The Hike
We were seven men aged sixty to sixty-eight. Two of us were experienced outdoorsmen, but mostly we were unskilled, acquaintances from boardrooms and social clubs, men softened by lives of sustained privilege, friendly but not friends. The experts were our leaders. The rest took guff from our wives for our sudden late-life conversions. They bought us bucket hats and tennis shoes, fanny packs for our pills and snacks, and, for the first time in their decades as our life-partners, lotions for our skin. They snapped phone camera photos after we first donned our sweat-wicking tops, our shorts of many pockets, and they sent them to our grown children with cute notes and emojis: Look at snazzy dad! Late Life Crisis! Adventure Life! We smiled like good sports. Despite their ribbing, we knew they were happy that we were belatedly looking after our health. We kissed them goodbye whenever our crew met up, hiked when we told them we were hiking, and we never felt guilty that every step was a lie.
Our balding legs firmed and browned. We trained by taking laps on the high school track, building our endurance before moving on to local trails. One of our wives dubbed us The Silver Pumas, but we never used that name ourselves. We became the talk of our social groups. Other men asked to join us, usually through our shared network of wives, but we refused them all until we caught the eye of Arlo Grant.
Arlo was a retired attorney whose rental properties spanned entire downtown streets, our town’s biggest wheel. He was rich, even to us, and none of us was poor. Everyone in town knew his name, many whispering it like he was a castle-bound miser from a children’s fable. In his younger days, Arlo had been an adventurer, an international traveler, but time had turned him sedentary. He made no secret that he only approached us at his wife’s urging. “She wants me out of the house,” he told us. “Wants me to shed some of this extra weight.” We took days to get back to him, making it seem as if we were conferring, but the truth was that we’d wanted him from the start. At the time he joined, our crew was preparing a two-day hike up Riley’s Trail, a steep and challenging cliff a few hours outside of town. Arlo was too proud to sit it out, despite the many years which had passed since he’d last been in good enough shape to consider it.
Our wives asked, “Why do you want to hang around that old codger?” asked, “Are you trying to get into his will?” asked, “Are you doing a good deed to get right with God?” They allowed their questions to die half-answered, knowing as well as anyone that it’s in the purview of old men to be particular and incomprehensible.
On the night before our hike, we packed and went to bed early, sending reminders and last-minute questions and confirmations to one another through group texts. We rose before the sun, before some of our wives. We piled into two cars, recalling fishing trips with our fathers and family vacations with our own small and vulnerable children. Each of us offered to drive, but our experienced members thought of themselves as our lodestars, and they insisted on leading us even at this stage of the journey. Along the way, we told stories from our lives, eventually even Arlo, who still felt to us like an outsider. As he spoke, we considered our younger selves, what they would think of us being in fellowship with this villain, laughing along to some recollection from his boyhood.
We arrived at Riley’s Trail a little after nine o’clock. We stretched, peed, stretched again, then shouldered our packs. It was a Wednesday, and the few people we saw were other retirees, mostly dog walkers who’d come for the shallows at the trail mouth, turning back before the grade spiked and the elevation rose. Stepping under the canopy onto the trail felt existential, like a rite of passage into a second manhood.
For two miles, the trail failed to challenge us. We breathed deeply, pointed at flowers and trees and insects whose shapes or colors made them focal points, spoke, laughed, or hummed, and swatted pests from our skin. As the difficulty increased, we grew silent, expanded the footprint of our group. At first, we waited together if one of us needed to rest or to wander into the trees to urinate, but soon enough, we stopped slowing or halting, stopped calling out when we needed a break, each man taking it upon himself to catch up if he fell behind.
Around noon, we came to an outcropping of bedrock where we ate a packed lunch. We were tired and in no mood for conversation, staring at our feet while we chewed, wiping sweat from our faces with our shirts and gritty bare arms, worrying about the body aches we would feel in the morning, thinking of the miles ahead of us before sundown.
The difficulty heightened, and the hike sorted us by ability, breaking us into three distinct knots with a quarter mile of trail separating our strongest and weakest members. Arlo drifted from the middle group to the end as the day wore on. He was well in the rear of us when we heard him call out in pain, a caterwauling that was loud enough to cause our leaders to stop and turn back.
We found him lying on the ground, sitting in the dirt, his hand bracing his outstretched leg, as near to his foot as he could comfortably reach. “Rolled my goddamn ankle,” he said, then he made an angry sound, a self-deprecating grunt of a laugh.
We looked at one another, unsure of what to do, of how this might change our plans. We were reluctant to speak for fear that any suggestion might be apart from the will of the group. It was ultimately one of our two leaders who said, “We probably ought to get you back down to cars, Arlo. This trail will only get harder.” He flicked his eyes from one to the other of us, unsure of how we would take it, but we only lowered our heads or nodded, crestfallen but relieved.
Arlo scowled, waving away any suggestion of quitting. His face was a glimmering mask of sweat. “We’re not turning back, not because of me. Get me to my feet and find me a stick I can lean on. I’ll be along directly.”
We didn’t argue, just split into groups, the strongest of us pulling him up and the rest scouring our immediate surroundings for a walking stick. Once he was situated, a few of us offered to brace him on our shoulders, but he declined. He was not our child or our partner or friend, and we bore no responsibility for his foolish self-reliance.
We proceed slowly with Arlo behind us where we wouldn’t need to consider his limp or monitor the swelling of his injury. We lasted for two more miles before the sky grew purple with the coming evening.
That night, our campsite smelled of woodsmoke and the mentholated creams we rubbed into our joints. Sitting made us chatty, and we laughed like the old friends we weren’t as we waited for the fire to boil a pot of water for our dinner, all but Arlo. He allowed one of our leaders to wrap his ankle, then he lay on the ground with his feet near the fire, staring up at the stars. He accepted a bowl of macaroni from a box, but he barely ate. We made jokes that we should have packed lobster or beef wellington to better suit his sophisticated pallet, but as the fire began to die, most of our talking was done with our eyes, moving them from his prone body to the eyes of the others, looking into the fire when we had nothing more to say.
At bedtime, he allowed us to help him into his sleeping bag. He was too proud to thank us but, once the fire was out and we were all settled in for the night, he said, “A lot of men in town hold grudges against me for the way I’ve conducted my business through the years. It isn’t fair of them. It was just the nature of my work. They would have done the same thing if they were in my shoes. It’s a lonely life, if you want to know.” There was a long pause then, as if we were allowing us time to respond, but no one did so. “What I’m saying is that I appreciate that you let me join you. We’re going to see the top of this bastard canyon tomorrow. I’m glad to be with you, even if The Silver Pumas is a ridiculous name.” We all laughed at this, but no one said more on the subject. It was something we’d agreed beforehand not to discuss. One by one, we fell asleep. However long it seemed to us then, the truth was that it took no time at all.
A younger crew could have made it to the apex in only a few hours, but we awoke with a quarter of the hike awaiting us. The aches we feared were taking root in our bodies. We were stiff and grumpy and unable to see the glory of our impending achievement from our current perspective. We sat around camp at a distance from one another to avoid the friction of pointless sniping. Arlo’s ankle had swelled overnight like he had tucked an orange into his sock for safekeeping, but we knew better than to discuss turning back with him, and he didn’t grouse about two of us lifting him and stabilizing him under his arms when we set off.
It was a struggle for us all, even the experienced among us—rocky inclines and log bridges and deep patches of mud that made no sense to most of us in their isolation—but we persisted, slowly, men trudging through a war that only existed in ourselves. Our silence was all consuming, ominous in a way that differed from the quiet we’d fallen into on the first day. It was, of course, our leaders who were the first to see the top of Riley’s Trail. To those of us behind them, their howls were a shock, as if they’d arrived at a destination that we never fully believed we would reach.
Some of us arrived at the top and stayed to wait for the others, stretching or taking long swallows from our thermoses. Others glanced over the ledge then stepped back down a few paces to stand in the shade of the trees. Arlo and the two of us assisting him were the last to show. We kept to ourselves as they passed us, checking our heartrate or sending text messages to our wives. They disappeared from our view as they stepped out of the trees, onto the sunny plateau of the trail’s terminus. Ages passed. We were unable to look at one another. We willed our ears not to hear.
Those of us who were on the plateau emerged and started back down the trail. Most of us followed them without even looking up to ensure that the deed was done.
If more than one person is responsible for a mistake, then no one is to blame. Every firing squad has one random blank round. We walked up that canyon as virtual strangers to one another, and we were strangers when we came down too. No one knew the others’ history with Arlon Grant, only that it was bad enough that one hike, one half-hearted admission of guilt from an injured man in a sleeping bag wouldn’t rectify it. We were seven individual men between the ages of sixty and sixty-eight. We couldn’t remember which age belonged to whom. It didn’t matter. One of us was a retired police officer, and after he called for help, we allowed him to take the reins as our new leader. We listened as he told us that the right thing to say was nothing. We were old and exhausted, and none of us saw exactly how Arlo stumbled into the abyss.
Most of us never hiked again, never had a reason to. Trauma was an excuse that begged no questions. Some of us, though, kept on, reverted to doing laps on the safety of the high school track, walking and walking and walking to settle our minds, but never together. If one of us arrived and saw another’s car in the lot, he would simply turn around in search of his own park or low-traffic residential road where he could walk alone, one foot in front of the other, as if sooner or later our next step would be distance enough.
