Reporter’s Notebook: Spotting wonder on the trail

I’m a slow hiker. Frequently I lag behind my family until they are brightly colored dots far up the trail. Sometimes it’s so bad that I lose sight of them completely.

Part of it is because I need to do more cardio. Part of it is because I have bad ankles that are seemingly more prone to accidents than other people’s. And there is also the clumsiness factor. Read: I fall down a lot. It’s fine if I’m on a day hike with only a water bottle, a granola bar and maybe a sweatshirt in a day pack; worse if we’re backpacking and I go full turtle. 

Part of it is because I spend a lot of time looking around. I like to take in nature whenever possible, and that naturally causes me to slow down. I can’t observe a bright fall leaf or a clearing full of baby pine trees if I’m charging ahead, bent on making time.

I’m not just slow on hikes with incline, either. I’m slow at the beach as well. I like to pick up garbage. Not just bottle caps and plastic bags, but sea glass and pieces of what might have once been a deck on a very nice house. I have found a lighter that somehow still worked and a lovely (if soaked and packed with sand) sweatshirt buried at the high tide mark. I brought home a plank of wood full of rusty screws and added cast iron numbers to make it an address marker.

For some reason, this doesn’t carry over to urban exploration. When we go to a city, especially a familiar one, I find my stride and suddenly it’s my family that’s getting left behind. I guess that environment isn’t as distracting. I don’t tend to look up unless there is some truly startling architecture. This is less than ideal when combined with a bad sense of direction, but you can’t have everything.

Recently I went on an overnight to Harriman State Park to sleep in the lean-to at Bald Rock. This lean-to is impressive; it’s the only one I’ve ever seen that was built from rock. There is a fireplace and chimney in the center. Very mountain man, very voyageur. 

The weather said 84, but it ended up closer to 90 at 100 percent humidity. This slowed my hiking speed to a creep. Fortunately, we had budgeted a lot of time and, with much cursing and sweating, I was able to putt along until we reached our destination. 

I will spare the gory details of our night in the lean-to. It didn’t cool down that much and the bugs were brutal. We got up before the sun, ate our reconstituted meals and shouldered our packs. The hike down (or up and down, since these things rarely go in a straight line) was once again hot and sweaty, and my husband and the dog were soon lost to sight. 

I trudged, knowing that the car and air conditioning lay at the end of this slog. I thought about details from the current book I’m working on and tried not to twist my ankle. I tried not to think about how miserable the hike was turning out, how bad I had to pee or how much farther I had to walk.

And then, right in the middle of the trail, I spotted something. A boring gray rock with the unmistakable outline of a shell pressed into it. I stopped, picked up the rock, and laughed out loud. When I got to the car I showed my husband the fossil.

“Whoa, that’s awesome! Where did you find that?”

I smiled. “Right in the middle of the trail.”

Make space for your slow hikers. They see the small wonders. The painted leaf, the dew-beaded spider web. The stone hosting the remnant of a creature millions of years old.