The Hike That Didn't Get Announced

July thirteenth. Three days, which is about right.

I texted Simone on the fourth without a preamble. Not 'do you want to' or 'are you free', just the name of the trailhead and a question mark. She replied in four minutes with a time. That was the whole plan. We had been circling this specific trail since Simone dropped the name post-Tuesday session back in May, since I went home and looked it up and found it was fifteen minutes from the outdoor skills workshop site, which felt like the universe being lazy about geography in the best possible way. And then we just, didn't go. For weeks we didn't go, and I think neither of us pushed because neither of us needed to, because the plan was already made in some way that didn't require confirming.

The Fourth of July is a strange kind of holiday if you don't have a grill or a yard or a crowd. The city does this thing where it gets quiet before it gets loud, and in the morning it has the particular flatness of a held breath. We got on the bus and the street outside the window looked like that, held breath, scattered flags, a dog on a leash, nobody rushing. I took a couple of frames while I was waiting for Simone at the stop. I don't know what I expected the trail to be after all those weeks of it sitting on my phone screen as a map, but the trailhead was just a trailhead, a sign, a parking area with two cars, the start of trees. We both went quiet once we were actually on it, which I think is the trail's way of telling you that it was the right call.

Somewhere in the middle of it, the talking kind and the trail kind.

At the top, and there is a top, a proper ridge with a view, city skyline low on the horizon and canopy below us like a second floor, we sat for a while without really talking. The whole morning had this quality of being inside something that hadn't quite announced itself yet. On the way back down Simone said something like, we should have done this months ago, and I said something like, I don't think we could have before now, and neither of us explained what we meant by that, which is maybe how you know we both meant the same thing.

The view we didn't plan for, from the hike we didn't announce.

I didn't know what I thought about the day until I'd slept on it twice. That's the blog's honest condition and I've stopped apologizing for it. The hike happened on a holiday neither of us celebrated in particular, without a plan either of us announced, at a trailhead that had been a name in a text for two months. It turns out that's enough. It turns out that's actually the whole thing.