I’ve known Emily Evelyn Johnston since 1986.
She’s the one who will sometime refer to herself that way - adding the Evelyn - I think because it is so incongruous. Emily acts nothing like an Evelyn.
(Caveat: If Evelyn refers to her grandmother, the one who was swimming countless laps in her late 80s, my apologies. And all bets are off.)
She graduated our guide training program but not before she had to deal with another student on her guide training, whom she was relegated to sharing a tent due to a dearth of tent spaces and only four other students to choose from. This guy was having grand mal and petite mal seizures far too regularly to be leaving civilization behind. He was from LA and we discovered all too late that he was in denial of his condition.
In hindsight, he was fortunate he paired up with Emily. As the daughter of a heart surgeon, she took it all in stride.
If you’ve ever known someone who was described as being kinetic, that’s Emily. A Prescott College instructor sagely told me once, “the only difference between a groove and a grave is the depth.”
You can carve that on her gravestone.
And, by the way, for you alarmists, this is not a eulogy.
A few days ago, I got a text from Emily telling me things were slow at her Sioux Falls hospital and, after hearing New York Governor Cuomo’s call for medical personnel, she was headed into the eye of the SARS coronavirus 2 storm. It came as no surprise.
A few years ago, over veggie burgers at a local cafe, she told me of her most recent brush with death. She was guiding on Mount Everest when an earthquake rocked Nepal. She was not at the main Base Camp which is really more like a makeshift Bedouin town with everyone sporting extremely expensive down attire and fiddling with their Go Pros. Emily Evelyn was at Camp One, just above the notorious and extremely dangerous Khumbu IceFall.
That’s an important part of her story because in order to navigate the icefall you must rely on a series of ladders used to bridge the crevasses. The Sherpa are responsible for this thankless, hazardous chore. The earthquake decimated the ladder system, so, in the aftermath, those at Camp One were stranded.
She told me when the earthquake hit, she was lolling about in her tent. (The various camps on Everest are used as acclimation-to-elevation stages as you climb the mountain. So her lolling was quite purposeful.) The shaking started and she immediately found one boot and rammed it on but the other escaped her. She bolted from the tent anyway because - what else are going to do? Maybe there was cover somewhere from the impending, inevitable avalanche.
She said she almost collided with a group of Sherpa arranged in a circle. They were chanting a prayer. They weren’t panicked and they weren’t in search of cover. They were awaiting their fate in as calm a manner as possible.
Emily decided to join them.
A blast of wind followed by a wall of fine ice particles swept over their camp, but it was not followed by blocks of ice and rock.
Meanwhile, the ladder system in the icefall collapsed like a house of cards and an enormous avalanche preceded by projectiles struck a good portion of the heavily populated Base Camp. Out of 345 climbers, miraculously only 22 were killed.
The hardest part for Emily to deal with in the aftermath of the natural calamity? The fact she could not make her way down to Base Camp to lend assistance. The earthquake, of course, affected many parts of Nepal, so an emergency room physician could have been helpful in a variety of places. However, by the time a rescue helicopter finally ferried climbers in pods of two or three off Camp One, she found her skills superfluous.
So, now she’s in New York. She traveled there with her lone N95 mask and a whole lot of moxie. She said her destination was Elmhurst Hospital which I think is one of the hardest hit by the influx of people diagnosed with COVID19.
I know she’s not a “volunteer”.
But I am damn sure she’s there out of the goodness of her heart. Running with scissors like she’s been doing for as long as I have known her. Running toward those who could use her help.
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I’ve posted a video of Emily and John Christopher Cosmos Cole riding around a deserted NYC on my Facebook page. The slo-mo was unintentional, adding an eerie effect. The lead photo is Emily and John observing the NYFD in action. Both were provided to me BEFORE she started her shifts.
Also, regarding Bird Box (see my post before this one), Aurora Potts writes: “The bird nerd in me also has gigantic beef with the fact that those parakeets would NOT be wasting energy chirping away in their box as any prey species would be conserving energy in that scenario and doing their best not to alert their presence to any predators. Also they'd probably die of stress. So the entire plot is flawed. Birds are too sensitive to survive in a box like that for very long.” Ahhhhh, Hollywood. Sorry if Aurora and I have thoroughly dashed the allusions of Bird Box fans.
If you want to watch a GOOD Sandra Bullock film, queue up Speed with Keanu Reeves.
Wonderful tribute to an amazing and courageous woman.