Wild Thing
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 entertaining when it comes time to talk.
Her opinion of hikes is that they should be good and long, but not so tough that they end with you 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 that 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 stainless steel water bottle? (It was the bottle.)
As we summited a rocky outcrop, a helicopter thoop-thoop-thooped along the Hudson River valley below us and to our left. On the far side of the river, church steeples poked above the tree line. 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 culminating in forgiveness, then “Fight Club” is about alienation and schizophrenia culminating in attempted suicide. Good luck with the father-son reading club.
Our conversation was briefly interrupted by a fight to the death between a hairy brown spider and 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. Maybe it got a little cocky after the spider thing. Our fight ended in a draw.
The chatty hiker decided to leave us behind and hustle on up the path ahead. 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 hiking trail. Standing on it, 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 in the wilderness and having to kill and eat field mice to survive, we watched carefully for the blue trail blazes that marked the route. I like the different blues, faded and repainted over the years.
We also used a hiking app that showed our precise location through the miracle of satellites, but never mind that.
An hour or so later we reached another overlook 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.
It’s been observed that men are bad at expressing their feelings, but had we just stumbled on a masterclass? The guy talking paused, searching I suppose for the perfect words to describe his grief. And then he found them. “I feel like that scene from ‘Invincible’ where Omni-Man is staring at the black hole,” he said.
A phone rang. His friend stood up and stepped away to take a call.
In the distance, a motorcycle could be heard, or maybe a jet ski.
We kept walking.
Who was the person who mapped this trail through the hills, many years ago, winding past babbling brooks and up mossy hillsides to reach this panoramic beauty spot, or black hole, depending on your perspective? Who decided this was the path we should all just follow? If you were to ignore that person’s choices and step off the trail and into the woods, what adventures might happen to you over there?
We didn’t find out. We stayed on the trail. We required no tourniquets.
We rolled back into town hungry.
Unfortunately it was the time of day when most restaurants had closed for lunch and weren’t yet set up for dinner. But we found a place willing to take our money. It was a restaurant where, believe it or not, everything on the menu is named after characters from the TV show “Dr. Who,” 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 us glasses of water, and when she realized, she apologized profusely, but who cares because we learned about things like the Krafayis Fried Chicken Wrap.
Who or what is Krafayis, you ask? It’s a murderous alien species with a reptilian body and parrot-like beak that’s invisible to everyone except Vincent van Gogh, for some reason. Maybe you knew that already. What a name for a chicken wrap.
The restaurant was empty at that hour, so there was plenty of time for our waitress to bend our ear. Until another customer came in and ordered some tea. The waitress tried chatting her up about Dr. Who stuff too, but the customer wasn’t interested. All she wanted was a cup of tea.
I was surprised to feel a little sad about that. A few minutes ago I didn’t care about Dr. Who, and now I do?
I guess I was sad for our enthusiastic waitress, but also sad for the missed opportunity to eavesdrop on a weird collision. Would the customer’s cup of tea have been improved by a spoonful or two 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 has been set.
