Adirondack Peeks Summer 2024

Even stranger, he didn’t seem to recognize how slowly he was moving. We agreed that I would go ahead and wait for him at the falls. I found the falls and turned back to join Tim. It took me a long time to reach him and when I did, he had not progressed much. We agreed to turn around together. It was four miles back to the car, all downhill. What should have taken us an hour and a half took us five and a half hours. I would walk with Tim, then go ahead a few hundred yards and wait. At one point, Tim didn’t ap pear for 10 minutes. I started hiking back toward the spot where I last saw him. The trail was flat with a mild cross slope. As I approached the spot and still didn’t see him, I grew confused. I didn’t see him until I was nearly right on top of him. He was lying sideways, shoulder down, in a small depression on the downhill side of the trail. “Hey buddy, are you OK?” I asked. “Well, yeah. I fell off the trail and it felt pretty com fortable, so I decided to stay here for a while,” was his unalarmed response. After helping him out of the ditch and then help ing him up once more after he fell teetering in the other di rection, we continued down to the car at our snail’s pace, staying together the rest of the way. Tim lay down on the couch for a nap when we got back to the rented place. We got a cryptic text from the Johns saying that they had turned down after Haystack. It wasn’t clear to me whether they had gone back to Heart Lake or down John’s Brook, so I drove back up to Heart Lake in case they had gone down that direction. After waiting for a couple of hours in the car with no cell re ception, and finishing watching a downloaded Bob Dylan documentary on my phone, I decided they must have gone down the other way. Their text came when I got up to the main road. They had hiked all the way down to Keene Valley via Bushnell Falls and Johns Brook Lodge. When I got back to the house, Tim was still passed out on the couch. It was 11 p.m., and we coaxed him to his bed. When we got back to Ithaca, I called Becca and told her of Tim’s difficulties on the hike. I suggested to Tim that he contact his doctor and see if he could get a B-12 infusion right away. Two nights later, I got a text from Becca saying that they were going to the ER, then three hours later another text saying that they were flying Tim in a helicopter to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester. Tim had slept for two days straight and at dinner had a seizure episode and then threw up on his dinner plate. Af ter Becca advocated strenuously for him to be evaluated, a CT scan in the ER showed a large tumor in Tim’s brain. The next morning, I grabbed my extra ADK 46er and winter 46er patches and drove to Rochester. Becca had flown with Tim in the helicopter and Hannah flew in from Philadelphia early the next day. Mary would bring Connor and a second car to leave with Becca later that morning. The nurses in the neurology ICU were already enamored with Tim and his stories of completing his winter 46 the previous year. I placed the patches beside his bed, a vi sual reminder of his strength and resilience. The nurses wheeled Tim out to the OR at 2:30 p.m. and he underwent

life-saving brain surgery at 4:00.

The surgeon removed a four-by-nine-centimeter tumor from Tim’s right temporal lobe, which was later confirmed to be glioblastoma. The big scary surgery was over, and Tim would now focus on recovery and treat ment. Standing in the hospital parking garage with Becca, Connor, and Hannah and trying to find the right parting words the night of his successful surgery, I said, “I have spent a lot of time with your dad in the mountains in win ter, and something I know about Tim is that he is incred ibly strong and cheerful when facing adversity.” There have been several milestones in Tim’s recovery over the past months: Finishing radiation and the first long round of chemo. Receiving a positive post treatment MRI. Going back to work full time. The first post surgery hike, bike ride, and run. Starting Optune treat ments, a device that uses nodes applied with stickers on the scalp to create an electromagnetic field in the brain to slow cancer cell mitosis, which Tim now wears at least 21 hours per day. Tim highly anticipated and was delighted when the day finally came this summer when the scar on his scalp healed fully and he could jump off the sailboat, fully immersing his body in Cayuga Lake. Plans are in the works for a return to the ADKs on MLK weekend again this year. Kent Johnson just needs the Santanonis and Phelps and Tabletop to finish his win ter 46ers, and Tim and I want to be there with him for his finish on Phelps. But mainly, I think we’re just look ing forward to being out on the trail again and are happy to have an excuse to get us out there on another adven ture together. It will be another chance to experience the Adirondack wilderness, a place that has become like no other in our hearts, and to laugh in the face of cancer and rejoice, notwithstanding the knowledge of our evanes cent lives. Let’s not call this a post-logue. I’m still alive after all. As a matter of fact, I’ve been hiking gorges around Ithaca this winter with Tom and other friends. And Tom and I joined Kent and the Johns for a weekend last month in the high peaks and climbed Noonmark (after the rain tapered off) one day and celebrated Kent’s 46er finish on Table Top the next day. Feeling quite alive. As you can easily imagine, after Tom told me he was writing some thing for PEEKS magazine, he asked me if I was good with him sharing the story and details about my health. “No problem sharing,” I said, even adding some details. After an exchange of edits and comments, Tom invited me to write a response. Let’s call it an epilogue, or a dialogue with Tom. How appropriate for me, a Logue. Our winter adventures have become one of my favorite events of the year, for many of the reasons Tom mentions. The first frost of the season in Ithaca invariably gets me thinking about an ADK winter itinerary and the call of the wild. The immense wilderness of the Adiron dacks is part of the call, as are those magical moments or transcendental experiences, reminders of a deep, natural spiritualism. The moment that Tom shared about the bird Epilogue by Tim Logue, February 2024

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