After waking up in a tent at 3:00am, I gathered my belongings together and stretched before hitting the trail. It was a long hike, 22 miles in all, each mile revealing a fresh perspective of the Sierra Nevada range. These are the mountains that inspired the devotion of naturalist John Muir and motivated the creation of an unprecedented three national parks to protect its peaks. And they would be my backdrop for the day ahead.
Not ugly.
My hiking group was jovial–more than I generally care for at such an early hour–but this ultimately made for some great company. There were nearly 20 people in all, men and women from a variety of backgrounds, assembled through an online meetup group designed expressly for this purpose. Although I had been a member of the group for nearly a year, I had never actually joined them on a hike.
Mountainfolk.
By late morning, the more fit and ambitious of us broke out from the others and headed for the summit. Our pace was strong. It felt great to travel so briskly.
Along the way, we ran into a woman hiking with her dog. I don’t remember the woman’s name, but the dog’s name I will never forget. Her name was Kacy, and she was a beacon of joy, a domesticated animal who had found her home on the ridges. Kacy was found freely galloping her way up even the most discouraging climbs, always turning around with perked ears to check in on her owner. You couldn’t help but be infected by Kacy’s delight. The stress from the recent bustle to sublet the apartment, the discomfort of sleeping under adverse conditions, the fatigue of climbing 4,000 feet in thin air, all of that dissolved in the presence of Kacy’s pep. If the dog could have so much fun on the trail, then so could I. By noon, thanks in part to Kacy’s enthusiasm, we reached the top and posed for our summit photos.
Later that afternoon, the group began to fragment even further. About half of the way into the descent, I found myself alone again. It was a welcomed solitude. At that point I had logged over 15 miles for the day and had seven to go. In truth, the hike had taken more of a toll on me than hikes of recent memory. I had spent much of the past month doing everything but maintaining my fitness. I was exhausted. Each step forward was met with the threat of ambulatory seizure of tendons and ligaments, each chunk of Mesozoic granite in the trail evaded with more consideration than the last. It was in this concentrated solitude that my brain began to wander.
If my best ideas are conceived in the shower, then my deepest emotional secrets are revealed on the trail. Particularly on the back end of the trail, when your body begins to give way from the stress of the long miles and your lungs are straining the hardest to capture and distribute the thin oxygen. Your will becomes skeletal. Your body is burdened and exposed to the elements. Your soul is vulnerable. For those next two or three hours, I began examining what remained of my depleted being. I began thinking about Shani.
Why do our most mysterious loves-lost linger so?
Shani and I had broken up on Valentine’s Day. She initiated the separation with a swift bluntness true to the form of her self-advertised coldness. In our year together, I had gotten to know the tender, dutiful side of the woman many people recognized as rogue and unfeeling. In truth, the same character liberated enough to stand by the motto “I do what I want” was the one so ultimately dedicated to putting her lover above herself in every detail, to absorb every fault and inconvenience with the subtlest smile and punctuate each visit with a thoughtful gift or remark.
My heart still bore a gaping hole from her absence, but though I missed her dearly and the pain of her departure shone clear in my most exposed moments, I couldn’t tell you if I’d take her back if she asked. Not that such a moment is anymore in the realm of possibility. But out of general bewilderment the question still surfaces. I’m still as baffled today about our parting as I was when it first happened.
These thoughts distracted me enough from the discomfort of my physical condition, my pace quickening as the scenery evolved from barren, punishing switchbacks to the fertile flatland route.
The bows and vistas of the trail never cured my thirst for an answer.
It had been months since I’d seen her. Six months to be exact. The memory of our love remained strong, but the image of our once strong union was disappearing, a four-dimensional canvas of sensory overload reduced to a fading slice of reminiscence, grainy and grayscaled, shrinking into oblivion with each passing day. Shani had been gone for half the year, but I was always losing her. Losing the image of a love I could never understand enough to tame.
When I reached the end of the trail, I was exhausted. But I didn’t want to stop. My knees were aching, temples throbbing, heart racing. Yet I was ready to move on. From everything. From this trail, from this day. And most of all, from the sting of misunderstanding. I wanted to walk until my body failed me, until my legs gave out from under me and sent me crashing to the ground, the impact of my fall resulting in an amnesic erasure of an aching memory.
– TOH
