By the time you read this, my 18-year-old son and I will be in
the middle of an adventure. Beginning at 4,000 feet in Yosemite
Valley and ending 25 days and 212 miles later on the 14,494-foot
summit of Mt. Whitney, we are hiking the John Muir trail.
By the time you read this, my 18-year-old son and I will be in the middle of an adventure. Beginning at 4,000 feet in Yosemite Valley and ending 25 days and 212 miles later on the 14,494-foot summit of Mt. Whitney, we are hiking the John Muir trail.
Writing this, anticipating the trip, I wonder how the final story of this journey will read one month from now. I know there will be moments of triumph and moments of misery, but in what proportion?
I occasionally recall a vivid snapshot lodged in my memory of what I assumed was a father-son pair I passed on a prior backpacking trip. They were resting at a creek crossing, packs removed, faces sweat-soaked and red with fatigue, each with a distant and vacant expression. When I recall this picture, I imagine myself to be a cartoonist filling in the bubbles above their heads.
Father: “What the hell was I thinking? Wouldn’t it be great for Billy and I to do some back-to-nature-father-son-bonding in the mountains? Yeah, right. I wish he would stop complaining for two seconds. Can’t he at least try to
enjoy this?”
Son: “How did I get talked into this? Get me outta here. If he says, ‘Isn’t this beautiful country?’ one more time, I’ll kill him. I could say it was an accident and no one would be the wiser. My friends are probably at the Boardwalk today, and I’m up here in the middle of nowhere with Daniel Boone. A king’s ransom for a burger.”
That is a chilling prospect to me right now, because I know that even on the best of backpack trips, there will be moments like that. The ground will get harder to sleep on. The just-add-water menu will grow tiresome.
We will long for a porcelain toilet seat.
When my son Drew carries his 50-pound pack up the seemingly endless switchbacks of 13,200 foot Forester Pass, then jams his toes into the front of his boots 20,000 times during the equally tiresome descent to the next low point, only to repeat the process again and again, what fantasies of my demise will he entertain? I prefer not to know.
I know that, at some point on this three-week-plus hike, Drew and I will experience the same feelings as the father-son duo I passed many years ago. But I share the naive hope and vision of that father at that creek crossing. While there may have been moments, maybe many of them, that his son ached for the comforts of home and the company of his friends, I hope that the memory of that backpack adventure with his father has sweetened with the passage of time.
It’s situations like this that make me marvel at the human spirit. No matter how many times the dark side of life rears its ugly head, we respond with hopefulness. Whether we are pathetically slow learners or admirably resilient I’m not sure, but it seems to me that we tend to be motivated by the rosy picture rather than deterred by the dark one. Why else would the entrepreneur open the corner bookstore or the father go on a one-month backpackwith his son?
I have no therapeutic father-son motive for this long walk, but if I could be granted one wish, it would be that after enduring the blisters, the thunderstorms, the countless climbs through thin air, that Drew – an unsure teenager looking for a reason to believe in himself – might say, “Look what the hell I did,” and realize he
can do so much more.
