Hiking

Hiking is beautiful.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, before the time of the horse, when our ancestors still had to gather food and hunt and lived in caves, hiking was a daily necessity, whether it was for daily survival or for nomadic tribes on the move. I cannot fully describe hiking to anyone. It is too beautiful and pure; those who have never been hiking or have never truly hiked cannot understand. Hiking for me is simply trusting my spirit and my feet to guide me wherever I might want to go, scrambling and leaping, loping, skidding and then that oh so holy gait - the hike. Humans, like horses, are gaited animals and whether you take to that analogy or not does not change the fact that this is true. The first gait of humans, was the hike. You might think that hiking is walking, but it isn't. Hiking is an energy efficient, swift, extenction of walking. A very experianced hiker can hike for what feels like forever, covering distances of upwards of several thousand kilometres on a long trek, going as far as forty miles or more in one day. Rather than tire you out, hiking invigorates in a way that walking just doesn't. The pureness of the air filling your lungs, the softness of the earth and the terrain passes beneath your heels.

My father once described hiking as being like his version of church and this is a feeling I can attest to being true. A hiker needs no walls or cross to feel at peace with the world or pure. All you need is the wilderness and the wind softly blowing through the trees, animals pausing invisibly in the growth to watch your passage by. When I hike, I feel like a dog shaking off the mantles of humanity to leap back into a world of primitive joy. Like a sled dog the moment I smell the forest breeze, a crispness of glaciers and pine, I cannot wait to begin. I feel like crying "Let's go, let's go, let's go!" and the moment everything is ready, when all gear straps are tight and everything is prepared with nothing forgotten my feet hit the trail and I give my self to them.

My feet know what to do. I cannot lift much with my noodle arms, but my powerful legs can lift my weight and more, springing me through the density of the forest like a wolf on the prowl, hunting for the path of least resistance through the woodland. Surefooted, fleet, I sometimes can do nothing but proverbially hold on as my feet bring me down an incline over roots and rocks that could end my hiking days in a heart beat. Take a wrong step hiking and you could even be dead, but I trust my feet. They have always brought me home and kept me safe. Where other people ride horses and love cars, I need none of that. All I need is my feet, which like my hands when I draw, simply just know what to do. They should - I grew up hiking. The hiking gait is ingrained into their makeup. The most peculiar thing is how I almost did not have this trust with my feet or this freedom of the trail. If I had been born a hundred years ago or maybe even just fifty, I would of been wheelchair bound for eternity for the way that I was born, my legs bent out of shape. I would have been crippled but I am not and I will always be eternally grateful for those who were looking out for me when I was a baby and straightened my legs, giving me this life of adrenaline and freedom on the trail. Sometimes, I even believe that my feet are stronger because they were born crippled and had to be straightened. I have certainly never sprained an ankle or broken a limb though there have been plenty of opportunities for such things to happen, growing up on the trail.

There is something in the forest, perhaps the air that just plain invigorates the body, enlivening a perhaps stagnant soul which sends a charge through you. On many occasions I have felt like a dead horse going into the forest, my mind and body poisoned by the stresses of our modern world and yet later, leaving the forest I almost always feel cured. I am very fortunate to live in a place where this natural medicine, a cure without side effects is so readily available. Away from the forest lands and the mountains, I would surely sicken and die. In the forest I shake off my cares and humanity to just be another thing in the wilderness. The wild does not care that you are human, nor what your station in life is.

If it wants to, it will take you just the same.