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 all right.”
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 its 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?
I mention this phenomenon to her in between gasping breaths when we stop for a sec, and she seems to agree with me without many words. She nods when I say that I never see the forest when we’re hiking/ all I see is the ground in front of me. I think she understands and feels the same. Anyway, by now we are here. And by here, I mean we aren’t there here/ we haven’t reached our plane crash destination. What I mean is, we are at the base of the mountain now that will ultimately lead us up to that place.
I feel my heart sink a bit. I’m already moist. My T-shirt is swampy on my back and my back fat is weeping out last night’s red wine and pepperoni pizza that I snarfed down when we were watching an epic three-hour Pirates of the Caribbean flick that left me feeling swashbuckling buzzed and mind-fucked by CGI battles that literally whipped my ass right there on couch. Everything about me is the anti-hiker except my ridiculous spirit. My desire is high/ my longing to shine out in the wild places like some kind of modern mountain fur trader is extreme by 21st century standards, I’d say. But there are hiccups, hang-ups. Little things that get in my way of executing my visions the way they go down in my head/ in bed on Easter morning/ in my underwear/ with coffee/ under the blankets/ snug and emotionally regulated and even a bit horny when Arle says hike and I suddenly understand that there will be hiking and it might be challenging.
I want to do this hike. I want to do all the hikes, and you should believe that because it’s true, man. But the part of me that is here standing in the woods far from anyone but Arle and some country kid we saw dirt biking down the road on the way in, that part of me is having to move out of one state of consciousness (Lazy Easter Atheist Chill) to this other less familiar one (Unexpectedly Motivated Easter Morning Atheist) even as the deal is actually going down. This is bad hombre territory of the mind, of course. I shouldn’t be dangling out here between the two worlds, so to speak. I ought to have fully transitioned from bed mode to danger zone mode back at the van before we even started, but I am still getting there. With age, it seems, comes unwanted choices brought on by a variety of people who mean you well and want you to flourish in the old style you once flourished in, but that can be difficult in and of itself. Because you are wonkier now. Both brain and muscle have begun to deteriorate. And even if they haven’t, you might like to tell yourself that they have in hopes of everyone gathering round you some Sunday morning to inform you that it’s OK.
They tell you, You don’t have to climb out of bed anymore. At age 52, you have been recognized as a perfect candidate for spending the next 20 to 30 years reading books and eating sandwiches and having sex and watching all the streaming platforms in between your only exit from the mattress to take nice hot showers with Cedar and Cypress body wash and to use the loo and spray some Right Guard in those flabby pits before you climb back under the covers with a novel and a cup of hot chocolate.
And by “They tell you…” these things, I obviously mean they tell ME. Not you. Unless we have the same dreams deep down beneath the fog within us.
I call time at one point not long after we have started the incline. It’s around the time when I make the observation that whoever created this particular trail did so in a manner not entirely in line with a lot of up mountain trails and roads I’ve known in my life. Those ones were all mostly wisely laid out in the old country way. That means: they zig-zag up the steep hill/ moving a fair distance at a soft climbing angle before acting on a switchback and continuing the slow work to the summit with yet another casual but lengthy stretch of mild grade. This all gets you up to the top of the mountain a lot easier than the other way to do it which, surprise surprise, is the way the cocksuckers who made this trail decided to lay it out.
This trail is more or less heading straight up the side of the mountain. It teases you at times with slight stretches of deep-angled parallel trail work, but the way it’s all done means the effect of whatever the fuck these idiots were thinking is pointless. You climb like a goddamn mountain goat. Or in my case, a bloated farm goat with a wee hangover who has dizzied himself trying to find the Zen in his step so far only to have slammed into this 75 degree sliding board mountainside covered in greasy pig fat before any kind of pure Zen has even had the slightest chance of unfolding within me.
Here, maybe 20 yards after we started the steep part of the hike, I tell Arle to stop. I don’t recall my exact words but I do recall that I am, in many ways, handing myself over to a feeling of immense shame the very moment I manage to order-beg her to quit moving. Arle, in her gentle way, stops and looks back at me with a bit of concern in her eyes. This might be actual concern that I am unwell or having second thoughts, OR it may be a look I wish to categorize as ‘concerned’ but in reality it is a look of surprise. As in: utter surprise. As in: Are you wiped out already, my love?
I added the my love part myself just to allow you a softer landing than the one I think I had when I first sensed that my wife might be lovingly really willing to do whatever is best for her man (including turning back to the car. OR that she might be going up that fucking mountain no matter what so: if her man dies/ her man dies/ he will be here on the way back down/ and no one will ever know that she went to the top and left him there in a puddle of his own dead-as-shit Easter sauce (my own piss, people).
Everyone is at church. No one will find him until she calls 911 and says he just slumped over a minute ago.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
