Letter: Just Walking Each Other Home

Seven years ago yesterday my wife and I bought two of the remaining limited-time significantly discounted “America the Beautiful Lifetime National Parks and Federal Lands Pass” thinking not only was it a good deal (my wife was Dutch and therefore frugal and definitely the brains in the family), but also that we would together return to these beautiful places in America.

We never did.

What had started out that day was good, but would turn to bad, and then get worse.

I had evidently forgotten to set the parking brake on my truck so that when we exited from the Visitor’s Center, the truck was not where I had parked it.

The truck had taken off on its own, rolled down a slight incline, across a small grass divider, hopped a ditch and gently nudged the front bumper of another car, whose owner – happy, for the moment, that he also had just purchased a significantly discounted Lifetime Pass – showed up.

As we exchanged paperwork, my dear wife – not only frugal but ever the optimist in our family – pointed at the vehicle parked next to the car we had hit and said sweetly: “Too bad you didn’t hit that car.”

‘That car’ was a jeep, complete with the kind of brush-whacking, cable-winch hauling, small-tree crushing bumper that probably doubles as an Air Force landing strip bulldozer ATV.

Even the owner of the car I hit smiled as he took a moment from writing down all my information to look at the car we didn’t hit.

The problem was I didn’t hit the jeep. I hit a late-model Infinity, Nissan’s luxury car.

That proved costly.

But far, far more costly was that my wife’s cancer would return with a vengeance and I would lose her on the first day of spring of last year.

But I walked her home.

You know where I am now?

I’m walking America the Beautiful, some of the trails, to some of the lakes, where my wife and I had planned to return to, places where we had dated 54 years ago.

I go solo now, 77 miles backpacking this summer on my journey to complete 100 miles in her memory.

And do you know what I’m finding?

That America is indeed so beautiful, as are the people I find out there on America’s circulatory system – her trails – trails that connect mile after mile of lakes and rivers and valleys and vistas like pearls are connected one by one onto a string; like fog-fashioned tears connect the one sorrowing even to the trees; trails that connect people who are all out there for the same deep-seated reason: to witness firsthand America the Beautiful.

There are places so incredibly stunning that fellow hikers, though total strangers, if viewing the same beauty as you, at the same time as you, also like you, are struck silent in the presence of such majesty.

Just this last Tuesday I was struggling slowly up and up and up the trail out of Dewey Lake which lies far below the ridge and top of Chinook Pass.

Three young backpackers passed me on one of the wider sections of the otherwise quite narrow trail. The hot sun then caught all of us on an exposed rocky shelf where footing was, for me at least, precarious.

I waited in what shade was available until they crossed then, reminding myself to avoid loose rock, ensuring each foot was placed stably, I made my way across.

Only to reach the shade on the far side and see that the threesome had not moved.

They were watching me. Resting no doubt but also I think making sure I made it.

This would be repeated as we made our way to the top.

That’s where they were waiting in the shade, and watching my reaction, as I rounded the corner.

The mountain.

I looked at them.

They were smiling at me.

America the Beautiful was before us.

We had made it.

We are all, after all, just walking each other home.