How Adam Got His Groove Back, or, The Fifth Day

And in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours.

Tuesday the twenty-second of July, 2008 was a big day for me. I am writing this post, on what is now Thursday evening (and Saturday evening when I finally got around to finishing this) as a completely different man from the one I was then. This isn’t to say that we’re not all, as human beings, constantly evolving on a day-to-day basis because, yes, we are! No, what I mean to say is that Tuesday was an especially evolutionary day in my life because of one unusual event that occurred at its mid-point: I, along with five friends, very nearly died.

To begin, the beginning: I woke up relatively early at around eight. Put on a pot of coffee…read the Washington Post online while waiting for said coffee to finish its dripping…the usual. By the time my coffee was ready, I had decided to re-read, for the umpteenth time, Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions because I was, well, feeling a little angst-y and forlorn over my proverbial “Certain Someone” whom, at 8:10 on Tuesday morning, I hadn’t seen or really heard from for a couple days or so. I knew that my C.S. was going through…a bit of a rough patch, so in the interest of not upping her stress level, I had to try as hard as I could to contain and control my tendency to become attached at the hip. In order to stay chill about the whole situation, to keep being cool for her sake, and to avoid having a complete existential freak-out for my own sake, I needed Sartre to simultaneously remind me and let me forget that: in order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself.

I needed to be reminded that there are indeed other others (besides C.S.) in the equations of my self: namely, my friends. And by the time I finished reading the 110 or so pages of the book, plans were already in place to partake in a favorite past-time which would be sure to set my mind at ease: a hike to and a swim in Difficult Run along with Kristin, Zack, Tim, Brittany, and Lauren. (Rita, who’d originally come up with the notion of going to Difficult Run on Tuesday a couple nights prior, was supposed to come along too, but she said she felt sick.) So we went with six—three guys and three girls. We were all feeling so carpe diem about the trip that lay before us that we must have forgotten all about the thunderstorms that were strong enough to fill several times over the keg-sized plastic tub underneath the leak in the gutter while I read on the screened in porch earlier that morning. The afternoon sun tricked me into forgetting.

As we passed the No Swimming sign at the midpoint of the trail, I considered that Sartre wrote: we want freedom for freedom’s sake and in every particular circumstance. (I then considered my tight pink striped Tommy Hilfiger bathing suit.) Our swimming spot is probably the same one where everyone who breaks the rules and swims in Difficult Run swims. It’s the one that’s located at the base of that one seemingly endless, and very steep log-staircase built into the side of the ravine about a quarter mile after the trail crosses down under Georgetown Pike and joins the high horse trail from below and to its right. If you haven’t ever been there, and are wondering which seemingly endless, and very steep log-staircase is the right one to take, you don’t know yet that there is only one set of seemingly endless log-stairs along the entire Difficult Run trail, that it is quite easy to find, and that the experience of swimming in the swimming spot to which it leads is highly recommended by me. Now you know all three.


It had gotten to be around two in the afternoon by the time we arrived at the base of the log-staircase to look out at the water in pristine condition. We could see that the water was resting calmly and at a relatively low level, down a few inches from the last time I’d trekked out to the swimming spot the week beforehand. Everyone else jumps in immediately but I look up instead and stare into the sky: the same sun, which had earlier tricked me into forgetting about that morning’s thunderstorms, was shining so brightly and perfectly that I could even see clear through the gently moving water all the way down to each illuminated rock on the bottom of the shallow side, which is not usually the case at all. In fact, because the sunlight was so particularly bright that day, I felt safe doing a dive between two large underwater rocks.

Thankfully, the apparent perfection of the conditions that was first evident that afternoon before I dove in was still intact when I surfaced; the water was not as chilly as it had been the week beforehand and not as turgid either. I could even see when I opened my eyes under the creek water, which had settled, at that moment, somewhere between cerulean and olive instead of any other of its infinitely varying possible shades of green to blue, grey to brown.

I ask the others, who have already climbed their way to the jumping rock on the deeper section of creek (which is on the opposite side of the creek from the staircase) if anyone wants to go behind the waterfall with me. Only Kristin said yes; she had never been behind the waterfall before. To get there, we have to go against the current that the confluent forces of the waterfall create, which simultaneously compels and repels us both to and from the waterfall. We flop our selves over a series of slippery, yet smooth and non-jagged, algae-covered rocks on our way upstream like salmon ready to spawn; I imagine I am one when I look foolish and nearly slip. Our arrival is made easily enough, though. Once inside, we find that hundreds—perhaps thousands—of years of water’s persistent, chronic violence against rock, played right out before our eyes underneath the waterfall, have left the rocks polished, like glass, or obsidian.

We then rejoined the rest of our group and five minutes later, while the six of us stood together atop the jumping rock, everything changed in an instant. The sun still shone just as before, but the creek water had turned opaque brown and the current was gaining speed.

It was a flash flood.

I’m standing at the top of the jumping rock when I look upstream and see the waterfall, which five minutes prior was a perfect stage for Kristin’s and my mock “Irish Spring” commercial—Refreshing!—but was now littered with debris,—some as big as whole oaks—angry and Vesuvian. Sartre wrote: …we can understand why our doctrine horrifies certain people. Because often the only way they can bear their wretchedness is to think, “Circumstances have been against me. What I’ve been and done doesn’t show my true worth. I was trying to tell myself not to be the wretched guy.

I thought those words to myself ad infinitum as I watched the gap of rocks separating my shirt, towel and shoes from the waterline at the base of the log-staircase—which by that point had gone from five yards to only a couple of feet or so—grow ever smaller like the waning moon. My mind opened up and was flooded with long-dormant motifs: Old Coach Wacker who once exhibited Rocky III during a team bus ride to Fayetteville, then later used the movie’s catch-phrase, “Just give them ol’ boys the eye of the tiger!” in his pre-game speech before the Methodist game. I remember the smell of my first real girlfriend’s hair, how my mother was telling the truth yet I didn’t believe her when she insisted that she never once thought her cancer might win, how lovely C.S. really is without makeup, in her natural state.

Four days have passed since Tuesday. I write still happy-tired and muscle-sore from the hike (and swim) C.S., Kristin, Mike, and I went on this Saturday morning, July 26, 2008. It hadn’t even occurred to me until I pulled out my first fistful of river silt and deciduous matter that I was wearing the same bathing suit as I had worn Tuesday.

Today, I get to live in a house made with four of my best friends and our ever-present roster of lovely guests and friends. We discuss Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. I play “Two-Headed Boy” on my guitar detuned and forget half the words. We invoke Ginsberg at least once annually and gather to dance at least once monthly. And the booze! The future swells all around us and everyone is in love. I’m finally writing again. I will miss this place terribly, but not just yet…

For now, I am free.

We are all free now.