Trail love, or not
By M. John FayheeAuthor’s note: I apologize in advance for the fact that there are surprisingly few synonyms for the word (to say nothing of the concept) “relationship.” “Affair” doesn’t quite cut it in most contexts. Neither do “romantic friendship,” “coupling” or “two folks regularly making whoopie.” Thing is, in most of the circumstances herein described, “relationship” is the right word. I believe it was Twain who said the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the fire and the firefly. That man sure had a great relationship with words.
“strung out on my memories
ghosts of what i used to be
when it seemed i understood
all this confusion perfectly
now the hopes and fears
throughout the years has shattered
scattered far and wide
leaving me almost satisfied”
— J.P. Jones, “Almost Satisfied” (Salvation Street)
1.
The first time the thought of bonafide backcountry-based, shit, I don’t even known how to word it without sounding, you know, sensitive— romance, love, relationship … something at least one small evolutionary step above the understandable pursuit of nookie — entered my erstwhile perfectly content lecherous noggin was on the Appalachian Trail in 1979, back when I was still young enough to be captivated and a tad frightened by new and intriguing notions, like, well, commitment.
The reason all this started percolating in my admittedly very lizard-brain thought process was that, one night in Vermont, I stayed in a trail shelter with a young couple — Skoal Brother and Bootsie — who had met four months prior on the AT and, the very night before I made their acquaintance, decided not just to get married, but to actually get married right there on the trail, up in Maine, in Baxter State Park, where they planned to end their 2,100-mile hike hand-in-hand on the summit of Mt. Katahdin as husband and wife.
My wild 22-year-old self did not quite know what to make of all that. Growing up as I did in the dysfunctional heart of Dixie, I viewed getting hitched as a soul-sapping inevitability, something that “happened” when you got your girlfriend pregnant and/or when you got so soft you ran out of steam and/or for the worst of all possible reasons: because getting married is what people did because it was what people had always done. Under no scenario I could conceive did a man in his early 20s decide to get married when he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, unless, of course, Skoal Brother was just bullshitting through his teeth in order to make sure he had a constant snatch supply as he made his way along the trail. But, it just didn’t seem like that was the case. Skoal Bother seemed genuinely smitten and sincere about his intentions. It was, if nothing else, a major-league forehead scruncher based, I realized after cogitating on the matter for several hundred miles, upon the fact that, for my whole life way down in the land of cotton, the available female demographic gene pool pretty much consisted of Southern belles, Southern belle wannabes, NASCAR groupies and stoned hippie chicks. And while each of those groups offered up their own intriguing variations on the fun-and-frolic theme, none would be caught dead out in the woods with a pack upon their back — even, perhaps surprisingly, the stoned hippie chick demographic, for whom the entire notion of venturing forth into the backcountry bearing a heavy pack was certainly worth a moderately enthusiastic and sincere “right on” or “far out,” but which was not worth the effort of actually putting the bong down and getting up off the couch.
If you were a guy inclined to backpack and you lived in Tidewater, Virginia, then you had better hike as many miles as possible before the foreordained life sentence was handed down from On Cultural High, because, once the knot was tied in my part of the world, your days of hiking off into the woods were definitely over and done with, unless you count golfing, mowing the yard and asking how high when told to jump to be forms of hiking.
Though it is almost incomprehensible these days, when we’ve got Outdoor Divas and Babes in the Backcountry and Title Nine and about a gabillion amazing women outdoor athletes covering every age group and background out in the woods hiking, running, skiing, snowshoeing, climbing, paddling and biking as good or better than their male counterparts, in those days, such was simply not the case. Not by a long shot. Very few females in 1979 ventured forth into the great outdoors the way they do now. I would guess I met maybe 15 female AT hikers, compared to literally hundreds of male hikers. At least partially because of their small numbers, combined with my very limited experience, perception, understanding and wisdom, women on the trail that wonderful summer were anomalies that I could not wedge into any of the female demographic categories I had grown up believing were essentially writ in stone. It’s hard to formulate any sort of cogent action plan when every woman you meet on the trail falls into the “none-of-the-above” category.
One thing was clear, though: Trail women, their relative dearth notwithstanding, were splendid, jointly and severally. I mean, Bootsie was beautiful, she was strong, and she was funny, smart and very cool. Yet, she had hooked up with a guy who was at least as ugly as I was and at least as much of a reprobate. So, trail women either had far lower standards than any of the female demographics I grew up with, or they could ignore the obvious grit, grime and proclivity toward flatulence that defined most trail males enough to see our well-camouflaged inner beauty. Either way, I wanted one of my very own.
There’s no way I would have heard the outcome of the Skoal Brother/Bootsie story had I not taken two summers to hike the AT. In 1979, I hiked 1,000 miles from Mt. Katahdin in Maine to Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, where I ran out of money. The following summer, my coffers replenished, I returned to Port Clinton and finished my AT journey three months and 1,100 miles later atop Springer Mountain, Georgia. It was that second summer that I learned what had become of Skoal Brother and Bootsie, the very first trail couple I ever knew.
It was in the Shenandoah National Park that I stopped for lunch at a trail shelter, where there was already a northbound hiker who looked familiar. I, too, looked familiar to him. We narrowed it down and realized that we had met in New Hampshire the previous year. He was working as a caretaker at a shelter at which I stayed. He rolled a joint and before it was lit, he asked me if I had met Skoal Brother and Bootsie. I told him I had, and, funny he should ask, but I had been wondering about them.
“They stayed for a few nights at the shelter where I was a caretaker,” he said. “Bootsie was feeling poorly enough that we took her into town to see a doctor. They were worried she was pregnant. Ended up that she just had some sort of bug. Because I helped them out, I was invited to the wedding, which was set for a month later in Baxter State Park. I drove up, and it was beautiful, though weird. Both their parents were there, and it was obvious that was not exactly what they had in mind when they thought of their kids getting married. Skoal Brother and Bootsie were both wearing their hiking boots and, when they exchanged vows, they used their trail handles rather than their real names. You know, ‘Do you, Skoal Brother, take Bootsie to be your wife … ’ I found myself wondering what they were going to call each other after the trail. I wondered if they even knew each other’s real names. I didn’t and still don’t.
“They had already been arguing about where they were going to live and what they were going to do when they got off the trail, and none of that shit was resolved. In my opinion, nothing about their life after the trail was resolved. They each had different lives in different places. But they seemed very happy during the ceremony. Genuinely happy. The next morning, most of the wedding party hiked up to the summit of Katahdin with them. They kissed right there at the northern terminus monument and, exactly at that moment, something changed. You could almost see panic in their eyes. They didn’t even last six months. She dumped his ass because he was partying too much and he put on like 50 pounds, and, last I heard, Skoal Brother, was drinking pretty heavily and was maybe even thinking about joining the Army. Getting dumped hit him hard. I heard from Bootsie. She’s going to graduate school and plans to get her MBA.”
So, OK, it didn’t work out so well for Skoal Brother. Still, I could not help envy him his one long-and-winding summer of love along the AT. So what if he crashed and burned into a cowering psychic shit heap at the end of it all? That’s a risk we all take every time we so much as say howdy to someone who catches our eye. Their acrimonious dissolution notwithstanding, Bootsie and Skoal Brother made me realize, as my own journey along the AT wound down, that I very much wanted to hook up with a woman whose most noteworthy characteristic was her ability to hike 20 miles a day. I wanted a trail wench (as many female AT hikers called themselves), someone who, when we were off the trail (which I hoped would be infrequently), would never want to buy furniture, would never insist that I embark upon a career that did not include leather hiking boots, someone who would never desire to own anything that could not be stuffed into a pack and carried down the trail of life. It was just a matter of, first, keeping my eyes peeled and, second, avoiding even casual interfaces with Southern belles, Southern belle wannabes, NASCAR groupies and stoned hippie chicks. Easily enough achieved if you begin your search by giving Dixie a very wide berth.
2.
She was a New York City girl, and I have no recollection how she ended up standing behind the information desk at Badlands National Park in South Dakota, wearing a tight-fitting National Park Service ranger outfit that made me at once rethink my long-held negative beliefs about uniforms (boy, those are some stoutly attached buttons, if you catch my drift). A friend and I were driving through on our way to British Columbia. We pulled into the parking lot shortly before the visitors’ center closed for the day, and the line of tired and frustrated late-arrivals was fairly long. I do not know how or why this happens and I really wish I did, because I could then pen a best-selling book and retire to the Bahamas, never to be sober again. But here it is: Though the room was filled to brimming with retirees and families with young kids and various and sundry vacationing hordes, time stopped on the half shell when her eyes and my eyes met above the raucous din and undeniably Something Happened and we both knew that Something Happened. Though she continued to professionally deal with the hordes as I made my way closer and closer to her via an ever-diminishing line, the connection we had made with our initial eye contact did not dwindle.
By the time we finally spoke, it was as though the conversation had begun years ago. She blushed just a bit and smiled at my glib flirtations, even though, as she told me hours later as we lay under the wide Dakota sky, that it’s a standing joke how many guys try to pick up on the female seasonal rangers every single day. She had given me the usual campground skinny and offered up a few hiking suggestions. Then, as she did with every tourist in line in front of me, she invited me to attend that evening’s natural history ranger talk, which she would be giving, at the campground amphitheater just after dusk. But her invitation to me was different, and I knew it, and she knew that I knew. It was like we were already talking in couples’ code. “The view of the cliffs is wonderful from campsite 10.” (“I’ll bring the wine.”) “Is the nature trail worth visiting?” (“He wants to hike with me.”)
My friend said later that he had never seen anything like it. “It was lovely to behold watching you two meet each other … it was like, out of the whole cosmos, two souls found each other in the gritty western part of South Dakota,” he said, and those words, coming from this scruffy dope-smoking freak, were both soberingly poignant and so out-of-character, I almost yakked and ran screaming into the night. But I didn’t.
We had only planned to stay in the Badlands one night, but we ended up staying three, which was OK for my buddy because my newfound ranger honey hooked him up with her roommate for a series of decidedly very un-cosmos-like one-night stands.
Up until that summer, Julie had neither hoisted a pack nor ventured forth into the deepest backcountry, but, the first time she did, several months before we met, she knew clear down to her DNA that the rest of her life would be centered around backpacking into the wilderness. And, shortly after that realization had settled its way into her consciousness, in walks yours truly, a man, she said (and I understand that, for most people, there are components of this observation that might not be considered complimentary), who veritably oozed trail life. When we met, I literally had not spent one night indoors in the previous two months, and my overall visage reflected that reality. I was as brown as the surrounding hills, and I was a lean, mean, hiking machine. The wind was in my hair, and Julie wanted to hook up with a man who boasted every permutation of that particular characteristic.
Though we were able to fit in a couple quick day hikes during my short time in the Badlands, a place, lamentably, I have not visited since, we never did go backpacking together. Her work schedule simply would not allow it. When we vowed to hook up again soon, we both meant it, and we both knew we both meant it. And, sure enough, that very winter, she was transferred to Grand Canyon National Park.
We made arrangements to hook up in mid-February. She had spliced together a five-day, 55-mile itinerary along unmaintained trails into a rarely visited part of the Grand Canyon. I was twitching with excitement at the thought of finally hitting the backcountry with my very own trail honey! It took me two days to hitchhike across the Painted Desert from Silver City to the South Rim. When she saw me standing there with my pack on my back, Julie literally sprinted across the parking lot screeching with excitement and jumped into my arms like something out of that old Clairol TV commercial.
That evening, as we organized food and gear, she told me that she would prefer it if we left our stoves behind. She had apparently been talking to some ranger friend/guru whose personal credo was to carry only food that need not be cooked, thus saving on stove and fuel weight while simultaneously freeing up time that would otherwise be spent cooking for things like day hikes. I mentioned that, first, since a stove allows you to carry dehydrated food, the overall weight differential is not that much, and, two, even though we would be down in the warmth of the lower canyon, it was still February and, you know, a nice bowl of hot soup and a cuppa mud would likely hit the spot. I was between a rock and a hard place, so I acquiesced on the stove issue, which was no biggie, except that in a weird way it was. I knew that, had I insisted on carrying a stove, even if I had managed to couch my reasoning in safety terms (that ol’ “10 Essentials” list and all), she would have been miffed. Ended up that, every time I craved a warm beverage the next five days, I was miffed.
Before we hit the trail, she put her Park Service ranger uniform on. I should not have been surprised, but I was indeed. Though she looked quite nice in those tight little ranger shorts, I thought I was going backpacking with Julie, not Julie the Ranger. Within an hour, I was already finding myself on the receiving end of ranger rebukes. One time, I pissed a bit too close to the trail, and, the next time, I got shit for walking off the trail to piss. Another time, I absentmindedly tapped a century plant with my boot while we were catching our breath. Another time, I hooted just to hear my echo and was told in no uncertain terms that such an act might negatively impact the calm of any other hiker who might be in the vicinity, even though we knew that no other permits had been issued for that entire section of the park.
Thing is, each time I felt myself getting stink eye from Julie in her capacity as ranger, I deserved it. Moreover, she was still new to the whole ranger thing (this was her very first trip into the backcountry without another ranger), and I ought to have cut her some slack. I ought to have let her use me essentially as a guinea pig for the very reasonable enforcement component that sadly has to be part and parcel of anyone wearing a Park Service uniform into the backcountry. But, hell, it wasn’t as though I was dropping plutonium into the Colorado River. I started wondering as I scratched my nuts if I wasn’t breaking some sort of Park Service nut-scratching regulation. (You must scratch your nuts with your hand in your pocket, lest you offend any over-flying raven.)
Things started really getting tense when I pulled out my pot. She ripped me a new asshole for putting her in a tough position, and I agreed that, when I decided to get high, I would wander off by my lonesome. She eventually said she was actually entertaining the notion of issuing me a goddamned citation! Despite the clear skies, a black cloud was beginning to obliterate the sun. Isn’t it strange how fast things can go bad?
Still, the hike was splendid. The previous summer, verily, a couple months after we first met in the Badlands, I had hiked into and out of the Grand Canyon when it was 110 degrees. But this was a whole different part of the park, and, since it was wintertime, the temperature made for wonderful hiking, and I would never have known about those particular trails had Julie not turned me onto them.
On our third day, the trail fizzled out — which ended up being metaphoric — and we spent an hour trying to locate it. My inclination was to stand back, sniff the air, look at the terrain, smoke another bowl and decide where the trail would most likely be located. Her inclination, having been told by her ranger compadres that the trail sticks “fairly close” to the river, was to immediately descend a crumbly cliff that pretty much dropped straight into the frothing current in hopes of finding tread. We were at a standoff, she wearing an official uniform, me having 100 times more hiking experience. I told her that, unless a bear took out after me, no way was I going to scramble down that cliff and that I was going to hike up a ridge finger, which seemed to me the only logical place where a trail could possibly be. I thought her face was going to explode, it was so red. (What happened to the cute blush when I first flirted with her in the Badlands?) She angrily followed me, only, she said, because it was her rangerly duty to not let a hiker strike out into unknown territory alone. Shortly thereafter, we came upon the trail and, as soon as our boots hit that tread, I knew our relationship, which had seemed so wonderful and promising scant months before, was over. I ended up being correct about the trail, but there are plenty of times when it’s way better to be wrong. We still had two more trail days left, and we got along well, but it was different. Our conversations became more superficial, and we placed our sleeping bags as far apart as decorum would allow. Just before reaching the Rim, we passed a couple of day hikers who said they were heading to Flagstaff right then. That put me well on my way back to Silver City. As Julie and I parted, I quickly reflected on how, just last summer, when our eyes first met way up in South Dakota, magic dominated the air.
Her last words to me were, “Well, it was good seeing you.” I have to this day never heard a tone so measured and neutral. It was like those few syllables were uttered by a Vulcan. And we never communicated again. I got stranded for 27 hours at the north entrance of the Petrified Forest and had to call friends back in Silver City to come and pick me up — a five-hour drive each way. On that day, I retired forever from a long and glorious hitchhiking career that had been a definitive part of my life — even more than backpacking — literally since I was 12. Somehow, it seemed appropriately symbolic.
What went wrong dominated my thought processes for many months. On the surface, it seemed so perfect: Here was a highly cool lady who intended to dedicate her life to manufacturing a lifestyle wherein she could hike into the boonies, pack on her back, forevermore until the cows come home, and here was yours truly, a man who finds such a woman to be corporeal manna from heaven.
Here’s the thing (I guess): Just because two people have something in common does not make up for the fact that, deep down, they have conflicting personalities. There are definitely two ways of looking at romances based even partially upon tromping through the woods for days on end with 50 pounds on your back. It can well be argued that, if you can get along on the trail, then you ought to be able to get along under any reasonable circumstances. It can also be argued that whatever issues there might be between two people are magnified out in the backcountry. In all likelihood, based upon the fact that she was acting like a goddamned 6th-grade bathroom monitor every second we were down in the Grand Canyon, I guess it’s safe to say that, had we stayed together, I would have found myself bound to a person with control issues. Combine that with the inherent know-it-all obstinacy that then defined my life, and I think trouble would have loomed on the horizon. It was a backpacking trip that spelled doom for Julie and I, but it was a backpacking trip that made us both realize we were likely not right for each other in any manner, that, in the long run, our lives would have been defined less by backpacking than by head-butting.
Which is a damned shame, because Julie was one seriously strong hiker.
As the mental of tumult of our disintegration was reaching some semblance of guilt-ridden but simultaneously relieved closure between my ears, I noticed walking down the sidewalk a lanky-legged vixen who I could tell by her stride was a comfortable and accomplished perambulator, and on her back was a grubby and well-worn Kelty Tioga. When God speaks …
3.
In a small, remote college town like Silver City, there is a twice-yearly ritual in which most single males partake. Every time a new semester dawns, you have about a one-week window of opportunity in which you can ascertain whether any new female blood has imported itself into town and, if so, how you can grovel your way into her graces, or, failing that, get her to at least notice you, before the tsunami of other guys who are thinking the exact same thing beat you to the punch. This lady was clearly a university newbie and, because of the pack she bore, I had a conversational entrée that my non-backpacking competition did not have. I jumped at the chance. The next time I saw her (this time she was carrying a day pack), I sidled up and began babbling my fool head off.
“I saw you walk by the other day with your Tioga,” I smooth-talked. “I have a Kelty myself and I love to backpack and I was wondering if you’d like to hike together sometime? Where do you like to hike?”
“None of your business … go away!” she growled as she beelined away from me as fast as her long legs would carry her.
I was fairly nonplussed. I mean, as she stated her short retort, she could not have helped but notice that I too was sporting a day pack of the very same brand as hers (REI, red), that I was attired almost exactly as she was: cuffed and scuffed blue jeans, flannel shirt, bandanna in my back pocket, Vasque leather boots, Ragg socks, Ragg hat, the whole uniform-of-the-day-enchilada for folks whose lives focused on the backcountry. Add to that the unkempt locks that defined a certain social strata back then, and I would have thought that, in those first seconds of meeting, she would have begged to bear my offspring, or, failing that, at least blown me off a bit more courteously.
Her name was Liz, and, months later, after we had been more formally introduced in an outdoor education class we shared, she confessed to me how intimidated she was when I walked up to her on that corner that day. She said my energy vortex or my chakra aura or some such shit almost knocked her over. “Well, I was enthusiastic,” I responded. We ended up getting close, and we ended up spending a lot of time together out on the trail, where we got along swimmingly (actually, far better than we did in town). We both lived our lives essentially out of our backpacks. She could hike as well as anyone I knew. She could find good campsites. She knew map and compass. She could make tasty trail pizza on a Svea-123. And she had no desire whatsoever to interface with any component of the debt-ridden American Dream. She wanted to spend her life working on a Forest Service trail crew and, during the off-seasons, she wanted to take photographs of the backcountry.
One of my best chums at the time, a man I still keep in contact with, who was then in the middle of a long-term affair that was deteriorating quickly but not quickly enough, said to me: “Man, I hope you know how lucky you are. You don’t have to spend every minute looking back over your shoulder making sure Liz is OK, that she’s keeping up. You don’t have to ask her every five minutes if everything’s all right, if there’s anything you can do to make her life easier. You know she’s tough and that she’ll be fine. You can pay attention to your own hike.”
It was many years later, after I had long been married to the woman I am married to still, that I came to understand just how right my chum was, even while he was being as friggin’ stupid as a person can be. He was right that Liz was one tough woman whose hiking acumen was beyond reproach, and I was proud of being hooked up with such a strong and independent lady, someone I knew that, if I sprained my ankle, she would be able to hike out for help. And, because of all that, I forgot something very important in any romantic coupling, whether that coupling is centered on trail life or not: You should always ask your partner how she is doing. You should always look over your shoulder just to make sure everything’s OK. You should never, ever be so focused on your own bliss or internal shit that you lose sight of the fact that, when you’re a couple, even if you’re a couple that has not made plans any longer than the hike you’re on, you are decidedly not alone as you make your way along the trail.
Thing is, that woman, tough as she was, needed very very badly both my concern and expressions of my concern for her well-being. She was the product of a home life that we never talked about, but I knew it was bad. She had self-esteem issues that were not merited, but then again, they never are. Even while I relished my strong and independent girlfriend, she suffered mightily from my detachment, and, sadly, the main manifestation of that suffering was her jealousy of all my other friends. She wanted to share me with no one. Back then, I hung with a tight group of maybe 10 cohorts in backcountry crime that spent every free moment together hiking, skiing, partying, visiting hot springs and driving down to Mexico. And all of a sudden there’s this new face getting brought to the group’s gatherings, which in and of itself was no concern whatsoever, except that poor Liz was flat-out horrible in their company. She was rude to all of my friends every time she hung with us, and it got so bad that the matriarch of the clan pulled me aside one evening and told me in no uncertain terms that Liz was no longer invited. I did not know what to do or how to tell her that, given a choice of her or my friends, I’d take my friends. So, as usual, I avoided the subject altogether until the wound began to fester and infection set in and killed our bond without either of us speaking a word about what we both knew was happening.
We had planned an end-of-the-semester backpacking trip from Turkey Creek to the Gila Cliff Dwellings. We should have cancelled it, but that would have required a heartfelt conversation, and I did not want to travel down that road. (What an asshole I was.) It was a strange thing indeed to realize as we made our way past Miller Springs Canyon and into the Little Creek drainage and toward the Cliff Dwellings that, as soon our boots were removed, that would be that and there would be no more us.
The same friend who had once told me how lucky I was to have a woman who did not need constant attention picked us up at the trailhead. He told me later that the 44-mile drive back into Silver City was one of the most painful experiences of his life. The tension and sadness in his old VW Van was a truly horrible thing for all involved. Liz spent the entire drive with a quivering lower lip and tears in her eyes. With Julie, it was definite that she was as relieved and happy to see me leave as I was to be gone. It was mutual. It was not mutual with Liz. She was being unceremoniously dumped and it broke her heart clean in two, but I could not stay with her simply to avoid inflicting pain. My life energy dissipates when I realize how easy it is to inflict pain, even unintentionally.
I do not know what ever became of Liz. I’ve heard a few already-stale third-hand snippets here and there over the years. I could not discern from those snippets if she was living a happy life or a sad life, whether she ever hooked up with someone who was kind enough and perceptive enough and gentle enough that he knew to stop on the trail and turn around with a sincere and heartfelt smile and ask, “You doing OK, Sweetie?” I hope so.
4.
When I first moved to Grand Lake, Colorado, in October of 1983, my then-roommate gave me several pieces of sage High-Country advice, such as getting in twice as much wood as you think you’ll need and never ever failing to pay your bar tab. His last words of wisdom centered on women, or, rather, the paucity thereof in those parts.
“You need to grab hold of the best-looking female who’s not already been dibbsed and enter into a winter-long verbal contract that runs till spring,” he said, much the way, I’m certain, that Socrates admonished his students to ponder logic. “I’m talking about TOMORROW! It’s getting a bit late in the year to find anything really good, but do the best you can. If you put this off, or if you fail, you’ll spend the winter dating a woman named Rosie.”
A week later, very coincidentally, I met the woman who, three years later, would become my wife, a woman who, before I met her, had never once carried a backpack into the woods. Thought had never entered her head, until up walks me one otherwise mundane day.
At that time, I was in the process of planning a multi-month overland dirtbag-type trip to Central America via Mexico’s Copper Canyon. Departure date was already mentally set for almost exactly one year after taking up residence in Grand Lake. All that winter, National Geographic maps and tourist brochures obtained from various embassies were spread about on my table, and, week by week, my pile of newly procured tropical gear got bigger and bigger. Newspaper clippings about the political unrest (read: all-out war) taking place exactly where I was headed began to fill my bulletin board to overflowing. During that entire planning process, a most perplexingly weird thing started to happen: This woman who I had latched onto (and vice-versa) with the idea that it was in all probability nothing more than a winter-long affair (neither of us really thought in terms of “our” future together; whatever happened, I guess, happened) began to take an interest in those maps and health department brochures describing the joy and rapture of cholera inoculations. She began reading what little backcountry-based information I could obtain. (This was before the guidebook mania that now defines travel oozed its way into almost ever corner of the globe.) She became curious about Copper Canyon and the Tarahumara Indians. She asked why I chose such-a-such a brand of tent and why this type of bag was superior to that type of bag in a humid environment. And I started getting interested in her interest. Before either of us knew it, we were ordering Gay a new Wilderness Experience internal-frame pack and a new pair of Nikes first generation of soft hiking boots, which, we found out months later, were near-bouts perfect for tromping through the muddy backcountry of Costa Rica looking for white-faced monkeys.
I guess, in retrospect, that was when I first realized I was in love. I mean, that was a stunner of a roundhouse kick to the head from out of nowhere.
It occurs to me as I pen these words decades after the events herein described that what I had been doing in my quest for a female partner who could handle herself on the trail was the backcountry equivalent of those pitiful schmos who venture to Third World countries in search of a bride. Several thousand words ago, I wrote that all I had to do to find me a mutually acceptable trail honey was to keep my eyes peeled, and what I had ended up doing for a very long time was, in actuality, the exact opposite — keeping my eyes closed. If a woman did not bear a pack almost every waking minute of every day, then she was clearly not for me, and, if she did, then by some sort of activity default, she was. And, that clearly didn’t work out so well. Little did I realize until I met my wife that a woman doesn’t have to carry a pack all the time as long as she’s willing to carry one some of the time. It’s important for any successful couple to have mutual interests, but that doesn’t have to bleed into the realm of myopia. (Another stunner.)
In the past quarter-century, Gay has developed a pretty damned impressive backcountry CV. She has spent weeks at a time on the trail and has toted a pack in a dozen or so countries and even has come close a couple times to knocking off some 20-mile days. She’s set up a tent in the middle of squalls at 12,000 feet. She’s hiked the Inca Trail. She’s sprinted down with me from the tundra as lightning popped all around us. She’s slept in a tent in the middle of grizzly country. She’s stood atop many Fourteeners. She’s dined for days on end on plain instant rice because her bonehead husband forgot the soup mixes. And, perhaps more importantly, she has bid me many a fond adieu as I hoisted my pack and hiked off by my lonesome or with a cadre of foul-smelling amigos.
I have often been asked (mainly by chums who have recently been dumped or who find themselves near-permanent residents of the proverbial doghouse) how a fundamental ne’er-do-well such as myself has managed to pull off a long-running relationship with a woman of Gay’s quality and, well, tolerance. When I attempt to answer that question, I find myself falling back on familiar ground. I go back to where it all started, to the trail, and I grasp for analogies that maybe don’t really exist. I talk about how, many years ago, I became familiar with a type of woman that boasted a certain appealing characteristic/tendency/interest: A predilection for hiking into the woods for long periods of time. I mistakenly mentally transformed what essentially was but one component of a personality, much like a taste for classical music or an interest in gardening, and built a mental pack-bearing Stepford Wife around that single characteristic/tendency/interest, to the blind exclusion of all other characteristics/tendencies/interests. Which is so ridiculously stupid that I slap myself in the head every time I think about it. (Slap!) (Slap!)
So, rather than continuing to pursue women whose prime attraction was having a pack upon their back, I found myself looking for, or at least being open to, someone who I just liked being with. Get there, and all else falls into place.
There have been trade-offs, as well there should be. Gay is fine and dandy with trail life, but, when she comes in from the backcountry, she likes very much returning to a place with functional indoor plumbing. She definitely likes the concept of owning nice furniture, and she enjoys flatware that is not made of plastic and cookware that is not made of titanium. All told, a life that definitely includes backpacks, but is not lived out of them. When we’re camping, we’re camping, but when we’re not, we’re not. Fair enough. And, when we’re on the trail, I carry the bulk of the weight. OK, that’s cool too. And when we’re planning our itinerary, I must take into account that Gay does not like toting a pack for 12 straight hours, so I must adjust my mileage count accordingly. But, whether we’re on the trail or not, she goes through life with the rational expectation that her husband will often turn around and ask if she’s doing OK.
There are lots of lessons we can take with us from the backcountry back to civilization. We can take with us a realization that, in almost every situation, lighter is better. We can come to understand the metaphor that the second gumdrop never tastes as good as the first, and the third never tastes as good as the second. We can learn that a little rain won’t kill you.
Neither will a little dirt in your food. We learn that it’s worth the extra effort to find an especially nice place to pitch your Bibler. And we can learn that the best life is one lived with a balance of planning and spontaneity, the dynamic and the static, the rigid and the fluid, the pre-conceived and the surprising, the trail and the home, the yin and the yang. Because, when push comes to shove, you really don’t know what lies around the next bend. No matter how much time you’ve poring over maps and guidebooks, you’ve got to be ready to make camp in unfamiliar territory, which is where all the best and most important adventures begin.
Especially that butt-puckeringly frightening adventure called love. MG
