You Can Take a Hike
Lately, whenever someone invites me to go hiking, my response is usually: “You can take a hike.” That’s because, I really don’t care for hiking.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not lazy. Okay, maybe that’s a lie. But I used to take long walking excursions all the time. It’s one of my wife’s favorite leisure activities – so much so that she snuck it into our wedding vows: “I promise to love, honor and cherish you – and take annoyingly long, arduous hikes into mosquito-infested woods in the middle of nowhere – so long as we both shall live.” I probably should have read over our vows a bit more carefully, but young love makes you say yes to the craziest things.
I’ve endured tons of treks over my lifetime. I’ve scaled summits of the Rocky Mountains (well, the summit of the visitors’ information stations, at least). I’ve toured all over Europe for two months, with nothing more than a backpack and my sister (to carry my backpack). I’ve run several 10K races and even completed a marathon – that’s 26 miles – and at the end, all I got was a t-shirt. So, don’t tell me I’ve not put in my share of hard miles on foot.
But hiking is not that much fun for me anymore, in part because I have osteoarthritis in both knees – which, personally, I blame on my wife, for making me join her on so many walkabouts over the past 35 years.
I don’t get the appeal of the activity. Hear me out. You want me to walk for hours, usually in the middle of a forest, so the view is totally obscured by trees and boulders and nature. Then, to make matters worse, after reaching my destination five miles later, there’s never a Starbucks. I’m stuck in no man’s land with no cell phone reception, so I have no idea what the game score is. I’m utterly exhausted and my knees are throbbing. But wait! We’re not done with the fun yet. My ordeal is only half over, because to get back to civilization, I have to cover the exact same route in reverse. I guess if you’re a masochist, I totally get the appeal.
