saint-louise's Diaryland Diary
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\"Seriously. How much further is it?\"
It is Sunday.
It is 11:30 in the morning.
I am squatting on a boulder, halfway up a mountain, staring into space and trying not to imagine deer ticks burying their heads under the skin at the nape of my neck. Somewhere behind me, OH is talking on his cell phone, saying things like, "We passed a building that was collecting the runoff. I swear I remember passing that before" and, "Do you think we should have stayed on the jeep trail longer? Well, we took a path off the side. You don't remember? Damn�" and, "Well, I've lured her out here on the superspecial Deliverance shortcut, and I'm about to abandon her here on this rock by telling her I have to piss and then hauling ass back down the mountain. Think she suspects anything?"
I am picturing some sort of satellite camera panning in on the earth, and the northern hemisphere, and North America, and western United States, state, county, city, mountain, trees, sweaty girl crouching on a rock, contemplating mooning the satellite.
Fucking satellites.
Fucking mountain.
I have hiked before. In Arizona. In my long-gone youth. But hiking as I know it involves a kind of meandering, stopping to sip water, looking at the beautiful surroundings, and still having enough breath to be able to converse with my hike-mates.
My recollection of it does not include plunging headlong up the side of a mountain at a dead run, eventually clambering up groups of rocks using only my fingernails for support because my leg muscles have been torn to the point of paralysis, and flinging myself off the side of the path every 15 minutes to lie in the underbrush, panting and calling out for an end to my pain.
You have to get off the path for that sort of thing, because stopping in the middle of the road will ensure you will be run over by other sado-masochists commonly known as hikers.
Outdoorsy types. Browned skin. Backpacks the size of double-wide trailers. Bundled in boots with perfect traction and weight, and lightweight-but-fashionable hiking clothes, and dreadlocks and grins and booming voices that respond to your breathless "howsitgoin?" with a BillandTed-like, "EEEEEXCELLENT!" And I am beginning to think that hikers don't even have eyes, because they are forever hidden behind grimy, expensive sunglasses.
These creatures. These hikers. They race past me as I stand, aching for one � JUST ONE PLEASE GOD GIVE ME ONLY ONE AND I'LL NEVER ASK FOR ANOTHER THING � one deep, clean breath in my cramping, spasming lungs. They are male and female. Braids and taut skin. I can hear them thinking, "Out of the way, amateur!" as they push past, and I watch them go in a cloud of dust. Sometimes they are 80-years-old, using walkers. Some of them are infants, who sneer at me as they crawl past in their crinkling diapers.
This is a dark, dark underworld I have never seen before. Behind the smiling, "Good morning!" there is a hardness deep in their eyes. Something keen like the edge of a hatchet. A commitment to charging up a mountainside in swarms. A need�a hunger to RUN through nature as though pursued by the black devil himself.
And I have experienced it now, I realize as I squat on my rock. I've been there and back. My convulsing legs and lungs and heart are proof.
There will be a part that makes sense, I know. Sooner or later, the hiking moment I've been expecting will occur. A large, flat area tucked into a crease in the mountainside, where a waterfall runs over the rocks, belying its shouting voice by ever-so-gently showering the dandelions growing nearby. And I'll sit, and sip water, and look at pretty things, and cram my face with peanut butter and cheese crackers.
And try not to think about casting myself off the side of the mountain to avoid the hike back down.
And how I know Myself, that bitch. And I know she's going to do this again.
God have mercy.
11:22 a.m. - 2003-06-13
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