take a hike
As we step onto the path, past the gravel and asphalt and through an arbor of trees to the place where the air grows light and cool, I realize two things: I am not wearing the right shoes for this hike, and consequently, I need a walking stick.
Roots ripple across the path, rising up from the dirt and clay. I glance at my hands, so like my mama’s, remembering how my children used to touch her twisting veins tenderly with their baby fingers, how they would whisper, “Grandma, you got trees on your hands.” I smile, realizing that even having never walked a path like this, they had identified the landscape correctly.
I hear the sound of rushing water, water I can’t see from where I stand, but water so loud I can envision the tumbling rapids, can see how they nourish and change the mountain, and suddenly I understand why scripture describes the voice of Jesus, the voice that can at once press people to the ground and change us forever, using similar terms. The sound booms, drowning out every other sound the closer I come to its source.
At this elevation, runoff and rain have left the path slick and soggy. Our tennis shoes slide along the roots, the hard-packed clay, and as we begin to ascend, Adam cries out and falls down. Mud smears a line down his calf. We help him to his feet, and, assured that he’s only injured his pride, I begin to look in earnest for some walking sticks, scanning the edges of the path, which narrows as we venture deeper into the hike. Finding a felled limb, I twist off the sturdiest length and hand it to Adam. It’s too short, really, but it will do. “Use this,” I tell him. “It will help you.”
Around a curve, I find another branch that’s a bit longer, thicker and heavier in my hands, and I pass it back to Riley. I reach for a tree that grows right at the edge of the path, gripping it’s knobby trunk as I plant one foot between meandering roots and step up, looking for a careful place to land. This part of the trail seems to wind up in continuous ascent. As far as I can see ahead of me, we’ll be traveling up. Already I am breathing heavily. Sweat trickles down my arms and drips from my elbows. Spying another length of deadwood, I lift it from a damp nest of leaves and test it for sturdiness, thinking how funny it is that having need of such a thing makes me less inclined to worry about meandering spiders.
“Found one?” Zoe says and smiles, glancing back from just ahead of me. I like her traveling there. Besides the joy of having my children in close proximity, I appreciate her wise caution, which was an inborn distribution of grace. Maturity has leant a cool detachment to her careful observations, something that serves all of us well along the way. Summer on the mountain brings the snakes out in search of sun, and on another hike it had been Zoe who spied a baby Copperhead slithering across our path. She had turned back without a sound, stopped in front of me, and pointing, said simply, “Snake.”
On this particular hike, Kevin travels at the end of the line; always at least one of us has Adam and Riley in view. We get to take no vacations from our alertness to seizures and low blood sugars, though we all suspect Adam might just be the best hiker among us. More than once I’ve imagined what it would look like for Riley to seize here, where roots and rocks and drop offs could be so dangerous to a falling form. But when Adam slipped, Kevin had been at his side immediately, had even jumped impossibly over the tangled clog of tree roots in the path. Faithful fathers point to our good and better Father, who never stops watching out for and protecting us.
I nod in answer to Zoe’s question, knocking the bottom of my new staff against a rock. “It just keeps going up,” I say to her, looking beyond us. “I keep thinking it has to even out at some point, but around the bend, it’s just more up.” Even as I say this, I am thinking that life often feels this way, like an uphill climb that offers very few breaks. I have been chuckling when I don’t quite know where to put my feet, as I groan, testing a precarious spot, and my sweaty, gripping hand soaks the damp, dead bark of the stick, marking a dark handhold, chuckling because it occurs to me that messy is the only way I travel. At least for me, cute and hiking don’t go together.
Zoe smiles again, nods in agreement, and turns back to the trail without a word. I lean into the walk, focusing on each step but also forcing myself to pause from time to time just to look around, to catch the light where it finds its way through the trees and limns the leaves in gold, to listen to the rustle of life surrounding us. I once read a compelling book about how trees and plants talk to each other using a vast fungal network in the soil of the forest floor, how they even share resources in families and as a community, and it’s this I pause to appreciate. There’s a whole world, multitudes of living communities, nurtured by God and not by me, thousands of lives He knows and tends and created to flourish together. In Him we live and move and have our being. I breathe it, a silent prayer, an acknowledgement that He is the one who holds all things together. If the years of my pilgrimage have taught me anything it’s that I can easily get tripped up by the roots below my feet and distracted by my fear of falling. It pays to travel carefully, to have a stick, wear the right shoes, and to look out for each other, but also, it’s important to stand still and look up and around, to see the vast ineffable Truth as it is expressed by what God created.
We have laughed about how a mile on the trail can feel like five, and now it feels as though we’ve trekked all five uphill. The muscles in my legs feel thick and hard and slow, as though I am becoming like the trees on either side of me, as though the walk transforms me even as I grow more tired and feel more depleted. When will it be that I’ll stop moving forward and just grow up, nourished higher by streams of living water, like these tall trees with their watery cores? I’ve got trees on my hands and trees in my hands, already.
Finally, the trail opens up ahead of us and we arrive at a plinth of polished granite inscribed to declare the summit of the mountain beneath us, over 3200 feet up.
“Is this the overlook?” I ask Zoe, turning slowly in a circle.
“Well, if it is, it’s poorly named,” she says, “because all you can see here is more trees.”
She’s right; it’s really no more than a wider spot at a curve in the trail. If anything, the slab announcing the point feels out of place, jutting out of the dirt in a tiny alcove surrounded by trees.
“No, this can’t be it,” she says, turning again toward the trail.
“Well, you’d think we’d be close to it, at least,” I say, somewhat desperately, navigating over the wide trunk of a fallen tree, so wide I almost have to sit on it to get across. My walking stick lands in the dirt with a thunk, wedged between two rocks that rise like bumps from the skin of the earth.
Riley and Adam make hardly a sound as they travel the trail, except that occasionally Riley testifies, suddenly says something that preaches when she hikes through a particularly difficult spot, something like, “God is keeping me safe” or “God is with me on this trail,” loud and strident for all of us to hear.
I can also hear the continual murmur of Kevin’s voice, making conversation with Beverly, a nurse we met at the trailhead who quickly became our traveling companion just because we were hiking in the same direction. Whenever we collect for pictures, she offers to take them, always says, “Let’s do one in portrait mode, just because we can.” At one point, I offered to snap one of her and she said, “Girl, I’m good. I’m not needin’ much of this right now.” She gestured down the length of her body. “Even my undies are soaked, if you know what I mean.” We laughed companionably, feeling no need for any pretense.
We round another bend, still sloping up, and Zoe glances back, grinning over my exasperated sigh. “I thought we were at the summit,” I say significantly, recognizing this as one of those deceptive situations wherein it’s tempting to believe I might never actually achieve the thing I hope in, at this point, the promise of a stunning vista. Pilgrims practice this feeling constantly, and with it, the perseverance it takes to keep on living by faith. We practice it through nearly every season and detail of life, in small, chosen activities and through immeasurable, unchosen pains, and here I am again, letting perseverance finish its work.
Finally, just as I begin to wonder how much longer, we discover a break in the trees. Zoe and I gasp sharply, stilled by the stunning view of mountain peaks, undulating in ripples of gray and stormy blue, clouds wisping white like smoke around them, framed up by the bold tremble of sunlit leaves in every shade of green. We suddenly feel very small. Again, the ineffable Truth. Zoe lifts her phone to take a picture.
“The overlook!” We declare it victoriously, in unison.
“But there’s really not much space to see,” I say, turning in circles again, looking for somewhere to stand so that the rest of our group, just feet now from where we have stopped, will be able to appreciate the view. It isn’t much of an overlook, really, just a place on the path.
Gradually, we clump together, a clot of collectors, snapping our pictures and dripping sweat in the dirt, still trying to catch our breath. Beverly politely stands at the edge of the path, waiting for her turn to see, so I wander a little further in an effort to make room. It means another step, two, up and over a boulder that’s crowding the path, but around the corner I glimpse a rough-hewn fence rising up, and beyond that, a wide, flat space with a floor of rock and stone. This then, is the overlook we’ve climbed to find, with space enough for all of us to stand and breathe and see. The view is the same, just broader and so even more stunning. I smile, briefly mulling the word breathtaking to describe this beauty, because it was the climb itself that took my breath, that stole it like a thief, but in this space, in view of this glory, I feel like I can finally fill my lungs, that in fact at last I breathe so well it feels all the breaths before were shallow ones. There is life and then there is the life that is truly life.
“Hey, come see,” I call back, “I found the actual overlook!”
They clamber over that last boulder, laughing over our stopping short, over our crowding thirsty around that break in the trees, and then we’re all together again and still, just breathing, only finally doing it side-by-side. We’re quiet before that vast beauty, still and knowing beyond words: One day we’ll reach the end of our travels, and we’ll all finally be able to see. Our faith will at last become sight.
