Northline Walking Blog #4

My final walk was in and around the UNR campus. I decided to take a break from Allison’s perspective and consider Dan Mahony’s instead. His incident on the UNR campus left him out of work for quite some time, and badly scarred his hand and eye. Dan does not reveal exactly what route he took when he was traversing the campus at three in the morning, so I took my own route on Sierra Street and through some parts of the southern end of campus. For some reason, when I read his story, I pictured Dan near Sierra and University, so I made sure to wander around this area as Dan might have been doing. I didn’t do this at three in the morning, but I have been around this area late at night before, so I could imagine Dan there.  

                Dan’s story is on page 163 and 164 in Northline. Dan describes the situation as confusing—he didn’t know what was going to happen to him, and he didn’t expect the men to jump out at him like they did. His situation then went from confusing to hopeless as the men brutally beat him, and he thought he was going to die. This event changed Dan’s entire life—he could no longer be a plumber, and he had to go through intensive psychological repair to return to a healthy mental state of mind.

                This inspired me to think about time and our complete ignorance of the future. Dan didn’t wake up the day he was beaten and expect anything like that to happen to him. To me, it seems that tragic events never seem possible until they happen—we hear about them, but I get stuck in the mindset that they always happen to other people. It’s difficult to imagine that you could be killed or seriously injured in a car accident or a shooting or something of that nature; in fact, I would venture to say that these possibilities do not occur to us very often. This is perhaps why Dan’s experience was such a monumental event in his life—he had his future planned around the assumption that he would be in good health, that nothing like this would ever happen to him. When it did, he was thrown for a loop and had to deal with heavy physical and emotional stress.

                However, I also considered how this event changed Dan for the better. He was forced to become strong enough to fight against his fears, and to shift his life in a different direction. He may not have fulfilled his dream of taking over his uncle’s plumbing business, but he learned quite a bit from working at the VA. Not to mention, he met Allison, who made him extremely happy. Without learning and growing from his situation, he never would have ended up in the place he did. 

Link to a map of where I walked:

file:///C:/Users/Kyla/Pictures/Walking%20Blog/sierra%20and%20university%20-%20Google%20Maps.htm