A Day in the Life of Kathy Mahoney: Death of a Small Tree

Monday, May 2, 2005

8:30am

I go to jury duty in Attleboro, MA and all jurors get dismissed at 11:30am.

It's a beautiful day and, after a weekend of rain, I decided to go hiking at the Wampanoag Reservation, in Assonet MA.

12:15 pm

Visited my mother, on the way home from the Attleboro District Court, just to say hello and see how things are. After visiting for a while, she offered me a ham sandwich for lunch but I passed on it saying I wanted to get home to change so I could get to the reservation before the expected rain for the day started.

1:30 pm

Arrived home and changed into jeans, a flannel shirt and my sneakers.

2:00 pm

Arrived at the reservation, parked at the entrance and explored the paths around the front end of the property. Had my cell phone with me in case of emergency and realized its battery was almost dead.

2:45 pm

Went back to my car, plugged my cell phone in and drove further into the reservation to sit at the top of the quarry to meditate. It's an old, deep rock quarry that has filled with spring water runoff over the years. The top part of the quarry where I was sitting is about 100 ft. above the water.  Then, it slopes down on both sides of the basin to water level.

I parked my car, left my cell phone to charge since I wasn't going to stray too far from where I was parked, locked it and set the alarm. Then, I walked over to the edge of the cliff to look down into the water. While doing that I was fiddling with the hook on my keys to hitch it to my belt loop so that I wouldn't loose them.

Here's where it starts to get interesting….

Slippery fingers that I am…

You guessed it… I dropped them… I started to bend forward to catch them but stopped myself realizing that was a bad idea.  Keep in mind that I was standing at the edge of a cliff with a 100 ft. drop.

In slow motion, I saw them slide off the edge and heard them hit a few things on the way down. I think I heard water splash at the bottom but I can't be sure due to the shock that I was in.

In seconds I realized how FUBAR I was. (If you don't know what FUBAR means, rent the movie 'Men at Work' with Charlie Sheen and Emelio Estevez).

Then, I thought, maybe it didn't go in the water, maybe it landed on the ledge at the base of the cliff and maybe I can take one of the paths down to the water and follow the pond around to the ledge and retrieve my keys that way.

Swearing the whole way down to the bottom, I take a good look at the ledge from that angle and realize that there's sheer faced rock on both sides and absolutely no possible way to walk over there. The only possible ways to get to the ledge would be to scale down the rock from above, take a boat or swim. I haven't scaled down anything since high school and don't own the equipment and I certainly didn't have a boat.

It's getting better…

That left one option. And… being the obstinate person that I am, refusing to just chock it up to a set of lost keys… (keys to my car, my apartment and to work along with my car alarm do-hickey, keeping in mind that my cell phone and my purse, with my inhalers are locked and alarmed in my car)

I opted to try and swim for it…

Now, mind you, I'm a strong swimmer as long as I pace myself slowly. I do have asthma: exercise induced is easy for me to control without my inhalers along with asthma attacks brought on by freezing cold but if it's brought on by allergies it's not so easy and it hits me worse. (I'm sharing that for a little later.)