Little Miss “I hike in sneakers!” scales 4,340 feet

November 8th, 2009

CarleneMountain I lead a magical life.

I, Little Miss “I hike in sneakers!” scaled a 4,340ft, heavily iced-over mountain yesterday, completely by accident.

I see that questioning look – “By accident, Carlene?” To which I respond, “How long have you known me?”

I love hiking; I love it enough to drag my hungover self out of bed at 7am on a Saturday morning after about four and a half hours’ worth of sleep.

It was compliments of this hangover that I maybe didn’t hear my buddy Chris mention that our little group would be hiking up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which are about the equivalent of the Adirondacks in New York, or for the uninformed, full of really big mountains.

Imagine my surprise when the mountains visible from the highway started showing white snow on their peaks. I am, however, the most gullible human to ever walk this earth, and as Chris had told me that this was an easy hike, I simply admired the scenery and sipped my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

Our hiking foursome arrived at the trailhead, shrugged on our packs, and started up the mountain (after, of course, the prerequisite ten minutes of girls needing to pee in the woods and working out the logistics that involved).

At this point I still had no idea that we were about to scale one of the “Four-Thousand Footers” beloved by serious hikers everywhere, and have I mentioned I was wearing sneakers. For my easy hike. That I was still hungover for.

So, I enthusiastically marched up the mountain.

One of the reasons I love to hike is because of the length of my legs. I live in a world of people generally much shorter than me, and hiking allows me to lengthen my stride and mosey up and down the side of a mountain at my own pace.

As I loped along next to Chris (we left the slower girls in the dust almost immediately), he turned and confided in me.

“I didn’t want to tell the girls how long this hike was because it would scare them off.”

I looked at him, curious. “How long is it?”

Chris laughed, and kept hiking forward. “It’s about 4,300 feet; the trail is a little over eight miles.”

I stopped dead in my tracks for a full ten seconds. Um….did I mention the sneakers? And hangover? Easy hike? We’re hiking a FOUR-THOUSAND FOOTER? I didn’t even pack a lunch.

But, what do you do when you’re halfway up a mountain that turns out to be twice as large as you expected and way out of your current mental state/basic needs/footwear league?

You just keep going til you get to the top.

Along the hike, since I had so much more time than I originally realized, I was able to do a lot of thinking. Life hasn’t exactly been….easy….lately, and it was nice to be able to work through my thoughts and feelings until I felt as though I had a semblance of order in my brain.

As I worked everything out in my head, the craziest thing happened. Almost immediately as I started to feel better, I turned a corner in the trail, looked up, and froze in place for the second time of the day.

To back things up for a moment, I had been taken to a random mountain, an hour and a half away from home, and was taken to one of several trailheads leading up the mountain. The group I was with had been delayed getting out the door, stopped for Dunkin’ Donuts, and a whole manner of other little delays had happened.

There are people who believe in the Universe and there are people who don’t; if I had ever been a person who didn’t believe, it would have changed in that moment, a moment where every coincidence in the world had to happen for me to be in this exact place at this exact time.

I looked up and froze, because in front of me, on top of a random mountain whose name I didn’t even know yet (it was Mt. Osceola, for the record), on an icy trail my sneakers and I had no business being on, was my friend Tim.

As I did when I wrote about my breakup with Ian, I will not tell the story about what happened between Tim and myself. It’s not the story that’s important; it’s what the consequences were. In this case, the consequences were that I felt hurt, betrayed, and abandoned by my close friend, who ended up deeply involved in a very personal event in my life.

There were a few moments where Tim and I each could hear the seconds ticking by, completely unsure of what to do, and then Tim shook his head, grimaced, grinned, and finally said, “Holy shit.”

That summed it up fairly well, I thought. He looked at me and said, “I’ve been driving by your office and thinking about apologizing, and I keep coming up with reasons why I shouldn’t stop by – you might have a client, or be really busy. I guess fate just took this into its own hands and is saying, ‘Nope, Tim, you’re going to deal with this right now.’”

He and I ended up having a good conversation where he apologized and we cleared the air, and after we hugged and went our separate ways on the mountain, I smiled and thought to myself, “I live a magical life, and I am so very grateful for that.”

Yesterday I climbed my first four-thousand foot mountain, and I did it hungover and in sneakers. Along the way, I was able to make amends with a situation that had been causing me grief. And I got to the top of that mountain; I sat on the summit and listened to the silence of Nature, and I felt a little piece of my soul heal.

Yesterday was my proof that as long as I keep my faith in the beauty and magic of this crazy Universe, the Universe will see to it that everything is okay in the end. And what else could I ask for?

Well, maybe some hiking boots.