Crossing Divides: A Couple's Story of Cancer, Hope, and Hiking Montana's Continental Divide

by Scott Bischke, Katie Gibson (Foreword by)

Overview

Artfully blending Scott Bischke and his wife Katie Gibson's agonizing struggle against Kate's advanced, recurrent, "terminal" cancer, this is the story of their three month, 800+ mile hike along the Continental Divide Trail across Montana. Numerous themes and parallels weave through the book: several encounters with grizzly bears, for example, provide an avenue for metaphorical comparisons between the fear of grizzlies and the fear of cancer. Similarly, Kate's ability to persevere through the toils of a long-distance hike provides a constant parallel to her ability to persevere against cancer. Other themes include the importance of a dogged spirit in battling cancer and the importance of wild country in revitalizing the soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780944235393
Publisher:	American Cancer Society, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/28/2002
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Scott Bichke and Katie Gibson have traveled across the globe to places like New Zealand, British Columbia, Alaska, Baja, Costa Rica, and Belize, and they actively participate in volunteer efforts for the Montana Wilderness Association, the Continental Divide Trail Alliance, and the American Cancer Society, as well as other worthwhile organizations. Scott is a writer, environmental engineer, fly fisherman, and photographer. They live in Bozeman, Montana.

Read an Excerpt

Crossing Divides

A Couple's Story of Cancer, Hope, and Hiking Montana's Continental Divide

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By Scott Bischke

American Cancer Society

Copyright © 2002 Scott Bischke
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60443-131-5

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CHAPTER 1

Enter the Bear

One of his favorite remarks was "if you know what a bear is going to do next, you know more than the bear does."

FRANK DUFRESNE No Room for Bears

Unlike Most People, Kate and I can tell you the exact day we entered "middle age," a day in December of 1992. Middle age, to me, has nothing to do with chronological age. Instead middle age describes the transition from a world of limitless opportunity to one suddenly fringed with boundaries. I left my youth behind just moments after Kate left hers, when I picked up the phone at work and she blurted out, "The doctor just called and said I have cancer."

Kate's voice at once sounded of fear, disbelief, and confusion. I reacted as you might expect, saying, "What? Cancer? You can't possibly have cancer! You're 30 years old. What did he say? Something must be wrong."

Unfortunately, something was wrong. During a normal checkup, Kate's gynecologist had discovered a three- centimeter mass on her cervical wall. A biopsy, just completed, had shown the mass to be malignant. Since Kate and I worked at the same company, we quickly met up and went home. The doctor agreed to see us in an hour to explain the results of the biopsy.

I recall little about that meeting when we first faced cancer besides being filled with disbelief. Two months earlier we had run the Victoria Marathon. Kate had always been a vigorous outdoorswoman, a near vegetarian, a health nut to the nth degree. Cancer? Kate? Moose poop!

Three things about that meeting I do recall, vividly. The first we did not understand, "papillary adenocarcinoma." The second rang cold and clear: "This could be very serious," the doctor said. "This could kill you." The third was Kate and me departing the hospital feeling as though we'd just been kicked in the chest.

* * *

Skip forward one month into our hike across Montana, to July 1998.

Kneeling in the tent I heard Kate's voice in the distance yelling, "Go away!" Must be a chipmunk, I thought; they always bedevil her. Our tent sat on a bench high above the West Fork of the Sun River, in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. While I was changing clothes after fishing, Kate had gone to our cook area to start dinner.

"Go away!" I heard again. This time it sounded more urgent. "Get out of here!"

I grabbed my pepper spray, somewhat melodramatically I recall thinking, and emerged from the tent. At that same moment Kate shouted, "Scott, there's a bear over here!" From a hundred yards away I could see the bear sitting on its haunches, just ten steps from Kate, facing her. Though a fire smoked, our food still hung in the tree above and to the left of Kate. The bear looked like the same bear we'd seen on the trail hours earlier, the reason we'd turned around and quit early for the day.

"What do you want me to do?" I yelled. Kate paused in amazement, clearly contemplating how she had ended up marrying such an unchivalrous dolt. For its part, the ponderous beast looked my way and then stood on its hind legs, trying to scent or see this new intrusion. Kate and the bear now stood eye to eye, the bear between her and me. From my vantage point, it looked like two steps forward and they could easily do a dosi-do.

"Don't worry," Kate yelled over the bear's shoulder. Her voice sounded surprisingly calm. "It's a black bear, not a grizzly."

"Are you sure?" I yelled back, dismally failing to reclaim any valor. Black bears, we both knew, tend to be less dangerous than grizzlies. Another thing we both knew — something that was painfully apparent — was that this bear was honey blonde, a common color for grizzlies.

"I'm sure." Her tone had turned flat and somewhat defiant. For its part the bear continued to stand on its hind legs, face quizzical, glancing between Kate and me as if watching a tennis match.

"Don't come up the trail," Kate shouted finally. For a moment I thought she was insinuating that she would be better off battling the beast by herself, but then she added, "That would push him toward me. Come up the gully."

I grabbed some rocks and jogged down into the gully. Our shouted conversation and my disappearance apparently convinced the bear to change plans. It dropped uncertainly back on all fours. After looking longingly at the empty pot near the fire, the bear waddled off. "He's leaving," Kate yelled, and then a moment later as I emerged from the gully, she called out, "No, no, he's still here."

By the time I reached Kate, the blonde bear stood 20 yards away in sparse forest. We both hollered at him and Kate banged our pot with a tree branch. The bear watched us, unimpressed. Together Kate and I threw rocks, and the bear moved two more steps up onto the hillside. And then, glancing back and throwing us a yawn, the bear lay down!

Kate and I exchanged stupefied looks. "Okay, great, now what are we supposed to do?"

We tossed more rocks and finally I nailed the bear hard on the rear end. That brought him to his feet, now facing us, ears laid back, shoulders low, snarling.

"That can't be a good thing," Kate whispered, wide-eyed.

"Maybe we ought to back out of here," I proposed. But before we could move, the bear, snarling once more, pointed itself up the hill and moved stiffly away.

As the bear disappeared and reappeared among the trees, I said, "That could be a griz."

"It's a black bear!" Kate snapped back. "It stood right in front of me. It doesn't have a shoulder hump. Besides, look how small it is."

"Small?" The bear I saw looked big enough to play defensive end for Chicago.

* * *

Talking with a backcountry ranger the next morning, Kate, her face animated and unafraid, described the encounter: "I looked up from the fire to see the bear, sneaking up on its belly just like a dog would. It was sniffing, so I figured it wanted food. The bear seemed kind of scared, so at first I just sat there trying to decide what I should do. When it kept coming, I knew I had to grab my bear spray, stand up, and scare it away...."

As Kate talked on, I realized her story was not unlike our encounter with cancer.

CHAPTER 2

III Wind

Well, you get up in the morning, shake the dew off of your mind, As the sun pours like honey through the ponderosa pine You're livin' every moment as if you've just arrived, Because you know what it means to be alive.

All along the Great Divide,
Yes, we can understand,
What it means to be alive,
All along the Great Divide.

WALKIN' JIM STOLTZ "All Along the Great Divide"

On a trail near the lake, a hiker appeared. The man struggled to walk, using two hiking staffs to hold himself upright. His arms splayed far apart. His legs swung awkwardly. His feet, cocked at odd angles, thumped with each step. The man's progress was slow and laborious, yet he did make progress.

It was mid-June 1998, exactly a month before Kate and the honey blonde bear almost did the do-si-do. The man was walking along Waterton Lake in Alberta, just across the Canadian border from Glacier National Park, Montana. Above him rose the Prince of Wales Hotel, silhouetted at that moment beneath an angry violet sky. Rain poured down. Kate and I stood beneath a shelter, out of sight, and I began to silently weep as I watched the man labor. Kate looked at me quizzically. I hugged her and said that I was just so damn thankful that we had the health to even think about walking the Continental Divide. What God-given privileges we enjoyed: to see, to smell, to walk, to live.

Later we passed the man. He wore a wool shirt, jeans, and stout boots. A grizzled beard shadowed his radiant face. I imagined this city trail along the lake to be the man's wilderness hike. He greeted us heartily, with a great smile, though he never wavered in his progress.

Our own progress toward starting the walk across Montana had slowed considerably. Instead of working on final preparations for departure the following day, Kate and I huddled into our tent and watched a ferocious wind rage off Waterton Lake. The tent sat behind a small building, the only shelter sufficient to keep us from blowing off into the eastern Alberta plains. Two bighorn sheep and a lamb trotted by, pausing in front of the tent to look in. Soft fur covered the lamb, which stood only 18 inches tall. The adults' scraggly appearance foretold the summer heat ahead. But this day summer was on hold. Dark storm clouds hid the peaks; sheets of icy rain raced earthward. We could not see to the far end of the lake where we planned to hike the next day — the initial steps of what we hoped to be 900 miles of walking, the culmination of a year's thought and four solid months of preparation.

A year had passed since Kate and I watched Walkin' Jim Stoltz perform for an environmental conference at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. Walkin' Jim is a singer-songwriter, a fine photographer, and a long-distance hiker. He travels the country promoting the virtues of wilderness and wild country through his folk music and photography. Jim has walked over 25,000 miles, including the long-distance hiker's "Big Three": the Appalachian Trail (AT), the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), and the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). Jim is the kind of guy who tells of doing a show in Albuquerque, and then says, "On my walk home to Montana, I ..." Walkin' Jim inspired us.

Kate and I had been planning a year's leave of absence from work for some time, even before the cancer, though our venue was undecided. After seeing Walkin' Jim's show, we started seriously researching a hike of the CDT. We already knew, of course, that the Continental Divide rises up as the backbone of North America, traversing five states: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. We knew that the Continental Divide separates the waters of the Pacific from those of the Atlantic. And we knew that the Continental Divide encompasses some of our nation's most dramatic and wild landscapes — rugged granite peaks, lush alpine meadows, and vast high-desert plateaus. What we didn't know then was that in 1978 Congress had designated the CDT as a National Scenic Trail, that the CDT runs roughly 3,100 miles, and that upwards of three-quarters of the trail was complete on the ground, not just in some map-maker's mind. Until listening to Walkin' Jim we also didn't know that each year a handful of people actually walk the entire 3,100 miles in a single backpacking season!

Tackling the challenge of long-distance hiking fit Kate and me well. We'd backpacked extensively for years. We'd once spent most of a year traveling by bicycle. We'd explored rivers by canoe, deep sounds by sea kayak, and quiet mountainsides by cross-country ski. We simply loved, and continue to love, any way of exploring wild country. And whenever that exploration can be formed into a way of life rather than a weekend interlude, all the better. Long-distance hiking fit us like a well-worn boot, with one glaring exception: our anxiety about Kate's health. How would her body react, we wondered, just three years after her final treatments for recurrent cervical cancer?

That anxiety, plus our desire to spend only the three summer months on the trail, led us to temper our approach to the CDT. Soon we began to focus on only the Montana section of the trail, roughly 900 miles from Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park to the Wyoming border just at Yellowstone National Park. Montana was a simple choice — it was my home state, we had been married there, and we longed to move back.

We spent four months in the winter and spring of 1998 preparing for the hike. First, we secured extended leaves of absence from our engineering jobs at Hewlett-Packard Company. Because we are engineers, our second act was to create intricate spreadsheets of everything imaginable: contact names, supply stops, gear weights, elevation profiles, and mean air temperature as a function of moon phase. The gear spreadsheet allowed us to select or omit each carefully weighed item and to move each item between Kate's pack and mine. We plotted overall pack weight and weight within each carefully delineated gear classification on a bar chart — in color with appropriate cross-hatching. For four months before heading to Waterton we packed and unpacked our virtual rucksacks. We weighed and scrutinized and squabbled about gear going into packs that still stood empty. "Hey, what's going on here? I see you slipped the stove into my pack now! What, I suppose you thought I wasn't going to notice?"

Endless planning and data compilation had been a somewhat pitiable attempt to claim control of the hike. Yet we knew that as soon as we pulled on the packs, control was one thing we would largely give up. A fall, a bear, a snowstorm, sickness — the pure, simple stresses of the trail differed so markedly from the artificial, complex stresses of the sterilized working world. Indeed, uncertainties provide the underpinning of any journey — experiencing an unscripted life, feeling the delicious tension of the unknown, and anticipating the satisfaction of successful completion.

Four months of preparation, so much done and still the storm raged across Waterton Lake and still we huddled in the tent. Still we hadn't walked a single step along the CDT.

Now the wind stepped up. Horizontal sheets of rain battered the tent. Kate and I slid deeper into our shared sleeping bag, wondering if June 16 wasn't too early to start a hike from the Canadian border. A low-pressure system sat contentedly atop the Rockies. The low was expected to hold for at least two more days, including the day we were slated to cross Stoney Indian Pass. Stoney Indian, at 6,908 feet, was steep and still snow- covered above 6,200 feet. The next day's forecast called for more snow. No surprise, really — in Kate's and my experience, weather rarely smiles on the start of a long journey.

It poured from 2 A.M. until dawn, with the wind redoubling its efforts of the previous afternoon. The tempest continued as we climbed out of the tent and made for more solid shelter. Shortly we learned that Glacier Park's Going-to-the-Sun Road was newly closed, buried under snow. Later we were somewhat disappointed to learn that we could not buy a pot of tea at the Prince of Wales Hotel. Instead we drank coffee, sat in cushy chairs, and watched whitecaps churn the lake.

The storm continued and soon we agreed to abandon our departure day. I was still in favor of trying Stoney Indian Pass, but Kate favored the safer route up the Belly River, a route that would not take us over any steep, snowy passes. "We haven't done anything stupid yet," she declared to the child in me. "Let's not start now."

* * *

That December 1992 day we learned of Kate's cancer I recall as sunny. Strange weather for such a dreary indictment, stranger weather still for our hometown of Corvallis, Oregon, where a cloudless winter day elicits squinty-eyed comments like, "Hey, what's that bright yellow thing in the sky, anyway?"

Everything about that day felt surreal: Kate calling to say the doctor claimed she had cancer, heading to the clinic with racing hearts and hollow stomachs, waiting for the unwanted and unbelievable news while desperately wanting to flee back to the safety of work and our lives.

"I didn't believe that the results were true," Kate has since said. "I thought that when we went in to see the doctor he would say that they had the wrong person. My mind flipped back and forth from not believing it to the panicked feeling of what if it is really true?"

And then we heard the words "papillary adenocarcinoma" for the first time and learned that cervical cancer could take Kate's life.

Heading home from the doctor's office, only partway through the workday, we wondered, "Okay, now what? Does this mean we can't ski into the cabin in a few weeks as we'd planned? If Kate has cancer, does she still go to work? Do we cancel our Christmas plans? Do we tell anyone — family, friends, coworkers?" We walked into the house and looked around. A sweater to knit, flies to tie, environmental papers to read, letters to write — in an instant our daily existence became inconsequential. Suddenly we were staring directly into the face of life itself. We sat on the couch, stunned.

How, I wondered, can a person who looks exactly as she did three hours ago, who looks exactly as she did when she ran to work that morning, who could run 20 miles right now at the drop of a hat, who is planning to bicycle around Tasmania in six weeks, how could that person possibly have cancer?

* * *

In the week after we learned that Kate had cervical adenocarcinoma, we informed our families. The news dampened Christmas celebrations considerably. Prayers at every meal mentioned Kate. Yet there she stood in front of us looking as normal as ever.

Kate had an understandably tough time controlling her thoughts during those days, and was unable to keep from projecting endless unthinkable outcomes. "We went to the play The Phantom of the Opera," she recalls. "I can only remember staring at the actors as if I were a thousand miles away, not able to follow the story, caught up in my own worries."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Crossing Divides by Scott Bischke. Copyright © 2002 Scott Bischke. Excerpted by permission of American Cancer Society.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1 -- Enter the Bear
Chapter 2 -- Ill Wind
Chapter 3 -- Escape
Chapter 4 - Climbing the Mountain
Chapter 5 -- Long Days
Chapter 6 -- At Cliff's Edge
Chapter 7 -- Medicine Grizzly
Chapter 8 -- Mental Gymnastics
Chapter 9 -- Finding the Lost Trail
Chapter 10 -- Facing into the Current
Chapter 11 -- Moving On
Chapter 12 -- Choosing a Path
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Suggested Reading

Foreword

No Room for Bears

Unlike most people, Kate and I can tell you the exact day we entered "middle age," a day in December of 1992. Middle age, to me, has nothing to do with chronological age. Instead middle age describes the transition from a world of limitless opportunity to one suddenly fringed with boundaries. I left my youth behind just moments after Kate left hers, when I picked up the phone at work and she blurted out, "The doctor just called and said I have cancer."

Kate's voice at once sounded of fear, disbelief, and confusion. I reacted as you might expect, saying, "What? Cancer? You can't possibly have cancer! You're 30 years old. What did he say? Something must be wrong."

Unfortunately, something was wrong. During a normal checkup, Kate's gynecologist had discovered a three-centimeter mass on her cervical wall. A biopsy, just completed, had shown the mass to be malignant. Since Kate and I worked at the same company, we quickly met up and went home. The doctor agreed to see us in an hour to explain the results of the biopsy.

I recall little about that meeting when we first faced cancer besides being filled with disbelief. Two months earlier we had run the Victoria Marathon. Kate had always been a vigorous outdoorswoman, a near vegetarian, a health nut to the nth degree. Cancer? Kate? Moose poop!

Three things about that meeting I do recall, vividly. The first we did not understand, "papillary adenocarcinoma." The second rang cold and clear: "This could be very serious," the doctor said. "This could kill you." The third was Kate and me departing the hospital feeling as though we'd just been kicked in the chest.

* * * * * * *

Skip forward one month into our hike across Montana, to July 1998.

Kneeling in the tent I heard Kate's voice in the distance yelling, "Go away!" Must be a chipmunk, I thought, they always bedevil her. Our tent sat on a bench high above the West Fork of the Sun River, in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. While I was changing clothes after fishing, Kate had gone to our cook area to start dinner.

"Go away!" I heard again. This time it sounded more urgent. "Get out of here!"

I grabbed my pepper spray, somewhat melodramatically I recall thinking, and emerged from the tent. At that same moment Kate shouted, "Scott, there's a bear over here!" From a hundred yards away I could see the bear sitting on its haunches, just ten steps from Kate, facing her. Though a fire smoked, our food still hung in the tree above and to the left of Kate. The bear looked like the same bear we'd seen on the trail hours earlier, the reason we'd turned around and quit early for the day.

"What do you want me to do?" I yelled. Kate paused in amazement, clearly contemplating how she had ended up marrying such an unchivalrous dolt. For its part, the ponderous beast looked my way and then stood on its hind legs, trying to scent or see this new intrusion. Kate and the bear now stood eye to eye, the bear between her and me. From my vantage point, it looked like two steps forward and they could easily do a do-si-do.

"Don't worry," Kate yelled over the bear's shoulder. Her voice sounded surprisingly calm. "It's a black bear, not a grizzly."

"Are you sure?" I yelled back, dismally failing to reclaim any valor. Black bears, we both knew, tend to be less dangerous than grizzlies. Another thing we both knew-something that was painfully apparent-was that this bear was honey blonde, a common color for grizzlies.

"I'm sure." Her tone had turned flat and somewhat defiant. For its part the bear continued to stand on its hind legs, face quizzical, glancing between Kate and me as if watching a tennis match.

"Don't come up the trail," Kate shouted finally. For a moment I thought she was insinuating that she would be better off battling the beast by herself, but then she added, "That would push him toward me. Come up the gully."

I grabbed some rocks and jogged down into the gully. Our shouted conversation and my disappearance apparently convinced the bear to change plans. It dropped uncertainly back on all fours. After looking longingly at the empty pot near the fire, the bear waddled off. "He's leaving," Kate yelled, and then a moment later as I emerged from the gully, she called out, "No, no, he's still here."

By the time I reached Kate, the blonde bear stood 20 yards away in sparse forest. We both hollered at him and Kate banged our pot with a tree branch. The bear watched us, unimpressed. Together Kate and I threw rocks, and the bear moved two more steps up onto the hillside. And then, glancing back and throwing us a yawn, the bear lay down!

Kate and I exchanged stupefied looks. "Okay, great, now what are we supposed to do?"

We tossed more rocks and finally I nailed the bear hard on the rear end. That brought him to his feet, now facing us, ears laid back, shoulders low, snarling.

"That can't be a good thing," Kate whispered, wide-eyed.

"Maybe we ought to back out of here," I proposed. But before we could move, the bear, snarling once more, pointed itself up the hill and moved stiffly away.

As the bear disappeared and reappeared among the trees, I said, "That could be a griz."

"It's a black bear!" Kate snapped back. "It stood right in front of me. It doesn't have a shoulder hump. Besides, look how small it is."

"Small?" The bear I saw looked big enough to play defensive end for Chicago.

Talking with a backcountry ranger the next morning, Kate, her face animated and unafraid, described the encounter: "I looked up from the fire to see the bear, sneaking up on its belly just like a dog would. It was sniffing, so I figured it wanted food. The bear seemed kind of scared, so at first I just sat there trying to decide what I should do. When it kept coming, I knew I had to grab my bear spray, stand up, and scare it away...."

As Kate talked on, I realized her story was not unlike our encounter with cancer.

Editorial Reviews

Every life has its mountains to climb. Read on and find the inspiration to reach your summit.
—author of Love, Medicine, & Miracles

Bernie Siegel

Crossing Divides is about the challenges we choose and those forced pon us. Read it for a reminder that our health, like our wild lands, is fragile and endangered, and that we keep both only with determination.
—nationally known folk singer and long-distance hiker

Jim Stoltz