the valley floor below. An extended rock garden, a roughly 100 yard pile of talus built of stone rubble the size of cinder blocks, meets the rider in the first mile-and-a-half of trail and screams “serious injury” to anyone who would dare traverse its broken pathway on a bike. To descend Reddish Knob on a mountain bike is to make a commitment to adventure: a genuine backcountry experience deep in the interior of George Washington National Forest, miles from the nearest town, on terrain that risks harm to both bike and rider.
My cousin Ryan, my friend Fr. Robby Renner (then a seminarian), and I had come to Reddish Knob for adventure in January of 2021. Actually, we had come to Reddish Knob to take a break; our destination that Thursday was Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina for a week of mid-winter mountain biking. But in the designs of providence, the Reddish Knob descent arrives about halfway on a trip from Baltimore, MD, to Brevard, NC, and we wanted to experience the adventure of a trail system we had heard about for months from local mountain bikers. Any pit stop that involved nearly 3,000 feet of vertical descending on a mountain bike is a pit stop worth making.
What makes the Reddish Knob descent most appealing is not the terrain alone or the amount of vertical involved (there are other trails nearby that just as good by these measures) but the ability to shuttle the ride. The summit of Reddish Knob stands at 4,397 feet and towers above the floor of the Shenandoah Valley. A typical effort to descend 3,000 feet from a mountain summit would involve an extended climb of almost 3,000 feet; “you need to earn your turns,” mountain bikers often say to one another. But Reddish Knob is an atypical mountain. A slender road—paved, with just enough width for two standard size automobiles to pass one another—twists and turns its way for 2.4 miles from an intersection with State Route 924 to the summit of the mountain. Forest Service Road 85 is exposed at times, with sheer drop-offs first on the eastern and then on the western side of the ridge. But drive along its pavement for 2.4 miles and you will arrive at a graffitied parking lot with a commanding view of the Shenandoah Valley and the extended north-south ridgeline of Reddish Knob that marks the border between Virginia and West Virginia.
Our plan was to leave a car at the bottom of the Wolf Ridge Trail and drive to the summit of Reddish Knob. The three of us would ride the Timber Ridge trail to its intersection with Wolf Ridge, regroup, and descend to the second car. At that point, one of us would stay below with the bikes (only one vehicle could carry more than 2 bikes at a time) while the other two of us returned to the summit for the second car. The descent we estimated would take 90 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how much time we spent evaluating different trail features before riding them. The driving on either side of the trail would add 30 minutes each way. A 3 hour pit stop that featured incredible riding and would still have us in North Carolina by 8pm seemed well worth it to us. This was our lunch break, essentially; a diversion to break up the monotony of 8 hours of driving.
Though the weather in the valley below was cold upon our arrival—not much more than 40 degrees—we turned a wide shoulder on Route 924 and were surprised to find that the entire length of the ridge was covered in new snow. The snowfall was light, maybe 3 inches deep, but the trees were frosted and white, waiting for a still rising sun to melt off the vestiges of the previous night’s precipitation. Route 924 remained clear of snow up to its junction with the summit road, but the summit road itself was covered in the newly fallen snow. Driving a Ford F-150, I put the truck into 4-wheel drive and followed a few sets of tire tracks up to the summit of Reddish Knob. The road was in good shape, despite the snowfall. About 3/4 of the way up the summit road crosses the ridgeline and sneaks along the backside of the mountain. The road here is darker (the western side of the mountain receives far less sun) and steeper but we continued upward without any problems and reached the summit of Reddish Knob in due course.
The details of the ride itself matter little to our adventure. We took our time evaluating the stone staircase before deciding to walk down and avoid unwanted injury. The upper portion of the trail was covered in enough snow to make it clear that we were the first to ride down Timber Ridge in these conditions. I made it about 3/4 of the way through the extended rock garden before I chose a bad line and came to a sudden stop. My front wheel caught between two rocks, my weight shifted forward hard on the bike causing my suspension fork to compress and dive, and I had to push back against the handlebars with all of my strength to avoid going over the bars. But there was no harm, no foul, no injury. Not long after, I took a hard left side line over the lower end of a downed tree laying across the trail; I was on the edge of the trail trying to skirt the underbrush. A sapling caught my jacket and flung me to the ground. I must have extended my right hand to break my fall because I stood up with no injuries apart from a pain radiating out from my little finger. Undeterred, I jumped back on the bike and completed the descent of the Wolf Ridge Trail into the valley below.
Once at the bottom of the trail, we took time for the glory of a parking lot beer before getting on to the next phase of our journey. We left Robby with his bike at the trailhead while Ryan and I returned to the summit to retrieve my truck. Turning onto Reddish Knob Road for the final ascent to the summit, it was clear that the warmer temperatures had started to melt the snow in some places. There was a little less traction than there had been on our initial drive to the summit a few hours before. Ryan’s Kia Optima spun out a few times, but with some care and without too much trouble, we managed to arrive at the summit without any problems. We took one last look out at the Shenandoah Valley, I threw my bike over the tailgate of the truck, and I told Ryan that I would see him in North Carolina in a few hours.
Ryan left the parking lot first, and I drove my truck around to follow him down the mountain. The road was slick enough with the snow that I decided to leave some good distance between our cars on this first part of the descent; maybe 50 yards or so. As we turned onto that darker, more secluded western swing of the road, traction on the road became harder to find. Tire tracks in the snow were glistening. Cars would ascend the road and compact the snow, which would then refreeze in the shade of the mountain. I was driving on an ice rink. About halfway down this section of the road, the tires of the truck slipped out completely and I lost control of the vehicle. The car started to slide, and to slide fast. I remember thinking in the moment—‘thinking’ is a strong word because it seemed to me that everything in those seconds was pure reactive instinct seizing control—that the greatest danger to avoid was the left side of the road where a low guard rail served as a feeble barrier to any vehicle that might fall off the western slope of the mountain. So, I cut the truck hard to the right; if I was going to crash, I needed to crash away from the guard rail and into the face of the mountain itself.
Fortunately, I did not crash. The truck came to a sudden stop, and I remember lurching forward from the impact. But there was no crash. The truck had spun out and turned almost perfectly perpendicular to the road. The front of the truck was now facing that right-hand face of mountain for which I had aimed. The front wheels of the truck had slipped off the road and were resting in a ditch—maybe a foot deep—that ran along the road and was full of debris. Piles of leaves, branches, chunks of blackened ice from a half-winter’s worth of car traffic. The truck had come to a stop in such a way that its front grill was maybe two inches away from the face of the mountain. There was not a scratch on the truck. I was immediately relieved, thrilled, and could not believe my luck. But then I went to inspect the rear of the vehicle and the nature of my emergency became clear to me: the rear of the truck was also unscratched, but the truck had come to rest in such a way that the tailgate was only a few inches from the guard rail on the road’s edge. I recognized immediately that I was probably trapped. The truck could not move forward or it would hit the face of the mountain. The truck could not move rearward or it would hit the guard rail preventing a fall of hundreds of feet down the mountain. There was no way to move the truck at all.
A car came to a stop behind me, from the summit of Reddish Knob. A young couple, maybe in their mid-20s, got out of the car and came up to offer assistance. I don’t remember our exchange of pleasantries or the making of introductions. The situation was immediately clear to them: my truck was trapped perpendicular across the only road down from the summit. We were all trapped together. We set to work looking for any way to move the truck. Maybe, just maybe, we thought, we could cut the steering wheel hard and get the truck to move enough in one direction to set it free. An immediate problem was traction; the front wheels of the truck lay in a trough of gripless leaves and snow. I gently pressed on the gas pedal while he pushed . . . no luck. The tires helplessly spun out, spewing snow and chewed up bits of leaves into the air. We next grabbed whatever branches we could find, ripped some larger rocks out of the ground, and built up platforms of solid mass under each tire. Again, I gently tapped on the gas pedal while he pushed . . . no luck. The truck was trapped, and there would be no self-rescue.
We had been working on getting traction under the wheels for about 20 minutes when another truck pulled up behind us. I had seen this truck up on the summit of the mountain earlier in the morning. The driver of the truck got out, immediately diagnosed the situation, and offered to help. His truck was new, with 4-wheel drive and some serious tires. He had a length of rope in the bed of his truck, and offered to pull me out of the ditch and back onto the road. We got to work immediately, fixed the rope between our two trucks . . . no luck. The road was so slick with refrozen snow that even the driver’s new all-terrain tires were slipping out as he pressed on the gas pedal. We worked for 15 minutes, doing everything we could to give his tires more traction on the road surface but nothing worked. From the summit of the mountain, a second road—unpaved and washed out—descends to the valley below, and the driver elected to head back home in that direction. There was nothing he could do to help us.
At least 45 minutes had passed since the truck slid out on the road. It was almost 2 o’clock in the afternoon and there was no hope of moving the truck without professional assistance. I told the young man who had been helping that my cousin had driven down the mountain ahead of me. Ryan had not seen the accident but once he realized I was not behind him, he would come back and we could put a plan together for rescue. The man and his girlfriend had no means of getting off the mountain other than their vehicle, but I then realized that I had my bike with me. I told the couple that I would ride down the road until I either found a cell phone signal (there was none on that backside of the mountain) or met my cousin and Robby coming back to see what had happened to me. So, I jumped on the bike and headed down the mountain. The snow was slick, quickly turning into sheets of ice and even the bike could barely maintain grip on the road surface. But before long I turned a hard right hand corner onto the exposed ridge of the mountain and entered into a world of sunlight. Sweet, intoxicating sunlight. The snow on the road had melted here; the road was even dry. I was standing on a saddle in the ridge of the mountain that was flat and warm and exposed to the sun overhead. Another 200 yards of driving without incident and nothing would have happened at all. I had been so close.
Another mile of biking and I met my cousin and Robby on their way to find me. Ryan had realized that something had gone wrong when I wasn’t behind him on the paved state route down into the valley. He elected to find Robby first, and then come back for me. I quickly described the nature of the situation and we discussed our options.
“I have AAA,” Ryan said. The truck absolutely needed a winch to pull it parallel with the road. A tow truck was exactly what we needed. To our good fortune, we had a decent cell phone signal on this little stretch of road on which we met. Ryan called AAA, and the best part of the day fell into place . . .
“Thank you for calling AAA, this is Lindsey, how may I help you?”
“Hey there Lindsey, my name is Ryan, and, well, my friends and I find ourselves in serious situation here. We’re going to need some help. We’re down here in the mountains of Virginia and have a car stuck in the snow. We’re gonna need you to send a tow truck, or maybe find some good ol’ boys down in the valley looking to recapture some old glory . . . you know the kind of guys I’m talking about . . . football players, old high school heroes, looking for one last adventure, something to sit around on porches and talk about, one last hoorah to share with the grandkids one day . . . tell them to get up here and give us a hand.”
When Ryan speaks he almost always reveals some of the deeper truths about the Irish people. Within seconds, Lindsey realized that she was speaking with a world-class conversationalist. To his credit, Ryan handed me the phone when it came time for all of the important details: where we were, what kind of vehicle, how long we had been stranded on the mountain. I gave Lindsey all of the information she requested, she submitted the service request, and told us that a tow truck would be to us in 45 minutes . . . just about 3pm. I rejoiced in that moment and thanked Lindsey for her help. Ryan asked for the phone and I handed it back before Lindsey disconnected.
“Hey Lindsey, this is Ryan again. Look, I didn’t want to tell you this at the beginning because I knew there would be too much pressure, and I didn’t want that for you. But I need to tell you now. Lindsey, here it is: there is a child and a small dog trapped in that car . . .”
“Ok, listen Ryan . . ." Lindsey began to say before Ryan interrupted her.
“Lindsey, I don’t want to hear it. A child and a small dog. Their lives are in your hands.” Ryan had Lindsey on speaker phone, and I heard her chuckle. Ryan was smiling as proudly as I'd ever seen him smile. Robby and I were laughing hysterically. In those fleeting moments of unexpected joy, I forgot completely that we were trapped on a 4,000 foot high mountain the middle of winter. We were just a few friends enjoying our time with one another. Those moments were a precious gift to me. In the hours to come, I would hold onto the precious details of those moments: the shock, surprise, and delight of Lindsey’s voice in the midst of the banter; Ryan’s smile; Robby’s incapacity to keep himself from laughing as he listened to the exchange.
We finished laughing and made a series of decisions. Ryan would head down the mountain and continue to North Carolina. There was no need for him to wait for us with rescue on the way and he was driving by himself; best to get him on the road. Robby would take his bike and ride up the road to tell the couple trapped on the other side of the truck that rescue was coming soon. I would stay right there on the open shoulder of the mountain with a clear and strong cell phone signal to manage the rescue. Robby grabbed his gear from Ryan’s car, we told Ryan that we’d see him in North Carolina later in the evening, and we watched him drive down toward the valley. Now came the hard work of waiting in the anticipation of rescue.
As soon as Robby left me and I was alone on the road, I became suddenly aware of how cold it was outside. I was freezing. For the ride, I had elected to wear shorts, an upper body base layer, and a technical shell jacket; the perfect selection for alternating periods of exertion and rest, cold and hot, but not ideal for standing in the cold. And now I was absolutely standing in the cold, still dressed in riding clothes stained by some last vestiges of sweat-induced moisture. I was freezing. To keep myself warm I started jogging in place. And then I started jogging up and down the road. I found a tree trunk next to the road that served as a perfect cell phone holder in a location with perfect cell service. I left my cell phone there with the volume all the way up and I jogged and jogged and jogged. A few times I sat down to pull off my shoes and warm my feet with my hands, trying to massage some warmth into them. All the while I was waiting for a tow truck to pull around the corner.
The tow truck never came. At 3:15, I received a call from AAA: the tow service denied the request for service, and there was nothing else that AAA could do for us. We would need to organize our own rescue, and we could submit our receipt for towing to AAA for reimbursement. I stood there in stunned silence. What should I do? Ryan was too far gone to call back to the mountain. Robby was a half-mile up the road without cell service, and there was nothing he could do anyway. So, I got to work finding our own rescue. There were no other options. Cell service was still strong, and Google Maps revealed some two dozen tow services in the valley below. I started making calls and soon realized our problem: every tow service in the valley knew exactly which road we were trapped on, and would not risk sending a driver. But every operator with whom I spoke also offered a glimmer of hope: “oh, we don’t go up that road, but call (insert tow service name here) and I bet they’ll head right up to help you boys out.”
I started to doubt that anyone would head right up to help us boys out. Slowly but surely I was working my calls toward tow services nearer to Harrisonburg. I was about halfway through our available options when a dark cloud passed overhead and my phone dropped the call. No attempt to call the service back was successful until the cloud passed. Once the skies were clear I resumed my calls, but in a few minutes another cloud passed overhead and I lost service again. I was eternally, deeply frustrated. My hands were shaking from the cold. Every now and then a car or truck would pass on its way up the mountain, I would explain our situation, and they would sometimes offer to help. A group of electricians in a large pickup truck were especially charitable and enthusiastic about getting my truck off of the road but the afternoon passed away and no word came to me of a successful rescue.
The point arrived—something close to a breaking point—at which I called my father. An adult myself, with almost half a lifetime’s worth of experiences in the wilderness, circumstances had conspired to make me a child again. I don’t know what my expectations were: what would my father do from an office outside of Baltimore to help us? But I made the call anyway. I don’t remember much about the call except a mutual exchange of frustrations. I wanted help that he couldn’t give, and he wanted to help but couldn’t. An hour had passed. It was now 4:30 in the afternoon and the skies were darkening. The temperature was dropping. When my cell phone worked—in those fleeting moments during which I was not the victim of meteorological caprice—I was only told again and again that no one could help.
You reach a point in these kinds of scenarios at which you must make a decision to let go of your best option. Survival in the wilderness is all about the conservation of resources and the most elemental resources are often the most important: time, temperature, and daylight. For us, the afternoon was almost evening, the air temperature was nearly at the freezing point, and the sun was disappearing behind us to the west. Our best option was getting a tow service to get us off of the mountain but that no longer seemed possible in the short term. I knew that Robby and I could always ride our bikes into the valley, find a hotel, and get to work finding a tow service in the morning. The ride into the valley would be long and cold, but we could do it. We had lights for our bikes and maybe a hour of hard pedaling would get us to Bridgewater.
I wish I could tell you how intoxicated—how enchanted—I was in the moment with the thought of riding into the valley for shelter and food and warmth and everything we lacked on the shoulder of Reddish Knob. More intense than the need for the basic goods of life was my overwhelming desire to bring an end to present reality. I wanted control over my life. Stranded on the side of a mountain in the cold, a perpetual casualty of statoform malice, I had no control. My life was suddenly dependent—contingent. And the only way to claim operative influence over my life again was to abandon our hope of rescue for the day. The logic of my thoughts seemed so clear to me: we were losing daylight, it was cold, and it would be a long night . . . get off the mountain and save yourself.
The problem with conscience is that conscience obliges us to live differently. And just as soon as I started to acquiesce in my desire for control my conscience broke into my thoughts and desires to remind me that Robby and I were not the only ones stranded on Reddish Knob. There were at least two others, and their welfare was our solemn responsibility. We all needed to get off the mountain, or we all needed to stay on the mountain. But we would get through this together.
I jumped on my bike and headed up the mountain. When I reached that low saddle before the upward turn with its ice and snow, I found the electricians who had passed me maybe 90 minutes earlier. I had forgotten all about them. They told me that they tried for some time to free the truck but there was no way to get traction on the road. The ice was too slick for a conventional tow; we would absolutely need a winch. All of the sudden Robby appeared. He wanted information. Almost three hours had passed since we went our separate ways and he knew nothing of the situation with AAA and every other tow service in the Shenandoah Valley. I gave Robby the news, admitted that I had no firm plan for the moment, and sent him back to the truck to inform the others of the situation. There were four people in total trapped above us, two couples, and though they had done a good job of keeping their spirits high, Robby said that some anxiety was starting to manifest.
Looking out into the fading sunlight, I came to terms with the fact that I really did not know what to do. Robby would later tell me that upon returning to the truck and delivering the message that no tow service would come to us, he climbed into the cab, saw in the rearview mirror the sun fading into the horizon behind him, and came the closest he had ever come to despair. The electricians who had been there at the saddle a few moments before had driven off, and we were alone again on the mountain. At that moment, my phone rang. It was my father.
“What’s your situation?” he asked. I gave him a short summary of everything that had transpired in the last hour. We had first spoken around 4:00, I think, and now it was close to 5pm.
“Well, what are you going to do now?” he asked. And at that moment a single option became clear to me.
“I’m going to call 911.”
“And what are they going to do for you?”
“I don’t know. 911 things. Send a fire truck. Get the National Guard. I don’t know. But we are getting at a real emergency here so they need to do something.” My father is an accountant, and can find a way to get to the bottom line in any circumstance.
“You guys got yourself into this mess, you know, so there might be a huge charge for the kind of rescue they would need to put together.” I thought about my answer before I gave it.
“Well, then I guess I’ll send that bill along to AAA.” I told my father that I needed to get to work and so I hung up the phone. We are reaching my favorite part of the story, the part of the story at which objective reality becomes a theater for silly human beings to play the foolish game of acting serious.
We can begin with an imagined history lesson. Sometime in the summer of 1863, West Virginia recently admitted to the Union as a state independent from Virginia, a team of surveyors must have been sent out to identify a border between these two states. A border that would also demarcate the boundary between two factions involved in a great war. And these surveyors, looking up at the long, gently rolling slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains must have seen in Reddish Knob a geological feature well-suited to the work of demarcating a border. And because geography is geography, some decades later, when the time came to build a road to the summit of Reddish Knob, the obvious course was for some contractor to trace the future Forest Service Road 85 along that same ridge of the mountain . . . a ridge that now served as a border between two states.
All of these imagined historical details matter because upon calling 911 for the first time I unexpectedly initiated a game of jurisdictional hot potato. I was standing on a road that straddled the border between Pendleton County, West Virginia and Augusta County, Virginia. My 911 call was sent first to Augusta County, who pinged my cell signal and identified me as being in West Virginia, and so immediately transferred me. The operator for Pendleton County pinged my signal and sent me back to Augusta County. I tell people with great frequency that the line between comedy and tragedy is very thin, so we should be laughing almost all of the time. In those moments I laughed at the tragedy of our circumstances. I could not believe the individual threads of circumstance that had twined together in just the right way to give us the rope we needed to hang. All of it—every moment of the afternoon—was deeply funny. And all of it together might really get someone hurt.
As many as four times my emergency call was transferred between counties and precincts before an operator in Pendleton County finally agreed to hear me out. I described to her our situation and of our desperate need for rescue.
“Well, son, it sounds to me like what you need is a tow truck, and needing a tow truck ain’t an emergency.”
“Ma’am, with due respect, in a few hours time there will be six people trapped on the summit of a 4,000 foot mountain with temperatures in the low 20s and we’ll be hypothermic, so if I call you back a few hours and tell you that will you agree that we’re in an emergency?”
“Oh, I see what you’re saying,” she offered with an extended southern draw. We got to work talking details and options. She identified our location, and was reaching out to contacts in Pendleton County to organize a rescue. There was no guarantee she could find help for us but she was willing to try. She asked me to hold. Maybe five minutes into holding, the call was dropped. The sky was dark by now and I could not identify the offending cloud. Not that it mattered. By this point, our situation was so absurd that I was a willing participant in the comedy of errors that had become my life. I dialed the numbers again . . . 9-1-1 and prayed that the same operator would receive the call. No such luck. My call was picked up by Augusta County in Virginia, and I begged—begged—the operator to transfer me back to West Virginia. The woman was confused by my pleadings, but quickly reshaped the conversation: her location tracking placed me neither in Augusta County nor in Pendleton County but rather in Rockingham County, Virginia, the county just to the north of Reddish Knob. Without another word I was transferred again.
Just as remarkable as the interwoven threads of circumstance that threatened to harm us were the interwoven threads of circumstance that saved us. To my great surprise, the transfer of my call to Rockingham County marked a turning point. Somewhere in Rockingham County is the town of Broadway. And there in the town of Broadway, Virginia is Hart’s Towing Service . . . the only tow service in three counties with a 4-wheel drive tow truck. The 911 dispatch officer for Rockingham County transferred me immediately to Hart’s Towing, Hart’s Towing transferred me to their driver, and their driver told me that he was on his way. We could expect him about 6:30.
I rode my bike quickly up the road in the dark to tell Robby and the others. My body rejoiced at the sudden burst of interior warmth that followed from an elevated heart rate. The others were tired, hungry, and cold when I found them. But no one was mad or upset. They happily received news of the coming rescue and returned to their cars to get warm. For the first time in five hours, I crawled into the cab of the truck and turned the ignition. I was desperate to feel warm. I also had not eaten in hours or had any water to drink. Robby quickly gave me an granola bar and a water bottle. I tried to relax. Robby and I talked about the day for a time, maybe traded some old stories to revive our spirits. We had only been talking for about fifteen minutes when I saw headlights shining around the corner of the road below us. It was not quite 6:00 and far too early for the tow truck. I watched as a Jeep Cherokee turned slowly around the corner of the road, tires sliding out on the ice, desperately clawing its way toward the summit.
The driver of the Jeep was named Tammy. Tammy drove a forklift for a living, was recently divorced, and was heading up to Reddish Knob to look out at the night sky and do some thinking. These are all details I learned because upon seeing her headlights I jumped out of the truck and rushed down the icy road to give Tammy an urgent message.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry but you can’t be here. Our truck is stuck on the ice just around the next corner and we have rescue coming and you can’t be here or the tow truck won’t be able to get to us. I’m worried you might even get stuck yourself.” Tammy understood and was glad to help. There was only one problem.
“I don’t think I can drive back down, I’m terrified of these conditions.” I ran back up the hill to grab my bike. I gave Robby the keys to the truck. I told Robby that I was going to guide Tammy back down the road and then stay at the saddle before the road turned to ice in order to ward off any other drivers who came for the summit of Reddish Knob. When the time came, Robby would need to drive the truck down the hill. And with those words I headed down the hill to get Tammy off the mountain.
We needed fifteen minutes to make it work, but eventually we got Tammy off of the ice and onto the pavement below. She refused to leave me there waiting for the tow truck. We drove down the road to where there was excellent cell service and I called to confirm that the tow truck was still on its way. It was. Tammy then drove me back to the saddle but insisted I wait in her car and keep warm. Every now and then another vehicle would make its way up the road and I would step out to warn them of the conditions and ask them to turn around. Tammy and I talked the whole time, mostly about her life, and for a few moments I forgot completely the circumstances that had brought us together. We simply enjoyed a good conversation.
The driver from Hart’s Towing arrived right at 6:30, and he had the truck free in a matter of moments. I stood in disbelief when maybe 10 minutes after backing up (yes, backing up) the ice-covered road, he drove back onto the dry pavement of the saddle with a trio of cars behind him. First came our truck, completely undamaged from the accident. Next came the two vehicles belonging to the couples trapped with us on Reddish Knob. I begged these couples to let me buy them food, alcohol, anything, but they refused. I apologized profusely for the whole affair but they would have none of it. “Could have happened to any of us, nothing anyone could do about it.” Each car made its way down the road and could not have been more grateful for their patience and kindness.
Tammy left soon after them. Robby and I jumped in the truck and followed the driver from Hart’s Towing down into the valley where cell service was strong enough for him to run a credit card on a portable device. $457. I would have paid three times that much, I think, to get off the mountain. I mentioned to the driver that I could not believe his comfort driving on a road so ice and snow covered or the speed with which he was able to free the truck from FSR 85. He laughed.
“You’re my 9th rescue on that road in the last three weeks. I know it pretty well by now.” His words shocked me.
“You know, you guys could close the road. And if you aren’t going to close the road, you could put up a big sign that says, ‘Call Hart’s Towing’ once you’re stuck.” The driver laughed again.
“Not a bad idea,” he chuckled as he drove off to the north.
We started driving toward Staunton. It was about 7:45 now, and the sudden absence of emergency awoke the most primitive of desires within us: we wanted food and we wanted it immediately. There would be no more waiting. We found a Chick-Fil-A in Staunton and then found a hotel room for the night. It was in the hotel room that I first took notice of my finger, the one injured in the fall earlier in the day. The finger was deeply swollen in hues of blue and black. I could not bend it at all. The pain radiating out from the knuckle was intense, but I just hadn’t noticed until now. My presumption was that the finger was jammed, but an x-ray a month later revealed one of the worst finger breaks the orthopedic surgeon had ever seen. What a remarkable day, to break a finger and not even notice it for the drama unfolding around you. After unloading our belongings into the room, Robby asked if we could pray a Mass. A part of me wanted to pray but those primitive desires begged me to crawl into bed and sleep. But in that moment, I thought back over the day and gave thanks for all of the characters who had entered into our story and given of themselves to help us. I told Robby we should offer the Mass for everyone we had met that day, and so in the corner of a Super 8 somewhere on the outskirts of Staunton, Virginia, I offered one of the more beautiful Masses of my life.
A few weeks ago now, I told another story of adventure to some young adults from the Basilica. There are many of these stories, and I cherish every one of them. When I was in middle school, I was a part of a genuine rescue operation in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. There was the time deep in the Great Smoky Mountains that I misread a map and found myself without water for a 20 mile hike with a full pack before I reached my campsite. In May of 2021 some friends and I attempted a traverse of Pisgah National Forest on our bikes and found the terrain so brutal that we soon ran out of food; I remember the burning pain of popping a hydration tablet into my mouth because there were no other options for calories. Many times I have stood at the top of some mountain or technical trail and wondered whether or not I (or we) have the requisite skill to get to the bottom safely. These are my adventure stories, there are many, and I cherish every one of them.
But no adventure resonates with me more than the dramatic events that unfolded on Reddish Knob on the 7th of January, 2021. At the young adult event at which I shared that other adventure story, a young man asked me: how do you avoid despair in these kinds of situations? What a wonderful question. And though I did not share this at the time, my thoughts immediately turned to Reddish Knob as I worked out an answer.
The fact of the matter is that I came close to despair on that afternoon; so did Robby. The stakes were high, our options limited. A perfect recipe for despair. And yet we never lost hope. As I look back on our experience on Reddish Knob now, a few thoughts come to mind that work together to form some kind of an account of hope. Maybe not everyone’s hope; maybe not the hope that someone else would want for themselves. But hope—despite its place amongst virtues both natural and supernatural—is also personal. My hope is mine, and my hope has always sustained me.
My hope has everything to do with making prudential judgments. I don’t remember saying to myself at some point in my life: you know, you really must learn how to manage difficult situations when these present themselves. And yet manage these kinds of situations I have done, and always through the use of prudence: the application of general principles to particular circumstances. What does this look like in real time? We make the best decision we can make every time we need to make a decision, and recognize that making the best decision possible is sometimes all that we can do. We don’t control all circumstances; we are finite, limited, dependent creatures. And to take a step back from prudence and consider something as foolishly irrelevant as the ideal within an emergency is a waste of time . . . and a waste of hope. The adventure on Reddish Knob was a matter of finding a practical solution to a practical problem. There were decisions to be made, and making the best decisions possible was all that we could do. And it got us off the mountain.
My hope has everything to do with the absurd . . . or if you prefer . . . fate . . . or if you prefer . . . providence. As I have mentioned, on the shoulder of Reddish Knob I could not believe the individual threads of circumstance that had twined together in just the right way to give us the rope we needed to hang. Nor could I believe the individual threads of circumstance that had twined together in just the right way to save us. The point is: adventure reveals to us that we are a part of something so much larger than ourselves. And in the midst of an adventure I perceive the ‘something so much larger’ sometimes as the absurd, sometimes as fate, and sometimes as providence. Sometimes I am so stunned by circumstance that I cannot help but laugh at the absurdity of life. Sometimes I am so stunned by circumstance that I curse fate. And sometimes—always—I am so stunned by circumstance that I give thanks. There is no place for despair in a worldview that is appropriately cosmic. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we cry, and always we give thanks.
My hope has everything to do with relationship. There on Reddish Knob I palpably—viscerally, tangibly—felt the gift of friendship. These moments do not come often in life, and these are encounters with grace. Somehow there trapped at 4,000 feet and risking hypothermia with no real food to eat, Robby and I genuinely enjoyed our time together. The adventure—the danger, the risk, the disaster—somehow served as the condition of possibility for a deepening of our friendship. We were going to get through it together, or we were not going to get through it together. But there at the core of the adventure on Reddish Knob is the beauty of human relationship: three friends went for a bike ride and unforeseen circumstances not only made them better friends but also brought so many others into their lives. These are encounters with grace, and when I look back on the events of January 7th, 2021 I do not see the cold or the misery or the uncertainty or the pain radiating out from a broken finger. What I behold is friendship. The whole affair was a gift.
There, I think, is the heart of the matter: I am grateful for our time on Reddish Knob. Those hours gave me an opportunity to come to know myself more intimately, to recognize the great gift of friendship, and to embrace the truth that my life is a part of a much larger narrative. I suppose a person could ask me: would you be saying the same thing if someone had been seriously injured, or had died? I don’t know, and I don’t think that I could know. More importantly: I don’t think that I should know. We can pass the time we have been given in these lives of ours wondering about hypothetical circumstances, or we can engage with reality. For now, I’m grateful for our time on Reddish Knob. And if the threads of circumstance ever twine together to render a verdict far more severe than on that January afternoon, well, then, I suppose I will need to find a new way to give thanks. For the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
I only watched the video to the end because I knew the ending. You are miraculously alive!!!