These hikes

These hikes.

These hikes I take:

Mornings on one of the Ridgeline Trails, winding through Doug fir forests, wildflowers and mushrooms, birdsongs and bear-sightings, trail friends, so close to home;

Silver Falls, Row River, Fitton Creek, a few days on the PCT—the Oregon hikes that make me love this state more than I already do, which seems impossible;

Away to hike the Wasatch, the Selkirks, to trek up Mount Kuchumaa, to check out the Appalachians;

And then the long ones, last year from the French side of the Pyrenees across northern Spain; this fall up the spine of Portugal across the river and into Galicia.

I was not always a hiker. I don’t come from a family of hikers. In Girl Scouts, back in the day, we didn’t hike. We wove baskets and made potholders. The first time I hiked I was 22. It was in Pfeiffer Big Sur with my then boyfriend and another couple, all of us not only clueless and bereft of decent gear, but tripping. It was apparently not my time to die, because boy howdy, did I tempt fate.

I fell in love with hiking in British Columbia, exploring the Purcells and the Kootenays in the early 2000s. Back then it was about the physicality of it, hiking as “exercise” with the added benefit of being in stunning landscapes instead of smelly gyms.

Now it is about so much more. Yes, I love the way my body feels during (and after) a hard hike, even an eight-hour hike with a loaded backpack. There are some aches that are not painful at all.

But hiking is also what passes as my “spiritual” practice. And it is my therapy sans therapist, with step-by-step (I mean that literally) gratitude to Pachamama for taking all I give her and transforming it. And it is part of my creative process, by which I mean my writing process. Hiking alone, here, there and everywhere, ideas pop into my head, sentences form, bridges appear, and transitions that loomed as impossible leaps become walkable paths.

The idea for this little essay came yesterday, as I hiked Willamette to Fox Hollow, Fox Hollow to Dillard, on an afternoon so blazingly beautiful that it scoured all ugliness from the world.

Wendell Berry, of course:
I come into the peace of wild things... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.