“I forgot my watch,” my boyfriend says, just as we step around the sign marking the trailhead.
I shrug. It’s a bummer. His watch tracks our mileage and elevation gain. And we are motivated by that sort of thing because we are serious hikers and we are training for distance today.
A little while later, the earthy perfume of pine needles hits my nose and clears my mind as the shade of the trees washes over me like the blast of AC when you step into a movie theater. And I wonder how many miles we’ve walked and if I actually want to be here.
When I stop, supposedly to take in the view, I turn and see the foothills of the Rocky Mountains undulating away from us like a plush, wrinkled carpet. And I recall that I only get one Saturday per week in my intense, grown-up, work-hogged life. Is plodding uphill what I want to do with it?
I like hiking. I think.
I’m fairly certain if I don’t say that, my driver’s license will be revoked or I may be tried for treason and exiled to someplace like Kansas, or Wyoming (North Kansas). I was born in Colorado. Family outings in my childhood had one of two destinations: places of historical significance or natural beauty.
After three or four cramped hours in the mini van, I would spring out and suck in the alpine air, bright as spearmint. My siblings and I would beg my dad to pull over along the Platte River and let us dip our feet in the water—it was so cold it felt like your veins became icicles up to your knees the second your skin made contact. In the parking lot of a lodge in Estes Park, I spun in slow circles with my head thrown back, looking at stars that had drawn close now that streetlights and highrises weren’t stabbing at them.
Every long weekend, every day off, my family would ask each other, “what do you want to do?”
We wanted to get out.
Staying home felt like a waste of a day. So, if it isn’t actively snowing (and sometimes if it is), most Saturdays, I go out, and I plod.
For all my plodding, though, I do precious little nature writing, or nature reading for that matter. I intend to, of course. I am aspirationally the sort of person who reads a brilliant observation about something green and wild on a Sunday afternoon and casts my mind back to it to take medicinal little nips off it like one might a pocket flask throughout my cubicle-bound week.
Right now. This very moment. As I write to you. I want to be steadily pumping up to the crest of a profound thought about nature. But the only really cool nature fact I know is that various parts of the yucca plant can be eaten, woven, or used as soap. And the fibers of the long leaves can be stripped into threads and used to suture wounds, the hard pointy tip of the leaf functioning as a built-in needle. It feels like there should be something there! Right?
I may have just wasted my one good, cool nature fact, and this isn’t even a nature essay.
I do love nature! That’s the thing. I love the globby forms of the red rock monuments. I love the bright faces of the hardy little white and yellow flowers that cluster by the side of the trail. I love the golden flicker of an aspen-strewn slope in autumn. I love the gossipy chatter of the stream as it picks its way down from the tundra, where the snow is melting, over its granite-strewn bed, never pausing in the story it’s telling, probably about what the marmots have gotten up to high above us. I expect marmots have drama, either of the feudal or crime lord variety. Do you think there’s a marmot monarch or a marmot mafia? The stream is probably trying to explain.
I just don’t love plodding. I maintain a juvenile rebellion against the things I “must” do. And I must plod for the sake of my heart, lungs, and joints, to undo some of the damage done by forty or so hours hunched over in an ergonomic chair. I must go squint into purple shadows of distant hillsides so that my eyeballs remember that the world doesn’t stop at the blue-lit screen perpetually a foot from my face. I must be silent except for the rhythm of my feet to balance out the words I heap up around me all week. I must ache and not quit or I will lose the muscle memory of perseverance. I do want all the benefits that plodding gives me.
But I get weary of my weekly obligatory plod. I’m tired of harvesting, optimizing, and processing my weeks, parceling out shares for each good, important, and beneficial obligation. If you use every part of the yucca, as with most things, it will die. Obviously. Which is a shame because yuccas have very pretty flowers, but I can’t recall if they serve any purpose except as something to look at. (You should have known I would not let that yucca thing go to waste.)
Nature writing, the really good and mostly unpretentious stuff, is probably more about looking—just looking—than it is about taking, processing, and using.
About this time of year, the trails around Colorado Springs sprout these signs that tell you to keep out of an area or off a trail because of erosion, or because seeds have been scattered to restore the flora. “This bit needs a break,” the sign says.
And not to slice a perfectly rambly essay up and process it into an overly tidy lesson, but I think it’s good to take a break from being useful and from using. I think it’s good to look without measuring. It’s nice, sometimes, to walk without counting the miles.
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
