I feel a bit like Gary Snyder today (and I am paraphrasing, and probably badly): the bend of the waist, the articulation of the knees, the in and out of ragged breath, the crunch of boots on ground.
Hiking. I know I wax romantic, and some of you, probably a lot of you, don't understand it or even want to. It's dirty, it's cold, it's hot, it's sweaty, it's exhausting, it's blister-inducing. You stand at the bottom of a hill and think, "no way am I walking up that thing." But then you do, one boot in front of the other and when you look behind you, you think, "I climbed that."
I love the austereness of it, which is probably why I prefer to hike alone. It seems sacred to me. From an online dictionary: "Austere usually implies a purposeful avoidance of luxury or ease." Maybe, to me, it seems as if you haven't earned it if the process wasn't difficult. I am leary of things that seem to come very easily. They rarely do.
When I am on the trail, I don't think about subway trains packed full of people, bills that are due, or any of the riff-raff periphery. I walk, I breathe.
