Content warning: physical injury, reckless behavior, grief.
I was five the first time. A riding lawnmower took most of the calf and heel off my left leg. I do not remember learning to walk the first time around, which means the lawnmower gave me my earliest memory of it. Crutches. A children’s hospital. The specific humiliation of needing help with stairs when every other kid in the hallway was running.
The second time was a meniscus tear and surgery. I was fifteen. Old enough to understand what physical therapy meant: someone else’s hands on your failure, three times a week, for longer than you think you can stand it.
The third time was a spinal birth defect they did not catch until I was twenty. Surgery. Recovery. The same bathroom floor. The same handrail. The same question: can I trust this leg to hold me for one more step?
Three times. Same process. Same answer. Yes, but verify.
The Mechanical Part
People who say “you’re so strong” have never relearned balance on a bathroom floor at three in the morning. Strength has nothing to do with it. Strength implies you are overcoming something through force of will. What you are actually doing is executing a procedure:
- Stand. Hold the counter.
- Shift weight to the bad leg.
- Does it hold? Good. Shift back.
- Repeat until the hold lasts longer than the fear.
- Take one step.
- Go back to the counter.
That is it. That is the whole thing. It is not brave. It is not noble. It is the same dumb loop every time, and the fact that you have done it before does not make it easier. If anything, it makes it worse, because you remember exactly how long the bad part lasts.
My great-uncle Wayne rode motorcycles for close to a million miles. He was a Vietnam veteran — came home, bought his first bike, and took it from the Canadian border to Colorado. He managed a search-and-rescue helicopter garage in the San Juan Mountains. He had a dog he named D-O-G, and every Christmas he’d put up a bare tree with a single empty shell casing as the ornament and make everyone sing “And a cartridge in bare tree.”
Wayne died of pancreatic cancer in September 2021. He had beaten it the first time. He did not beat it the second time.
I found out days after I rode a Harley-Davidson Pan America to Deadhorse, Alaska. Key West to the Arctic Ocean. The Dalton Highway in gravel and mud, the radiator so clogged that I was killing the engine at hilltops and coasting down to keep the temperature under 280 degrees. I woke up in Coldfoot Cemetery because it turned out to be a decent place to hang a hammock. A moose the size of a Ford Ranger chased me near Pump Station 5. I cafe-raced the Alaskan Highway in thirty-two hours to make a Friday service appointment in Fairbanks, because if I arrived Saturday the bike would be trapped through Monday.
I did the ride because of Wayne. The IBA Ultimate Coast to Coast certificate says “Zack Wayne Robinson.” My middle name is for him.
Here is what Wayne and the bathroom floor have in common: neither one cares about your narrative.
The motorcycle does not care that you are honoring your dead uncle. The road does not care that you pitched Harley-Davidson’s CEO and got no sponsorship and rode anyway. The deer on Route 711 at 3:30 AM does not care that you have already relearned to walk three times. It hits you at 55 miles per hour and you pull its body off the road and ride home with skinned knees and a bruised pelvis and tinnitus in your left ear from a Kansas thunderstorm that will never go away.
The Explorer in me seeks these edges. Danger for the competence it demands, not for the rush. You earn the right to be out there by being prepared — the same way the Eagle Scout earns merit badges, one skill at a time, verified by someone who has done it before you. I earned sixty-nine of them. I ran the Laurel Highlands Trail at fourteen. I drilled through lake ice for drinking water in Minnesota. I climbed glaciers near Juneau.
Preparation does not insulate you from being human.
The people who talk about resilience like it is a character trait — a fixed attribute, something you either have or you do not — have never had to relearn the same skill four times. Resilience is not bouncing back. Bouncing implies elasticity, some inherent springiness that returns you to your original shape. That is not what happens.
What happens is you forget how to do something you already knew. And you learn it again. And you do it without the arrogance of thinking it will be easier this time, because it will not be easier this time. The nerve damage is different. The scar tissue is in a new place. The physical therapist is a different person with different hands. The bathroom floor is in a different city.
The only thing that stays the same is the procedure. Stand. Hold. Shift. Verify. Step.
I have visited every state in the United States. I have fallen in love more times than I can count. I have accumulated hundreds of outstanding tales. And the thing I am best at — the real skill underneath all the stories — is the boring, unglamorous, non-cinematic act of relearning something I already knew how to do.
Walking is not a metaphor. Walking is the test. Every other kind of recovery — from a bad trade, a failed business, a breakup, a move to the other side of the world — follows the same procedure. Stand. Hold something stable. Shift your weight to the part that hurts. See if it holds. If it holds, take one step. If it does not hold, go back to the counter.
The scar is not the injury. The scar is knowing exactly how long it takes.