City Slicker Takes Hike
Essay | Jesse Pesta
A friend and I go on hikes sometimes.
She’s a quiet, deliberative hiker, which is nice because that way we can listen to nature. And she has funny opinions, which is great for obvious reasons when talking is called for.
Her opinion of hikes is that they should be good and long, but not so tough that they end with you lying at the bottom of a cliff using your sock as a tourniquet.
Yes, quiet is nice, the better to hear the whispers and murmurs of the wild. The sounds of nature can be elusive in what passes for wilderness an hour’s drive outside of New York City.
Is it the wind whistling up the valley I hear, or a highway? Was that the distant cry of a hawk, or was it you unscrewing the squeaky lid on your fancy metal water bottle? (It was the lid.)
As we summited one rocky outcrop, a helicopter thoop-thoop-thooped along the Hudson River valley below us and to our left. On the other side of the river, church steeples poked above the treeline. We didn’t hear church bells. But it wasn’t Sunday.
But we did hear motorcycles. The loudest are the motorcycles, even louder than the helicopter.
While admiring the view, we met another hiker. He was definitely ready to talk.
He talked about hiking. He talked about the video production industry. He talked about how he’s reading “East of Eden” with his young son and how thrilled he is that the kid would want to read a book like that with him. But he’s worried because the next book his son wants to read is “Fight Club.”
If “East of Eden” is a rich and lofty allegory of Cain and Abel ending in forgiveness, then “Fight Club” is about alienation and schizophrenia ending in attempted suicide. Good luck with the father-son reading club.
The three of us also watched in horror and fascination as a hairy brown spider, crouched on a boulder, fought for its life against a shimmery purple-black wasp. The wasp would circle, then attack, then back off and attack again.
The wasp won.
Then a few minutes later, astonishingly, the wasp attacked me. Got a little cocky after the spider thing, I suppose. Our fight ended in a draw.
The chatty hiker decided we were moving too slow, so he announced that he’d be hustling on up the trail. He intended to find a rock to sit on, where he’d read a book about writing, he informed us.
It can be hard to photograph a trail. Standing on the path you might see clearly where it goes. But take a photo of the spot and what seemed so obvious simply disappears into the leaves and shadows.
Sometimes, of course, the trail does vanish entirely. To avoid getting lost and having to kill and eat field mice to survive, we kept an eye peeled for the blue trail blazes on the trees marking the route. I love the different blues, faded over many years. We also used a hiking app that shows your location in real time, but never mind that.
An hour or so later we reached another vista where two young men were sitting on a rock, discussing heartbreak. “I could have spent the rest of my days with her,” one said to the other.
He paused. Then he expressed a thought that was rather less tender and romantic. “I feel like that scene from ‘Invincible’ where Omni-Man is staring at the black hole,” he said.
Might that tell us something about the relationship? Who’s to say.
His friend’s phone rang. He stood up and stepped aside to take the call. In the distance, a motorcycle could be heard, or maybe a jet ski.
We continued down the path. It didn’t seem right to linger.
Who was the person who mapped this trail through the woods, many years ago? Who decided this was the right way to go? And what would they think of Omni-Man? If you were to ignore that person’s choices and step off the path into the woods, what might you find over there?
We stayed on the trail. We required no tourniquets. We stopped for lunch.
We rolled back into town late enough in the day that many restaurants were closed for lunch and not yet set up for dinner. But we found one willing to take our money. It was a place where everything on the menu is named after characters from “Dr. Who,” of all things, the surreal 1960s British science fiction series in which the main character (Dr. Who) travels through time to prevent evildoers from changing history.
Guess what, we were clueless. But our waitress, an extremely cool “Dr. Who” nerd, explained what we needed to know to obtain food. She was so into helping us understand everything, she forgot to offer glasses of water, and when she realized, she apologized profusely, but who cares because we learned about things like the Krafayis Fried Chicken Wrap.
What’s a “krafayis,” you ask? It’s a murderous alien with a reptilian body and parrot-like beak that’s invisible to everyone except Vincent van Gogh, for some reason, and represents mental health distress. Maybe you knew that already. What a name for a chicken wrap.
The place was empty, so there was plenty of time for our waitress to bend our ear. Until another customer came in. The waitress tried chatting her up about Dr. Who stuff too, but she wasn’t interested. She just wanted a cup of tea.
Would that tea have been better with a side order of Dr. Who trivia? We’ll never know. Like the hairy spider killed by the wasp, or the Omni-Man fan who’s missing a girl who doesn’t miss him, the path’s been set.
