Easter morning, me and Arle go on a hike. Once the kids get picked up for a few hours, we have this rare open stretch, so she says let’s hike and I say alright. She chooses the spot, up the mountain down the valley. It’s state forest land and at the top of the ridge there is a small monument to a mail plane crash that happened there in 1931. The pilot was the only one on board. He died.
First though, you’ve got to get up there.
We drive her minivan down the dirt road and park in the small lot designated for the trail. I notice some people have left a collection of found sticks against a boulder. Hiking sticks, if you want one. I bring my own though. Something you should know about me is that I have my own hiking stick and it’s kind of a necessity for me to dig the woods properly although I have no idea why. I don’t even what kind of tree it’s from. Or where I got it. I think someone left it at my house once a long time ago; I didn’t find it on my own; that would be a cooler story but it’s not the way things are.
The first few hundred yards of the hike are Outdoors 101. The terrain is mostly flat because we are tucked back behind one mountain in front of us and the next one behind. This is common here in Central Pennsylvania. I guess we are in a hollow, or a holler, as it goes. There’s likely a name for this place but I don’t know it and neither does Arle, I imagine. The ground is tricky here. Centre County is rocky as hell. And because it has rained overnight all the dead leaves on the forest floor are a total oil slick. The rocks are also covered in a film of ice that is not ice but acts like it.
“Whatever you do,” I tell Arle as she walks ahead of me, skipping over ancient stones, “Just don’t step on any rocks or leaves. Then you’ll be alright.”
She doesn’t answer me because what I said is stupid, impossible, and she’s here to hike not joke around with a woodland fool. The pace of our movement is set by her since she’s in the lead and the first thing I forgot about hiking (since it’s been a little while since I did one) is also the first thing I recall about it. Here in our neck of the woods, a lot of hiking means never looking up from the ground you’re moving over unless you don’t mind going down swift and clonking the side of your head on a sharp pine spear or a mean old stone. It’s almost as if the hiking is designed to draw you into a strange headspace in which the Zennish nature of your time outside doesn’t come from observing the flora and fauna or the landscape’s beauty as you might think. Instead, what you experience is a totally unexpected much different kind of meditative mind scape in which you lock in, quite intensely, to the vision of each and every one of your footfalls as they happen/ envisioning how your boot will fit perfectly into the slightest depression in the leaves or how it will land gently but firmly against the side of a protruding rock so that you will use the sandstone wall of it’s body to launch your self into the next movement. It is a flawless and beautiful music that you end up making with yourself as you become more accustomed to the ground, more drawn into the very syncopated oneness that can and will happen between man and Earth if we are open to it.
But.
Like I said.
The price you pay for the inimitable sort of mindful awakening that comes from such a fixated trance of commitment (to not shattering your ankle) is that you don’t see fuck all. Not shit. Not a whitetail deer’s distant flag bounding off. Not a bunch of wild turkey scratchings in the leaves of a dry creek bed just off the path. Not even a Blair Witch pile of stones with your name and fate scrawled in neon opossum guts: SERGE MUST DIE!!
You miss everything if you are hiking this terrain properly. See, if you are doing it right then you are in the zone and that particular zone requires a certain level of flawless understanding on your part. To accept the unstoppable rolling of trail in sequential order/ one frame at a time/ a maddening pace slowing to a much different one in the less rapid paradigm your brain allows you as you practically float over the natural bedlam/ each frame coming at you in slow motion/ every step you take processed through a distinct and unique part of your consciousness that goes untapped all the rest of your life until now: in the woods: as you begin to move in symphony with the rush of the coming trail as opposed to the still solitude of everything else. It is as if you are a very high-tech movie camera and your vision is the shot and the shot is now or never, flowing forward, each leaf, each twig, each coming footstep: a potential threat and a potential victory at the exact same time.
I feel as if Arle looks around sometimes, but I never do. So maybe the whole thing is just me? I don’t know. If she is in fact clocking the trees, if she is truly noticing the way the dull, sad light of a dank Easter afternoon is illuminating these Appalachian forests, then how is she also navigating her way without missing something simple and dangerous down beneath her step?