Hiker embraces life after paralyzing fall — step after step, mile after mile
CORTLANDT, New York — The doctor's words were blunt, with no wiggle room.
Tommy Javenes's neurosurgeon at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York was, with one hand, offering him a higher quality of life. But, with the other, he was taking some of that back, placing limits on what that life could be.
"You ain't hiking," he said with a laugh during that conversation in July 2015, taking a blade to something Javenes had long loved and which perhaps had come to mean more to him after his wife Kathleen's long struggle with brain cancer that ended in her death about seven months earlier.
Hiking may have almost killed Javenes, but it also offered him the comfort of normalcy. Now, more than ever, Javenes needed normal, needed familiar and needed something to look forward to.
The fact Javenes had mentioned hiking to the man who would operate on his vertebrae two months later and was even thinking about hiking might surprise some − at least those who don't know him very well.
It was while hiking locally popular Anthony's Nose in the early morning dark of July 5, 2015, that Javenes tripped on a rock and fell off the side of a trail into a nothingness that was interrupted only by the unforgiving ridges he "kind of rag-dolled" off before landing face down.
Javenes fell 40 feet in all.
If his backpack had not slid up and protected the back of his head, he might have died.
A post-rescue MRI revealed injuries very similar, his neurosurgeon told him, to those that relegated actor Christopher Reeve to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
"There are people seen with the same MRIs who aren't walking," Javenes said.
But Javenes, who was initially almost completely paralyzed − vertebrae 4, 5, 6 and 7 were so badly compressed that little spinal fluid flowed − had actually drawn a lucky card.
Yes, his right hand and right leg would forever be impaired, but he'd walk again. Even, run again.
That happened while Javenes was being pursued by an angry turkey − perhaps an on-alert, nest-guarding mamma bird, he figures.
He remembers running while laughing at the turkey's ostrich-like gait.
The bird considered Javenes a trespasser. But this was Javenes' territory, essentially his home, too.
The bird and Javenes' surgeon would just have to accept that, since the encounter occurred while Javenes was hiking a familiar venue, Anthony's Nose.
This summer, he'll make his 4,000th trip up and down the trail since being airlifted out.
An athlete deals with life's curveballs
Pre-injury, pre-family heartbreak, Javenes, now 53, was in many ways a typical, although athletically gifted, kid.
An All-Rockland County skier, who was good enough to represent the Hudson Valley twice in the Empire State Games, the 1987 North Rockland High School grad was even seeded second once at ESGs, a huge coup for a downstater, although medal dreams crumbled in a crash.
But to train for skiing, Javenes, who was also a fast, strong-armed MVP on North Rockland's varsity baseball team, would walk outside his house in the Tomkins Lake Colony and head into Harriman State Park, which abuts that neighborhood and has more than 50 peaks.
Javenes would hike up and run down.
"I kind of started as a kid. For me, there's no better exercise except snowshoeing uphill," said Javenes, who probably has snowshoed 50 times since his accident, sometimes on Anthony's Nose.
Post-high school, he went to Rockland Community College, where he played baseball.
He'd started working at an area restaurant as a dishwater at 13, and restaurants have been his professional life.
In 1996, he married Kathleen Goggin, who also had been a North Rockland High and RCC student. Two years later, they started running the Peppermill Grille in Stony Point.
For a brief time, they owned three restaurants. Fireside opened soon after Kathleen's diagnosis.
"She had a pretty good quality of life there for awhile," Javenes said, noting while given six months to live, three surgeries at Columbia Presbyterian gave her 9 1/2 years.
"You just keep your head down and keep living," he said of those years of uncertainty.
Things were, of course, sad and hard when Kathleen's cancer finally won.
"I fell when I had started to get my life back together and move on," Javenes said.
His fall occurred, depending on one's perspective, as a result of impulsively doing something stupid or impulsively doing a good deed.
Javenes had treated himself to a July 4 sunset hike of Anthony's Nose.
Atop the peak, he overheard four kids who were hiking the nearby Appalachian Trail talking about being out of water.
Javenes approached and told them he'd get water bottles from his car and be back up.
He brought up eight bottles, bid them goodnight and went to his restaurant, then hung with friends for a bit.
At 3:30 a.m., he got the idea to make a surprise visit to the hikers, dropping off pizza and beer with them.
He climbed, delivered the treats, then headed back down a path he always liked because it's a "little scrambly."
He was only about one-quarter of the way down, when he tripped.
Javenes never lost consciousness but, landing face down, found himself capable only of moving one toe and shrugging one shoulder.
Roughly every 10 minutes, for hours, he yelled into the darkness.
No one heard until an older hiker appeared around 8:30 a.m. and used Javenes's phone to call for help.
An initial effort to carry him down was abandoned, with Javenese's permission, as too dangerous, so a helicopter was summoned.
He was flown to Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, where he spent nine days. The surgery he eventually had at Columbia was supposed to take place there but, despite being in the best shape of his life, Javenese nearly died on the operating table and the surgery was aborted.
While initial physical therapy got him walking, it was with difficulty and things weren't easy when he was back on his feet at home.
But, with support of friends and family, who, among other things, gave him rides, including to spots for him to walk, he battled back.
Five-minute local walks preceded his surgery.
Then, post-surgery, he did 30-minute walks on flat ground at Bear Mountain. Those led to a fairly flat mile-and-a-half on the Appalachian Trail in Harriman. Eventually, he was walking four miles on Route 9W. And then hiking followed with him only ascending and descending Anthony's Nose once his first time back.
Ten months after his injury, Javenes crossed the finish line of his fourth 50K race, his first post-injury 50K, the North Face Challenge. Doing that took him 11 1/2 hours. But what mattered was he did it.
The next year, despite a huge rainstorm, he tackled the same 50K, finishing again in 11 1/2 hours after sending the near-hypothermic race sweeper ahead to get warm.
Friday, and every day, he hikes
It's a spring Friday afternoon and Tommy Javenes is at the base of Anthony's Nose, which, depending on exactly how one decides to tackle it, is around two miles up and back.
He has been at the base − and the top − many times since this miniature mountain almost killed him. Many, in this case, means thousands.
The up is somewhat of a labor, even for people with two fully functioning legs.
This isn't Mount Kilimanjaro, but although relatively short, the ascent is steep.
The payoff for the casual hiker is a grand, canvas-worthy view of the Bear Mountain Bridge and Hudson River and of Bear Mountain State Park, across, on the Hudson's western side.
But the payoff for Javenes is much more. He talks about this as he climbs, but there are stoppages.
Mostly they come from encounters with other hikers he has come to know on a first-name basis from simply bumping into them here. The odds, after all, of running into Javenes on Anthony's Nose are pretty high.
In the past 3 1/2 years, with the exception of four days, Javenes has hiked the trail every day.
His days away were used to play golf and to snowshoe in the Adirondacks.
While his hiking isn't competition, it's at least partially fueled by an inner competitor, who clearly survived the fall unscathed and maybe, in some ways, has grown to Incredible Hulk proportions since it.
Each day, Javenes undertakes multiple ascents of Anthony's Nose, photographing his car each time he reaches the bottom, so his number of hikes is never a question.
His single-day record is 16 trips up and back.
His minimum is usually three. A couple of days a week, he typically does five. This all feeds into the goal he set for himself a year ago of doing at least 100 each month.
Of course, like the golf outing and snowshoe trip, sometimes other things take priority.
This Saturday, for instance, is a question mark.
If things go the way he wants, he'll hike at sunset. That would be after he does his fifth 50K trail race and third since his injury at nearby Bear Mountain State Park and Harriman State Park.
He anticipates it will take him 10 hours to finish the race, so, he won't be in the running for a medal or plaque.
Of course, there's no plaque, medal or reality TV deal for any of this.
But Javenes tackles the trail, tackles this self-imposed challenge/addiction/passion of hiking as if a rainbow's pot of gold awaits him at the top.
And maybe, in a sense, it does, since he hikes with the knowledge he's doing what so many can't.
Javenes's rescue and recovery involved, in part two helicopters, nine days at Westchester Medical Center, a month at Helen Hayes Hospital as an in-patient learning in part to walk, his surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, surgery with Northeast Orthopedics In New Jersey for torn shoulder ligaments and about a year and a half of outpatient rehab at Hayes.
There are a lot of memories associated with all that but one of his strongest is seeing others undergo physical rehabilitation, some much worse off.
"Every day hiking, I think of all the people at Helen Hayes Hospital and what they'd give to hike it once," Javenes said.
Post-fall, Javenes has hiked Anthony's Nose in 106-degree heat, and hiked it immediately after a blizzard.
After the blizzard, with snow along Route 9D by the trailhead over his head from plowing, it took him an hour just to shovel out a parking spot.
That was the easy part.
On the trail, he sometimes had to push himself through chest-high snowdrifts.
His Anthony's Nose up-and-back record is 31 minutes. His norm is around 40. But that day, it took him two hours just to get up. But the undertaking kept one of his consecutive-day streaks of hiking the site alive. He eventually ended that one at 5:15.
But instead of penning a quite understandable mental, "Never again" note to himself about hiking in so much snow, Javenes instead said, "That was one of the most amazing days,"
Last Friday, he completed his 1,366th up and down of Anthony's Nose in less than a year, including 163 in December.
And, despite a very rainy weekend, he didn't miss a beat.
He finished April 220 hikes ahead of his number from January through April 2022.
By the end of his hikes on Sunday (was his 208th consecutive day of hiking the site), his 365-day (May 1, 2022- April 30, 2023) total of Anthony's Nose hikes stood at 1,375.
He doesn't foresee trying to top 1,375, since the commitment is so time-consuming.
"That's going to be my number unless someone wants to pay me to be out there eight hours a day," Javenes jokes.
While he hiked Anthony's Nose in late 2015, after September surgery that involved cutting his C6 vertebrae in three pieces and using the pieces to separate his other compressed vertebrae from each other, Javenes didn't start keeping track of his climbs until December 2016.
"I was up here in a neck brace, he said. "I probably shouldn't have been."
He's on track to, at some point this summer, hit that 4,000 mark.
The numbers come easy to Javenes because they mean so much.
As he finishes the last incline to the overlook, he pauses then notes his Anthony's Nose hike numbers starting with 2017.
2017: 376 hikes
2018: 401
2019 369
2020: 420
2021: 455
2022: 1,155 and counting
Last year's dramatic increase, which has grown even more this year, came about from befriending another hiker, who, hearing what Javenes was doing, started upping his own number of hikes and keeping track of them.
The other hiker, of course, hasn't nearly kept up.
This is despite the fact that while his surgeries were successful, giving him much greater use of his leg, foot and hand, Javenes experiences a mixture of pain, numbness and tingling in his hands and feet 24 hours a day.
He was prescribed pain medication − 10 pills a day. He took the pills for a couple days, then decided the pain was more acceptable to him than how the pills made him feel and the prospect of being on them for the rest of his life held zero appeal.
"Movement is my medicine," he said, flatly.
And it does provide some relief.
Javenes says getting out of bed each day is difficult. He's not just in pain but also stiff.
Even getting out of his car at the trailhead in Cortlandt after driving across the river from his Rockland County home can be a chore.
His first time up and down, he's slow. But his flexibility increases as he hikes.
And he's walking better and faster, dragging his right foot less than he initially did..
It took him 50 minutes to go up and down on nice days when he first returned. Now, 10 minutes faster is no sweat and he can really rabbit if he wants to.
"It's a high almost when some of those days I'm motoring," he said with a smile.
He thinks about the then and now and how he had to have a nurse on each side of him to attempt to walk just 20 feet during his early days at Helen Hayes, and calls it a "miracle."
His right foot still drags a bit, but not nearly as badly as it initially had.
His sense of humor seems very much intact as he jokes about going through three pairs of hiking boots a year due to the drag that remains. Javenes loves the outdoors, which is no surprise, and says hiking "can just kind of set your mind straight."
But there are days he'd rather stay home − days he doesn't feel like going up and down and up and down and on and on before going to The Fireside Pub, the Stony Point restaurant he opened with his wife in 2005 and where he puts in a 5-10 p.m. shift, cooking and doing myriad other things, seven days a week.
Of what gets him in his car and across the Hudson on days when he'd rather stay home, he says, "Just dedication, determination, discipline," before whittling the list and remarking, "I guess just determination."
He sometimes tells folks about what he's doing, not to brag but rather to inspire.
"You can change lives," he said. "Part of my message is we can all do more than what we're doing."
Continuing to live life
Javenes is clearly in move-forward mode. He says he's thankful for his girlfriend, Diana, a non-hiker who fully supports his passion. He's also thankful for his 17-year-old and 19-year-old Pomeranian poodles and for everything he's able to do. Among those things is skiing and he's doing much, much more than bunny slopes.
As with hiking, where he sometimes falls but tries to quickly pick himself up, he's challenging himself.
And that's not going to change.
Until he someday retires and moves from the area (to another good hiking area, he notes), he plans to continue his daily hiking of Anthony's Nose.
Yes, he has walked the route from which he fell a few times. But he has no real desire to go there again, given its increased risk.
He loves snowshoeing in the Adirondacks with close friends and feels all his hiking has allowed him to be able to do that, since it has strengthened his right leg.
How long he can keep up what he's doing, of course, is a question. But it might be for decades since he clearly has good genes.
He noted his mother, who'll soon turn 80, is "famous in the Colony" for walking two-to-three times a day, logging a total of three miles, despite having been rushed to the hospital and then going to Helen Hayes for rehab due to a heart problem.
He chides her to cut back but her response is, "How many hikes did you do today?" and that shuts him up because he won't lie to his mom.
They are birds of a feather.
"We kind of feed off each other," Javenes acknowledges, noting his two older brothers shake their heads but "get it."
Others, of course, don't and some may never.
Javenes has heard the "Why?" question about all his hiking phrased in one way or another probably hundreds of times.
His response goes well beyond love of the outdoors.
"People, all the time, ask me what I'm in training for," he said.
"I say, 'Life.'"
Nancy Haggerty covers cross-country, track & field, field hockey, skiing, ice hockey, basketball, girls lacrosse and other sporting events for The Journal News/lohud. Follow her on Twitter at @HaggertyNancy.