Welcome to another installment of “Hiking for Personal Growth”.
When I’m in Holland, my cousin always plans our walks meticulously. The
night before, he opens maps, checks train schedules, works in exactly
when and where we’ll stop to eat and what it will be. We’ll start in
this village at 10:15 and end in this village at 4:45. We will then
take the train of 5:10 and eat Chinese food when we arrive back in
Amsterdam at 6:13. And when it doesn’t go according to plan, he is
completely thrown off, feels it has been a failure.
I am made of entirely different stuff, and feel that the best things in
life are often discovered by chance, when you throw the playbook out
the window. You may encounter some roadbumps as a result, but there
will be rewards as well. You can never truly prepare anyway, because
you never know what lies around the corner. Life can change on a dime
sometimes. Surprises are what both break our hearts, but also make life
exquisite when serving up unexpected delights.
With the latter in mind in my self-crafted practice of symbolic walks,
I decided to avoid familiar favorites and scope out a completely new
trail today, and headed out to the
San Geronimo Valley, where I ended up at “
Roy’s Redwoods”.
Cheers, Roy. It was a fairly easy hike, meandering through meadows, up
into Redwoods, varying the spectacular scenery from sunny, unblemished
vistas of rolling hills and pine forests, to shady fern-flanked paths
through dense trees. As you began to get too hot from the sun, you
turned the corner and were plunged into cool shade. As in life.
I met a couple coming up the path, the only other souls I encountered.
“You might want to turn around,” the man said, “There’s a huge fallen
tree blocking the path ahead.” “Can I climb over it?” I asked. “No,” he
said, just as his female companion said, “Totally.” She shot him a
look. My hope for their future as a couple was low. A fundamental
difference in attitude became clear. “You could try,” he said, “but
there’s poison oak all around the tree. I wouldn’t try it. We turned
around.” Again she looked at him. “You could totally climb over. It
didn’t look that hard.” I told them I would take my chances, and walked
on. When I saw the tree, it was big, and had branches that made it a
sort of wall, but she was right. It wasn’t that hard as I clambered
over it. I didn’t even have to get near the poison oak. And I did it
again when I had to come back because the trail didn’t loop around. So
there.
I was happy that I chose to explore a new area today and take a chance
on what could have been a boring trail, but turned out to be quite
lovely and quiet, compared to
Mt. Tam and
Tennessee Valley,
my normal hiking spots. I’m glad I just got up and went instead of
researching spots and mapping it out. It would have taken some of the
luster off of a newly discovered treasure.
Last week, I was walking in
Oakland’s
Tilden Park at the
botanical gardens
with my friends Kevin and the soon-to-be-married Chris and Lena. The
path meandered through the garden and then got narrower and began
winding up into the hills. There were no longer any placards
identifying plants, but we wandered on, lost in conversation, until
Chris stopped. “Hold on, here,” he said, looking around him. “Are we on
a
hike?!” “I don’t know,” I said, when I stopped laughing at him.
“Maybe.”
Isn’t that the strangest thing? Sometimes it just creeps up on you, and
your walk becomes a hike when you stop looking at the map and you’ve
just been enjoying the twists and turns of the path. What did John Lennon say? Hikes are what
happen to you while you're busy making other plans... Yes, Chris, you
are on a hike. We are all on a hike. Look around and throw away your
map. That part’s not on it anyway.
