The Swonks invited us to dinner. We've had many meals together. Peter and I go way back. We once shared a dorm room. Since then, our paths have been parallel. He came to LA for Med School. I came to seek my fortune and get as much distance as possible from loony relatives and high-school snubs.
I used to watch the Sunday games with Swonk. At least till he met Siobhan. That lucky dog. She is quite the catch: pretty and rich with a blue-ribbon education, the blessing of common sense and a tender heart. They had a big wedding back in New Haven at the Charter Oak Country Club. Three months later they bought a house. A year after that, they had their first. Another two, their second. Funny how family changes a man. Or maybe it is the brahmin ties or perhaps the accumulated effect of the physician's mantle. Whatever, it was Siobhan, not Swonk, who kept me in their social circle.
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The discussion began innocently enough. I was finishing a second helping of Siobhan's fabulous meat pie, and Lilalee and Siobhan had emptied the last of the Beaujolais into their glasses when Swonk asks, "How's the still-nameless Key to all Mythologies coming along?" Of course Swonk knows that I've made no progress. He just loves giving a good-natured dig; especially one that earns him an elbow from Siobhan.
"About done," I retort with mock bravado.
But Lilalee steps on the joke. "Oh, he's been totally obsessed with that darn hike."
Siobhan interjects, "I think it's cool." And then she says, "I just read Wild. Wasn't it great?"
"I found it boring and silly." replies Lilalee with finality. At that moment, for the first time, I realize that Lilalee may not quite be the champion of my hike that I'd thought.
Siobhan sits up and asks, "For heaven sakes why?"
"She's an addict who makes a lot of dumb decisions."
"Isn't that a bit harsh? She was pulling her life back together."
"Well maybe, but I can't think of a better way to screw up than to shoot heroine and fuck everything in sight."
If you happen to be from that very select group of blog readers with an interest in hiking who didn't real Wild because you have spent the last 18 months in isolation training for the next Mars Mission, then I should explain. Wild is a best selling memoir of a young woman, Cheryl Strayed, who hikes the PCT. She is on the ropes. Her mom has died of cancer. She succumbs to a self-destructive despair and becomes an adulteress and drug addict. Just at the point-of-no-return, she embarks on her hike where she finds forgiveness and redemption.
"Trust me," continues Lilalee, "I didn't grown up eating Pate gras. I see that shit for what it is. No walk in the mountains fixes that."
"That's Pate Foie gras, corrects Swonk. "It's not just fat,"
"Whatever."
By this point Lilalee's temper is really up—snarky class references do it every time. Unlike Swonk or Siobhan or me, Lilalee made it pretty much on her own gumption. She is an only child. When she was 7, her parents lost the land her family had homesteaded four generations before. They moved to a 1-room duplex in Omaha across the street from a potato chip factory. It was a hardscrabble existence. Both her parents worked. She had a latch-key, cleaned the house, cooked her own TV dinners and refereed vicious family fights. When we first met, Lilalee told me how determined she had been to be middle class. She had fought her way out of a bad marriage and worked two jobs to get a Masters in Social Work. All that happened before we met. Over the years, we've managed to cobble together a bourgeois lifestyle. But even still, matters of class still light her fuse.
"Really Lilalee? How can you be so heartless?" Siobhan says. She genuinely wants to know. "She was a single woman out there alone. And she stuck with it till the end."
"And, she was damn lucky she didn't die. Even luckier that she didn't end up as an addict after the book." This point she settles with a defiant glare.
Despite all her virtues, Siobhan is tone deaf to their class difference and doesn't understand Lilalee's pique. It's taken me two decades, but I see it now, Lilalee could never afford to be weak. She sees it as a sin.
But Siobhan persists, "She got better. Right?! She has a family now. And she's such a good writer. I was so touched by her honesty and humanity."
"Wish I was." replys Lilalee. "But if you like to read good writing about troubled souls try a Hardy novel. At least their lives have gone to shit because they have tried to do the right thing."
On that point we all gave pause. It is just long enough for Swonk to break the spell with an offer of coconut sorbet and Port.
As we drive home we say little. It's a long drive. As we're making the transition from The 10, Lilalee asks if she had been too harsh."I got a bit wound up."
"I think you made a good case," I am reassuring.
"Really?"
"Definitely." But it was a sympathy for her past that was on my mind. I know there are things she has never told me and things I am glad to never really know.
What I didn't say is that the discussion has me re-thinking the hike. You only get so much time, it does not earn interest, you have to spend the principle. So why strap on a backpack and traipse off for a month or more into the elements where there's loneliness and fear?
Strayed went on impulse, desperate for change. Others go to prove themselves by pushing the limits and facing their fears. And, some go for the experience of a lifetime. But I know that implusiveness seldom changes things for the better. And, I've learned that for every limit and fear there's another limit and fear and there will be no proof at the end. What's more, I know that experience is what you make of it and to think otherwise is to be trapped in a never satisfying quest for the next experience. Doesn't that just leave you where you started?
Before last night, I didn't question. It seemed enough to know that the long walk and the air in the temple of the high valleys and mountains is transcendant. Now I wonder. Is there more to it? Something more substantial? Or is this just a foolish quest of an old fuddy-duddy unable to accept his age? And what about Lilalee? Yes, what about LilaLee?
That was what I might have said at dinner, but I had no idea how to say it. And while these are the very people who are my closest links to humanity, I doubt they would have had a genuine understanding of what troubles me. It not their fault. Maybe it would be different if they were hikers. They aren't.
I do know this: if you walk long enough and you make it to the end, it is good.