The Trailhead Was Just There

August fourth. It's been almost a month since the fourth of July and I'm only now writing this, which tracks. The lag is the blog's honest condition. I've written about this before, the gap between the thing happening and knowing what the thing was, and July fourth was a perfect example of it. The city was slow that morning. Not empty exactly, but held. The kind of quiet a holiday makes when everyone is somewhere other than the sidewalk. I texted Simone without preamble. She responded in about forty seconds. We were at the bus stop within the hour.

Neither of us said 'let's go hiking.' We had been circling the idea of this trailhead for months, Simone had named it first, back in late May after a Tuesday climbing session, and I'd gone home and looked it up and found it was fifteen minutes from where we'd done the outdoor skills workshop in the spring. I wrote one sentence about it in a post. And then we just kept not going. Not because we didn't want to, more because a plan never got made aloud, and the not-making-it-aloud is also its own kind of patience. Then July fourth arrived and it turned out we didn't need a plan. We needed a slow city and forty seconds.

The trail is nothing dramatic. A forest path. Tree roots and dappled light and the particular July smell of warm bark and somewhere-nearby water.

Mid-trail, zero plan, full send.

We walked mostly without talking, which is a specific kind of company I didn't know I needed until I had it. At some point we stopped in a clearing and looked down the trail and I had this ordinary, uncomplicated thought: we've been here before. Not on this trail, we haven't, but at this kind of moment. The gear shop decision, the outdoor skills workshop, the Saturday bouldering. The body arriving somewhere the mind never formally agreed to go.

The clearing we didn't know we were walking toward.

I took a few frames while we were waiting at the bus stop beforehand, the street empty the way only a holiday makes a street empty, and one of them is the best photograph I've taken in a year. I haven't posted it yet. I'm still deciding what it is. That's probably also the lag talking.