360 Degrees Longitude by John Higham

heartbreak over the plans that would not be fulfilled.
    September turned her gaze from Katrina to me and said, “Is this the best we can do for our child? We drag her halfway around the world to make her lie in the grass, homeless, with a broken leg?”
    Well, we didn’t actually drag her. Last I checked Katrina was pretty enthusiastic about the whole World-the-Round Trip thing, but this was hardly the time to argue the finer point.
    I set our tent back up and carried Katrina inside. Actually, it is impossible to carry a person through a three-foot-high doorway. I sort of pulled her in and thought, “Okay, now I am dragging my child.” An upgrade in our accommodations was a top priority, but it would have to wait.
    In my professional life I had spent my career dealing with crises in one way or another. I had spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours writing procedures for various spacecraft-related contingencies. The previous several years I had been on call twenty-four hours a day as part of an “On-Orbit Help Desk” and had dealt with all kinds of emergencies. I was used to bad things happening, but this was a lot more personal. My mind raced with how to cope with our immediate needs as well as the longer-range problems that we now faced.
    As with every contingency I had ever worked through in my professional life, there were a lot more questions than answers at this early stage of our recovery. We simply prioritized issues into what had to be done and ignored everything else for the time being. In this situation, that meant Jordan and I walked into town and picked up something to eat and brought it back. We didn’t get ham sandwiches.
    â€¢ • •
    Morning dawned with a beautiful blue sky and sunshine. During the night September realized we had another priority besides an upgrade in accommodations—a wheelchair.
    Where the heck do you get a wheelchair in a small resort town? I left September and the kids at the campground and began my quest. Zermatt doesn’t have a hospital. After a lot of asking around town and pantomiming a wheelchair I found one at a nursing home. The receptionist scribbled my name on a yellow Post-it note and smiled as I wheeled the chair out the door.
    We spent the remainder of the day pushing Katrina in her wheelchair, going about town looking at apartments. We quickly learned what every disabled person knows.
    â€œThere isn’t a single place on our list we can access with a wheelchair,” September exclaimed after several hours of searching.
    Zermatt is a hilly town with lots and lots of stairs and steep paths. Even the town’s youth hostel was unreachable because of the long stairways that had to be negotiated to reach the grounds.
    We were still without a better place to stay than the local campground when we returned to Dr. Julen that afternoon for Katrina’s follow-up appointment. We explained our predicament to Dr. Julen’s receptionist, who happened to also be Mrs. Dr. Julen. “The suite above the office is available for a few days. It even has elevator access!” Dr. Julen not only became Katrina’s caretaker, he became our landlord. We negotiated a price, something on the order of first-class floor space in Tokyo’s Ginza district, but we had a home.
    We spent the rest of the evening luxuriating in indoor plumbing, cooking facilities, and actual furniture. Over the next few days as we waited for Katrina’s follow-up appointment with Dr. Julen, e-mails started to pour in from friends offering us free accommodation from Stockholm to London during Katrina’s convalescence. We demurred, preferring to take things one day at a time.
    Along with everyone else on the planet, we had been counting down the number of days to the new Harry Potter book. The day arrived as we were contemplating how a broken leg was going to impact us in the coming weeks.
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    John’s Journal, July 17
    â€¦ we then spent the