Home at last
I unlock the car, dump my gear and drag myself into the driver's seat. I guzzle my water, then start the car and back out of my parking spot.
The cow moose is standing about thirty feet in front of me. She is blocking the parking lot exit, browsing an autumn bush. When I roll toward her she eyes me benignly and shifts her rump a quarter inch to let me pass.
I don't know where baby moose is. And I don't know where daddy moose is. Perhaps it's better that way.
* * *
It takes four days before I can walk normally. A Timp hike has always torn me up. But it used to be that I'd be sore the next day, then feel better the second. By the third day after a trip there would be nothing but a few healing blisters. But I've come to dread the days after a hike. The second day is actually worse than the first. The third seems marginally better at most. This time I used up whatever resources I'd saved from the hike in my final headlong push to get off the mountain before the light failed. For the first three days it takes a careful steeling of will to walk down stairs. The fourth day I am still limping. The fifth day I can move without showing any soreness, but I can still feel it. But finally the aches fade, the muscles stretch. The pain is gone. Life settles back into its familiar rhythms, and only the memories and the pictures remain.
Walking a mountain is not a reasonable thing to do. It chews you up, wears you down. Mountains are big and remote and ultimately uncaring. They are untamed and dangerous places. A thousand things might go wrong. Several of them usually do.
No, there is nothing at all reasonable about walking a mountain. But I'll be back in the high country soon.
Won't you join me?
-Dale Neibaur, October 2003