Coming to a pretty pass

Thursday night after Dean and the kids are all asleep in the hotel room, I lie awake and picture a scene: a beautiful little four-year-old, my beautiful little four year old, running at full speed away from us, several long steps ahead of us, along a path on a high cliff, towards an area with a drop-off high enough to bring immediate death were she to fall. Although she is now snuggled safely between Isaac and Mabel, sleeping tranquilly and completely intact, I can’t get the scene out of my head, can’t sleep, and wonder if I’ll ever be able to shake this terrifying image.

This was our second family trip to Zion National Park. The last time we only had about an hour, and Dean chose a short but spectacular hike for us: the Canyon Overlook trail. It’s a short and nearly level hike along a cut-out ledge on a cliff side, and it leads to an amazing view of a very deep canyon. I have some fear of heights, and I was very worried about my little ones breaking into a run and running off the edge of the path, so to assuage my fears, after a while Dean picked Mabel up and carried her on his shoulders. Since the path also has overhangs in several places, and Dean is tall even without the added height of a child on his shoulders, this also made me nervous when he would have to stoop while traversing a low, narrow area. I was also frightened when we reached the overlook, because although the overlook itself has a tall fence across it, it’s surrounded by sloping rock hills that are very attractive to small children, but which conceal deadly drops. I barely kept my fear in check, with much pleading with Dean and the kids to stay well back from the edge. On the return hike to the car, we learned from other hikers that the day before, a young boy had gone off the path and fallen to his death. I told Dean I didn’t know if I could ever come back on that hike with small children, and I mentally filed the hike as one of my more frightening parenting moments.

So, when we planned this trip back to Zion Park, I asked Dean if he would want to do that hike again, and he assured me he would. He would remind me of the millions of people who have safely hiked that trail, and I would remind him that we would be doing the hike with energetic, unpredictable, and often non-compliant children — and that we knew of at least one child who had died at that place. Before we left on our trip, I went to Target and bought a harness I’d seen — a cute harness with a little teddy bear that rides on the child’s back, with an attached leash. I decided that with Henry in a pack on Dean’s back, Rose wearing a harness, and with stern directions to the older kids to stay close to us and far from the edge of the path, maybe I could brave the Overlook trail again.

Fortunately Rose liked the teddy-bear leash well enough and it had worked well at keeping Rose away from drop-offs on our other hikes (mainly I would hold her hand while wearing the leash around my wrist, but if she broke free and headed towards danger, the leash would alert me and stop her,) so when Dean wanted to do the Canyon Overlook hike on Thursday evening, I braced myself and agreed. I’ve learned that I can keep my fear of heights partly in check if I just don’t think about where I am or what I’m doing, but I did have to pay attention to the path, keep Rose on the side of the path away from the edge, and keep her happy and compliant — all this, and yet try not to think too hard about the narrowness of the path nor how high up we were. Rose was stopping every few minutes to do things like writing the word “water” in the sand with a stick (sand writing was one of her favorite amusements throughout this trip,) and this slowed us down enough that Dean and Ike and Mabel soon left us behind, which made me nervous because I’d seen that Mabel and Ike kept going faster and getting further ahead of Dean than I was comfortable with. I kept calling after Dean to slow down and wait for us, but he couldn’t hear me, and when he finally did hear me, he called back that he wanted to get to the overlook by sunset — and kept going. He and the kids finally responded to my pleading enough to slow down a little, and Rose and I arrived at the overlook not far behind them.

Mabel (who really wasn’t paying nearly the heed to my instructions that I’d have hoped or expected) was exploring the rocky hills and finding secret hiding places, which captured Rose’s imagination. Rose had just found a secret hideout of her own, when Dean found someone to take our picture and asked her to come be in the family picture. She refused. He insisted:

That was the turning point for Rose — she was tired, she’d been kept on a leash all evening — and from that moment on, she wouldn’t comply with anything else we asked her to do. When we announced that we needed to head back to the car, she went ballistic. I picked her up and carried her for a bit while she hit me and screamed at me, and then Dean took her from me (so he was now carrying Henry on his back and Rose in front) and carried her while she writhed and attacked him, screaming “Backwards! Go backwards! Put me down!” I rolled up her leash and tucked it into the tiny backpack on the bear harness, and Dean used the long sleeves of Rose’s jacket to straitjacket her. At home when Rose gets upset, she’ll go to her room (voluntarily) for a few minutes, and can usually calm down that way, and I was thinking that if she just had a little break, we’d all be safer and our hike would be much quieter. So, eventually I talked Dean into setting her down for a minute in a safe, wide area of the path. I sat down on a rock next to her — when suddenly she broke away from me and started running along the path at full tilt. I screamed, “Catch her! Catch her!” With a few quick strides, Dean did catch her, and picked her up again before she reached the drop-off area of the path. I realized I’d been standing helplessly, watching. I said, “She didn’t even have her leash on, and was running — that was my worst fear, right there.” Dean said, “You’re the one who wanted to put her down.” “I know — she’s just sick of not having any autonomy, and I thought if you set her down for a minute, she could calm down.”

And we continued our hike. Rose even calmed down enough to be able to be set down and walk on the very last bit. We were all safe and sound. But then, that night in the hotel room while trying to sleep, I couldn’t stop replaying those few seconds when Rose’s life had seemed in imminent peril.

The next morning I asked Dean, “Was there any chance you wouldn’t have caught her when she was running from us?” He said, “I definitely would have caught her — there was still plenty of distance before she got to the dangerous part of the path, so I was just taking slower steps to be sure of my footing.”

And so Rose was never in any real danger, anyway. Maybe we could have found a better way to keep her from reaching meltdown point, certainly I should have held on to her leash when we set her down, definitely it would have been preferable for Dean not to have to carry a screaming four-year-old in addition to a one-year-old for the second half of the hike — but it was never the life-and-death situation I’d thought it was.

And will I go on that hike (or any others like it) again? Not this week. But, if Dean and Ike and Mabel promise to stay closer to me, and if I keep a more constant grip on Rose’s leash, then maybe, just maybe I would do it again.

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