Covid, Cancer, and Trusting the Trail

My wife and I went for a long walk this weekend at a state park near where we live. It was a beautiful fall day, a little cool, but sunny. 

We walk every morning, usually a couple of miles. We bring the dog with us. She's a puppy still, and has more energy than my wife and I put together. Our neighborhood has some hills, but the state park is basically one giant hill. Plus, the paths are full of ankle-twisting rocks. In other words, this is more of a hike than a walk. Lots more challenging.

Still it's fall in New England and it was a beautiful day, so off we went. The exercise is good for our bodies, and being in nature is good for our minds and spirits -- Shinrin-yoku, as the Japanese call it. Taking a forest bath. It might even help the immune system. Especially good during a pandemic. Better still for a cancer patient.

The state park has a lot of different paths to take, all of them headed uphill. We texted our son for advice for which one to take. He knows this park well (and works now in the stunning White Mountains of New Hampshire as an ecological field tech, collecting data to changes in plants, animals, soil, and water -- an ideal job for a forest bather like him).

He recommended the Orange trail -- not too steep. When we got to the park, we looked at the trail map and looked at the Orange trail and decided to take a different one -- the Violet trail. It's one that we walked a few times with our kids when they were small. It begins near a small river before heading uphill.

 When I suggested this trail, I had forgotten how rocky it was. Not just the ankle-twisters on the ground, but large basalt rocks, twenty or thirty feet tall, that needed to be climbed. The path that has been cut through the rocks made it easier, but it was still a challenge for our middle-aged legs.

We got past the big rocks and made it back on to the trail that heads to the top of the hill. This was the one we hiked with our kids years ago, and it led to a tall rock face, 200 feet high. Our son told us that a pair of peregrine falcons nests there, and doesn't like people hanging around when their babies are small. We didn't see them, and we didn't stay long. This was also the point where our Violet trail broke off into three other trails.

And that's the point where our memories failed us. We couldn't remember which trail we usually took with the kids.

I tried to get the trail map with my phone, to figure out where the three trails went to. We'd only walked a mile, half of what we usually walk in the morning. But we'd added a bunch of rock climbing. So we were already tired from our hike. 

The map didn't load very well. Poor phone reception in the woods. I couldn't really see the map in much detail.We could turn around and go back the way we came (going over the big rocks again), or we could take one of the other three trails, and hope that we picked the right one to take us back to our car.

As we slowly walked up a rocky trail on tired legs (even more tired because our puppy was pulling the whole way -- she loves a forest bath us much as our son does), my wife stopped to rest on a rock. "How much longer?" she asked.

I confessed that I didn't know. The trail map on my phone was too fuzzy to show distances, and I confessed, I didn't even know if we were on the right trail. But we were on a trail, so we wouldn't be hopelessly lost. We just might be walking for a lot longer than we'd expected (or hoped). My wife thought for a minute, and then got philosophical.

"I feel like we've been going on this walk for the last 18 months. Climbing over obstacles. Not knowing where we're going. Trusting that the trail we've been on is the right one, and whoever marked the trail new what they were doing." 

We walked on.  My guess was right -- the Red trail took us to the Blue trail, which took us to the main trail, and downhill to the parking lot.

And my wife (as is often the case) was right. She sees things clearly. Our walk really was a metaphor for what we've been through in 18 months.

And for the years before that, too, since I was diagnosed with Follicular Lymphoma. We never quite know where we're going, and we have no choice but to trust whoever marked the trail -- the doctors, the researchers, the patients who came before us. 

It helps to have some companions.