So, it was a big hiking day today. Busy before, busy during, and busy after. But I like busy, because it makes me feel social, and alive, at least a little.
When I went hiking, what, a month ago, with my high school buddy Rhett and his son, he asked me about the various places around here that one would go on fun and/or arduous hikes. One of them (with a waterfall at the top of a mountain) was one of his favorites, and I told him I'd been planning to hit it before too long. Well, he told me we'd get together and do that hike, and not to go without him. He was pretty adamant about it, otherwise, I think I would've hit it by now. He even called my old friend Dennis, who lives about a half hour from the mountain Rhett wanted us to climb, and arranged a day when the three of us could go climb it together.
I hadn't seen or heard from Dennis since 2017, which is kind of sad, but I understand. He remarried and moved away to a new town, with a new family and, in a way, a fresh start in life. I can't blame him for leaving the old one behind (which, I'll be honest, he did a long, long time ago, first moving up to Alaska--about as far removed from the rest of America as you can get, and then marrying a woman with young children that he could look at as his own). Although I'm just guessing.
Dennis was coming from the north, while Rhett and I were coming from the south. Because Rhett is fundamentally incapable of getting anywhere on time, and even though I myself was ten minutes late, I still had twenty minutes to sit in the car and write. Little did I know that that was all the writing I would get in for the day.
It was an extraordinarily warm day to go on a hike--over a hundred here in town, and probably close to that at the start of our hike. But I guess these months of running and hiking have conditioned me, because I survived just fine.
Rhett brought his teenaged son along again, and he was exactly the same as he was the last time--the opposite of introverted, and very eager to listen to and be part of the conversation the adults were having. Dennis had brought his young step-son, who I had no memory of meeting, although he would've been much smaller the last time I saw him. Dennis, in actuality, was absolutely unrecognizable. He had a long greying beard and wore a floppy hat, and if he hadn't waved at me when I was walking around the parking lot, I'd not have known it was him.
There was practically no place to park, due to the abnormal number of visitors to the mountain, but Dennis (who drove all of us in his little car from a lower parking lot) simply parked alongside the road, and we walked three quarters of a mile to the trail head (which was fine when we started, but miserably hot and distant by the end of the outing.
I've been on a dozen or more hikes in this plague year of 2020, and this was easily the busiest and most overflowing with people I've been on. In the past, I've shied away from people because of fear of contamination, but the path up the mountain was so narrow and so jammed with hikers, that we might as well all have been in an elevator together. A sweaty elevator.
There WERE a few people hiking with masks on, and while I admire their dedication, I couldn't have done that. I'd have just stayed home.
Both Rhett and Dennis had been there before (and Rhett goes often), so I kept asking them if now would be a good time for a picture, or if it was going to get better. I'm just too old school to remember that with a digital camera, you can take a hundred pictures, and if they're not special, you can always delete them.
It was an intense climb up a mountain, where there was a quite spectacular waterfall waiting, and a huge crowd lounging around by it, or actually standing under it in various stages of undress. Because it was so hot out, the nearly-ice cold water felt pretty refreshing, but there were a lot of girls and children screaming because of how cold and (ironically) wet it was in the splash zone of the falls.
The two kids that were with us wanted to play around in the water, and we three adults did not. But later, when I was feeling particularly hot, I did go stand underneath the falls, and got quite wet taking photos like this:
Or video like this:
I took a crazy number of pictures because who knew if I'd ever use my old phone again (I thought I'd give it to my nine year old nephew to take pictures/video with, but now I'm thinking I might keep it just for hikes and the cabin and stuff, because it has fallen to the ground dozens of times and never once cracked or scraped, whereas my new phone has fallen twice and cracked fifty percent of those times*). I'll put a couple of them up, but it'll probably take me a few days to upload them (I had to de-install Dropbox on my old phone because they don't let you use it on that many accounts . . . unless you pay a premium).
The two boys wanted to climb to the top of the waterfall, but Rhett and Dennis didn't want to. So I said that I would, because I am adventurous, I guess. Or I might have just not wanted to seem old to the kids. Before I went up, Rhett warned me that his son could be "rambunctious," and that he ought to go along too. And this is going to sound strange, but I thought about it, and I have to admit that I didn't know what that word meant. I still don't.
It was a steep climb to get to the top of the waterfall, and only the most foolhardy or physically fit made it up there. It made for some good angles for pictures, I will admit.
Dennis was not feeling great, so Rhett led us on a quicker path through some really dense foliage. Honestly, it reminded me of Hawaii (where I've never been), specifically JURASSIC PARK, and that's always fun.
We went down the trail for a ways, only the five of us, and only encountered a single teenaged girl walking by herself.** We let her past, walked about half a mile, and then ran into some kind of resort employee/security guard, who told us the path was one-way only, and we had to turn around and go back to the falls. Rhett absolutely didn't want to (and called the guy a bastard a few times before the day was done), since we'd made it close to the road at the bottom of the mountain, but the guard actually walked with us all the way up the trail again until we were back where we'd started, then announced to someone on his walkie talkie that he'd taken care of the trespassers.
So, we had no choice but to climb up to the top of the mountain again, find the trail we'd taken to get there, and go back down on the other side. It took a while, and we were so high that we could see the path we'd been taking, and how close to the bottom we'd gotten before being stopped. There were these resort guards all over, we discovered, policing the high number of tourists out walking around.
This route was where Dennis started having problems, and we stopped a number of times to rest. It was very hot, but I had been smart enough to bring two bottles of water I carried around in my backpack. Three would've been even better.
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In July: 1761 (more than halfway to my goal)
At night, I was lucky enough to get to see the greatest sequel of all time, and the best of the Star Wars movies, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, on the big screen again. That makes three times I've gone to see it (once in 1997, once in about 2003 at a Q&A screening with Irvin Kershner, and once in Plague Year 2020). It was more glorious than ever in its fortieth anniversary, and I wish everybody had a chance to see it.
And that everybody had a chance to be loved. Or fondled by a stranger during a church picnic. You may choose.
I saw EMPIRE with my cousin, who has always shared a love for The Trilogy, and with whom I watched "The Mandalorian." Now, while I'll almost certainly die alone (and soon), I count myself as fortunate to get to go to it again, when a big chunk of the moviegoing public can't go see anything.
You see so much more on the big screen, with zero distractions, and we both laughed when we saw Willrow Hood run by.
Good old Willrow Hood.
I'm sure you get tired of hearing "I didn't feel like writing today," but it's the truth. I knew I needed to sit down and write before I went to bed, but I laid down and closed my eyes anyway, with the lights still on, figuring I would write in a couple of minutes. I woke up to find it four am and my brain in shut-down mode, so I got up, put my laptop on the floor, and turned off the lights, not even thinking about writing any more.
Still, I will try to do better tomorrow (Sundays are my hiking days, but because I did that today, I could maybe write instead?). I'm twenty days away from having written every day for half of a year, so I might as well keep going.
Words Today: 389
Words In July: I dunno, seven?***
*I did order a case for it this weekend, but to quote SATURDAY THE 14TH, it's a little bit like closing the barn door after the horses have eaten your children.
**He said he never saw any teenaged girls along the trail. Worrisome?
***8940.
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