I Do Believe

You shuffle and I hear the sound
Of your cigarettes in your pocket and my coat on your back
The worst of my riches are gone

We stole together once, I think
There’s memory of darkness and shared secrets,
I think (you know how I’m forgetful)

And I wore dark gloves with my dresses
At night when we clanged bells and dripped
Together in a fountain of found pennies

But I think I stole someone else’s wishes
When we scooped up shiny bounty, it looked
Easy and piled and newly minted

I used to suck on pennies when I was seven
I liked the bitter taste and the texture
Of something foreign in my mouth

Did I tell you I make habits and break habits
Like falling stemware from my wedding
I lost three crystals in one move

And here we are among mountains
Of our own wishes looming over
And I do believe I love you

The Theory of Perpetual Motion

Running is painful.

This thought occurs to me on my 8th loop around the track during a reluctant Sunday run. I still run clock-wise, an act to appease my obsessive personality, though this is one of my first runs after a nearly year-long hiatus. My body and lungs are screaming and my breaths aren’t just short but burning, the result of a recently discontinued pack-a-day smoking habit. Such a habit produces a (somewhat necessary) sedentary lifestyle, so my weakened legs sting in tandem with my singed lungs. My heart pumps “stop, stop, stop” with every triplicate slap of my feet.

I don’t stop. The pain of running past the point of comfort is like a small death. I am ashamed to notice something akin to the feeling of being near tears and I’m transported back to the year I was 12, on the athletic team at my intermediate school, huffing out endless laps each day before classes began. My morning runs were usually beautiful and squint-inducing, bright glints shocking my retinas with every new corner and angle. I had the mindless ability (like most 12-year-olds, especially those as active as I was then) to churn out lap after lap without much effort, at least compared to the effort I must exert at 26.

Lap 10. My mind finds my mother, at 51, huffing prettily as she answers my phone call during a jog around the block. I huff, gasp, huff, gasp. Will I be able to run at 51? What if I can’t make it to 51? What if this circular loop claims me on Lap 67 and I spend eternity sitting on the sidelines with blood and lust and theft and love on my back and in my heart and in my mind? No, I cannot sit. I must reach my destination with speed, with gusto.

Running is an obvious choice, as the fastest form of unaided human locomotion, yet it’s not the most efficient in terms of calories (energy) expended in relation to distance managed.  Men on a track running at a pace of 6.3 mph use 1.20 times as much energy to travel the same distance compared to walking at a pace of 3.15 mph. [1] The exertion of running then must be said to be indulgent, a luxury. In order to exert the expenditure there must be an excess of energy than that needed to sustain the walk of life.

The laborious cost of running isn’t happenstance; we pay in pounds of sweat for the fancy of feet in flight so that the act of walking, which is more often performed in the daily course of human life, will be easier. The heel-down posture of the human gait, in contrast with the toe-first posture of cats and other proficient runners, “increases the economy of walking but not the economy of running”. [2] Although our very makeup is not conducive to our sprint, we persist. But why when it seems irrefutably unnatural to force ourselves into marathons, onto tracks and treadmills? There must be something else in our makeup, some penchant for pain and perseverance, some competition with our own minds and biology. I shall not walk. I will not be ruled by the bounds of nature or will. I have always been defiant in the face of authority.

So there is life and death and the struggle in between. There is the panicked need to sprint through my body’s desire to stroll, and I feel it on soft Sunday’s such as these. Every lull feels like a death, a reminder that neither my face nor my heart are as soft as they once were. Each lap hardens my body and my mind while causing simultaneous deterioration. My joints begin to grind and my hair threads with silver. I race myself to wisdom while pieces of flesh and sinew are left like sand in my wake. I pant, “Faster”.

So I run harder, my mind broken in obedience not to nature but to my own will. In this break I find reward – here I find my destination hiding under the guise of purpose.

Lap 15, but I no longer struggle. I’ve hit my stride and now my slaps and huffs make sense instead of conflict. There is no destination. There is no pleasure, but nor is there despair. I am running and must continue to run — that is all. When my shoes begin to fail, I will run barefoot. When my clothes become rags I will in turn become content to have breath in lieu of labels. I was created to run this loop, in line behind my mother and hers. There is peace with the acceptance of necessity, of inevitability, of sameness and flesh-toned brand uniformity.

With this solidarity in mind, I drop my eyes from the sunset and let my lids fall closed. I don’t need to see; I’ve know the pattern of this circle before I knew its naming letters. When the sun drops and I no longer feel its warmth on my cheek, I grind gears into a sprint. There’s relish in the scream of my hamstrings and, eyes now open, I aim my feet towards home.

I’ll have a Grande.

I am, it’s a shame to say, a smoker. I don’t just like to smoke; I absolutely love it. I shudder when that ubiquitous non-smoking co-worker points at my lunch-time Camel (smoked in a corner in my office’s garage to avoid this very situation) and says, “you know those are bad for you, right?” Yes. I know these are bad for me. I’ve smoked 20 of these a day since I was 16. Before that, I smoked 40. I’m winded RIGHT NOW.

I understand that at this point in my post, those who regularly read my attempts at biographical keepings will be rolling their eyes at the thought of another cigarette post. Yet I neglected to mention in my previous postings just how very much I love this particular vice. It’s not that I don’t want to quit, it’s that I have a love affair with smoking. I know he slaps me around, mom, but boy does he sure taste good with coffee.

Bear with me. I’m not thinking as much this week about smoking and how to break up with it… I’m thinking more of the reason I have the tendency towards abusive relationships. Although I’ve never had an abusive relationship with a partner or spouse, I have one daily with varied vices in life. I’m compulsive, jumping into repetition with gusto, from daily routine to a pack-a-day Camel habit. I have to tread carefully in new endeavours, ever mindful of something that may take hold of me. While many whims take me in forms of eccentric trips and occupation, if caution isn’t used I’ll look up and find myself in the Starbucks line for a cappucinno every morning for three months straight.

I don’t usually admit these repetitive vices to others for fear of being judged, and not without some justification. Have you ever heard a friend’s confession with mock-shock on your face? I know I have. Why it hasn’t always been easy for me to be sympathetic to the faults of others when they’re the same as my own, I’m not sure. I just know that much too often I judge the faults of others knowing in my heart I bear the same.

As much as that thought could depress me, I’ve been around long enough to know that I’m not alone in this fault. I’m not the only one sucking a cancer-stick and judging almost subconsciously. Why is it so hard to admit common fault? Especially one as, well, common as the fault of vice?

I supposed I’m surprised because I’ve noticed most of humanity is made up of large masses of compulsive people. From religious zealots and heroin addicts to the “tanorexics”  of the new millennium, we gather in circles of addiction. The crutches are all around us; we’re nothing more than gamblers without the stigma. You don’t smoke, lady, but we both like a Big Mac, I’m telling you what.

I’ve gone before into attempts to quit or reduce the amount I smoke with a feeling of obligation. I have to quit this habit because my friends and family bitch and moan about it. I have to quit this because I have smoker’s guilt. What I haven’t done is be honest about my level of dependence on my habit. For someone like myself who is only recently beginning to emerge from a dark box of deeply guarded inner self, it’s difficult to admit.

So I write this cigarette post not with the intent of announcement, but in the hopes all readers will remember this week to pay tribute to their own vices. I hope they think deeply about the rituals and dependencies in their own lives and the comfort they provide. Then, I hope they take the cigarette from my hand and remind me that fallacy is human, loving only natural. Perhaps I’ll return the favor.

Origins

I often wonder at the capacity of people to disregard investigation into the origins of their beliefs. Although I usually pick on religion here, I have bigger blood lusts today. Instead, I marvel at the things we believe about ourselves, our lives, our own origins as a species. We ponder life and wonder from what rib came our capacity to hurt, to die, or to birth.

After seven years of living together and five years of marriage, my first marriage is coming to a close. It’s not as contentious as some, not as passionate as others, but the impact of its dissolution has rocked the foundation of my life. I have spent days sobbing. I have spent days feeling like the most terrible person on the planet. I have felt a fool.

What I have not done is disregard the question of origin. I was nineteen. I was lonely. I was afraid. I needed a father, a savior, and he came to me in the form of a husband 13 years my senior.  I clung to his armor for as long as I could, believing things about myself that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I felt I needed a knight. He felt I needed saving. How could I know that I needed neither, but instead required expulsion from the comforts I’d come to rely on?

Birth, as any mother will tell you, is unpleasant. It’s more than physical pain, although the pressure threatens to rip you in two during the process of delivering new flesh is quite intimidating. No, birth’s trauma comes from the objectionable smell and slime and fear that books and mothers of past delivery rooms don’t speak of.

The pain of birth itself, however, is something we speak of often. Yet according to a study done  by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, after five years nearly half  of all women are shown to recall birth as less painful than what they recalled two months after the birth. I’ve heard rumor that this memory lapse may be charged with the task of ensuring the propagation of our species; doesn’t it make sense that the shocking memory of filth falls away for a similar purpose?

My own son made my abdomen clench in more than the pain of birth, but also with the fear of my life’s necessary changes to accommodate him. I recall a line in a poem I once wrote:

Too weakened to smile, instead
I bare teeth, mimic breathing (11-12)

Although my bared teeth in that instance related more to matters of the heart (much like the sub-plot of this entry, if you haven’t picked up on that yet), it is still too apropos to a description of labor to limit to only to the pain of unrequited love. The pain of the messy change which comes with being a parent scared me more than the fleeting pain of flesh.

As painful and gross as evolution is, it is inescapable. As much as I lay in that bed and wished I could escape my new reality, I would open my eyes again and again until I knew only the white of the delivery room. I knew only that soon I would love something more than myself for the first time in my life. I knew that evolution, by nature, could do nothing but foster the adaptions which would ensure the survival of my soul.

And I will survive. Diana Ross might have made a mockery of that particular string of words, but survival is the intent of evolution. Like Gregor in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, my heart and life grow shells before burning out and into something new. I embrace the discovery of my own unicellular origin, and look forward to more showers and funerals before I am but a husk which once was woman.

I am Alice

We’re all mad, mad hatters. We’re all in medicated stasis – allowing our children to latch on and suckle up the propaganda of Playboy bunnies and sexless marriages, ensuring their own slavery to cars and flash and effervescent happiness. It pours out of hidden bottles and makes living widows of women and shackled demons of husbands, all while parents scold when witnessing the evidence of their own foul doing.

Which is my own foul doing – my search for a strangers heat on winter nights that leave me breathlessly alone with my identity. I thud in clubs and discos with my revolutionary hat and bestow on empty souls the reserve that should be corked and saved and cherished. But no, line them up. Shots of me for you and you, until I’m weightless and free of sloshing personality.

When that bar closes you’ll find me in my white tank, sitting watch over Clear Lake Bay with whiskey lubricant handy. When the sun sizzles out into the waters, I think of that first day you burned me. We played chicken with your cigarette and my arm, and my stone flesh won ten dollars over your late blossomed sympathy. I stroked that circle for two full months when I found out; if only the other reminders you left were so shiny and white.  But instead I’ve made dark corners, drunk days under shade trees. I’ve made fearsome discoveries and seen myself become a rapist.

How else do you define the loss of days spent wasted in mourning over lost items that never brought happiness to begin with? Nothing more than broken toys when you stop to consider the vast collision of infinite matter we hang in. How is it not robbery when we are the only known beings gifted with the capability to burst with unique creation that births sonnets and punk rock insanity, yet we throw ourselves away in false pursuits?

Have you ever seen a face of madness? Are we not imbeciles for failing to see it reflected back at us each morning? This world, the way we misuse it, is madness. The fat-fucking-free version of love and value and honor and kindness. That we are each gifted with talent we waste and abuse until it leaves us cold like a rambling lover we knew damn well was no good. The mistakes we repeat and the children we ignore until it’s too late, and those relentless vices that we allow to consume our reason. All this baggage eats us, like the cancers we fear and cause in the same breath — we let the delusions we use as protection from reality carry us away into madness.

Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. We live in a wonderland we fritter away but still expect fulfillment from. It’s time to change course, stop repetition from claiming the sand in our hourglass.    Embrace pain and love and happiness and even madness with appreciation. I will stop today in the middle of a busy street and let the world rocket out of sync without my participation. I will slow dance in my kitchen and break cups and break bread. I will experience my own wonderland.

Growing Pains

It is the great irony of life that we pass each age or era without reveling at our current point in the timeline. The ability to run without great fatigue, the triumph of first accomplishments – all of this is wasted on beings too consumed with advancing to the next level of life, either with eager anticipation or with muted dread of wrinkles to come.

I am no exception. The enjoyment of being 26 is leached from me by the dread of being 27, 28, 29… 30. I look each morning for signs that soon I will no longer be the pretty girl, but instead the attractive woman. I think about the inevitable changes in behavior and dress, and I prematurely sting with the regret of these years I know will be soon lost and soon coveted.

This past Sunday, on a trip to the park with my son, I noted the discrepancy between the modern plastic jungles of today and the metal monsters of my youth. My son runs to me for a hug of reassurance, a hug that reminds him I have not left him here alone. The smell of sweat I catch when I bury my face into the top of my his head transports me back an eon ago, an eon where I shared hugs with another tow-headed boy. The nostalgia startled me; it’s grip was powerful and unexpected. As I raised my face from my son’s hair I spiraled with something akin to vertigo. When did this happen? Who entrusted this perfect child to me?

I released my son, and he went to stand behind a group of children whom were obviously well acquainted with each other. His arms tucked behind him, he peeked at each child in the circle using the corners of his eyes. I knew that he wanted to play with these children, but life had already taught him the cruelty of cliques. Too embarrassed to invoke an invitation, he quietly edged away.

More so than my own fading adolescence, I realized already covet the lost days of innocence I see becoming fewer for my son. I watch as the eyes that were once filled with wonder by the amazing sounds of normalcy become eyes that mirror his mother’s skepticism and caution when he encounters something foreign. Magic tricks already have explanations, and I feel he may well be the one humoring me when he “hears” Santa’s “sleigh bells” Christmas Eve.

I cannot wait for the day I see my son accomplish his dreams; yet I wait with dread for the last of his youthful innocence to slip away from him, just another lost child in a business suit.

Dribs and Drabs

I’m a dabbler. I can do many things, but I never feel as though I do one thing particularly well.

I ran across a blog post the other day which featured the author’s beautiful B&W photography (go to http://laughingbunny.wordpress.com/) and it made me wonder… why don’t I take more pictures? I have a very nice camera and the inclination, yet at some point I set this hobby down and walked away.

So that must be my answer. I don’t stick with things. I dabble, then move on. This is satisfying in itself, in a way, yet I want to feel the surge of pride which accompanies accomplishment.

Therefore, I am making my resolutions earlier than the mainstream this year – I will practice my hobbies more often, in pursuit of the deep happiness that dedication brings. Stay tuned.

This is the Season

Each arrival of winter to Texas surprises me. Through hot and glorious summers spent on surfboards and fighting warm ocean tides, I remain unconvinced that late summer nights will ever turn bitter. I’m remorseful when the temperature dips and the chill shows itself – summer equals a reprieve from melancholy attitudes and memories of hard months in times past, while winter reminds me of my mortal impotence to cease earth’s internal clockwork.

Inevitably, the first real day of winter finds me driving towards the country. A creature of habit, I seem to always be rebirthing, revisiting places dead to me. I’m not sure why I find myself here, driving past suburban countries on roads that open to fields identical to my mind’s obsessive recollection. Revving the engine, I fly with little regard to laws or speed limits, closing my eyes for seconds at a time so I might savor that familiar bite of excitement which almost always accompanies carelessness. Eventually I burst into a cluster of familiar houses; I lived in that house once, and that one, an inpatient of misguided protection. The houses are set back from the roads, grouped for security, alarmed from the inside. They’re jails, attempting to masquerade as homes.

I stop my car outside my last place of residence, ten years ago now that this year’s frost has fallen. I check for signs of punk pink hair in the windows of my former prison. I squint also at adjoining pastures, their countenance at once brightened and chilled with glowing glints of gold from a meager sun. Cows surround and bale mournfully at this house… have you noticed how contented cows seem to be contented with their bovine life, despite their woeful lowing? I would imagine it is because they possess the luxury of being oblivious; dumb animals do not know better than to accept their station in life as merely sustenance to meat eaters.

An exercise in futility, I sympathize with those grazers. I’ve tried before to cover my own taste for flesh and blood with grass and grain. It never lasted long – I lack some intrinsic commitment to peace that these simpletons artfully possess. Dining on fruits and nuts and breads, my lust to use my teeth never truly waned. Yet I still consider a reversion to vegetarianism on many levels — will acceptance ever replace activism? It seems as though I am meant in this life to be branded by the distaste of the blood lust born unto me.

As I futilely coo into the herd, a lowing loner gives me an admonishing look from ten feet’s distance. Her branded flank touches my heart; I press my left pointer into a fence barb and suck back my exhalation. I soothe the corresponding digit of my right hand over my own skin, puckered by life and former teenage angst and carelessness, searching for willful mutilations infused with color. My own imperfect envelope, reason enough for excommunication from one herd or another, has been colored and dressed in many variations of tribal garb, but possessed by none for long.

I reflect on the ease of grazing with a herd, even herds not so adapted to life as plant eaters. There’s a comforting normalcy of eating flesh together, of toasting indifferent savagery. We humans dine and feign indifference at being meant ourselves for consumption as meat or dairy; eschew categorizations in favor of burning brands. It’s as though our ceaseless, cyclical pursuit of individuality only leaves us with the realization that branding is an inevitable and inescapable eventuality. It’s unstoppable, just another changing of the seasons.

I wonder now if the Donna of that season past is still staring out of the houses’ darkened eyes. Is she still staring with heavy thoughts into herds of moaning cattle, holding vigil with the Donna of present? She is forever in the windows of my own internal house, so perhaps it is not impossible that the Donna of a former life stares still into the pastures of now. More disconcerting still is the imagination of my grey haired doppelganger standing beside me in this place when she should be past need for this place, this prison. More than a little unsettled, I remove myself back into the warmth and comfort of artificial heat.

I do not look backwards as I head home. Although I feel the urge to gaze into my rearview mirror and drink in every remaining glimpse of my past, I hold my eyes steady. My seasonal pilgrimage completed, I think perhaps I am done with this place; I will not need to make this voyage next winter. I find myself weary of seasons.

Reflections

I remember an afternoon in East Texas, passed at intervals next to various family members on the porch swing of my grandparent’s house. It wasn’t much; it was small, perfect, elevated. The back of the house faced a lake I would have, if left unchecked, spent an eternity in. But for reason I never truly understood until I held my son, my mother was miserly with her permission to let me try my hand at reversion back to unimaginable ancestors. Yet still, so beloved are our wardens, our lifeguards.

Drowning. The word brings to mind two alternate possibilities – the physical act of a lake’s tide flowing into a body, turning them into a vessel; the life of the lake filling the body with miniscule creatures so remote they don’t cause consideration on a summer day when, dipping under, one often comes up gleefully from the waters, spewing a teeming fountain in the style of God himself.

Alternately, a pressure. A weight. A creeping wave, causing frantic clutches at one’s throat in desperate efforts to cast the intruder off, gagging.
I am drowning. I sit with my hands numb from my day. I sit verging on creating my own ocean, but am too remorseful to see evidence of my own ungodly lake.

Thus, I fling off my familiar weights. I close my mind to him, the person who has the ability to transfer thought into my fingertips. Love? No. An anchor, perhaps. Child? Heavy, wet clothing. How can I have a chance against hungry sucks from a lake-mouth with a steel passenger like a babe in arms? How can one reach shore and run with pockets full of extrusive reminders of that lake’s own volcanic placenta?

Except for birth, when is man more self-realized than before his death, facing the acceptance or rejection of his baptismal guarantee? I think it no accident that it is not uncommon (or, at least, propaganda of such tales are not uncommon), for those who would have classified themselves as “non-believers” in life to suddenly join hands with God. It must be a terrible thing, to see your life flash before your eyes. Small theft of candies and grand larceny of hearts. No way, a lifeline, please; the only other option is that ubiquitous lake of fire. Could there be anything worse than drowning AND burning at the same time? It’s the question of the ages, a creation of nothing but the human taste for morbidity. Drown? Or burn?

*******
I walked through the Museum of Natural Science this afternoon. My son with his father, I allowed myself to lapse into my problematic solitude. Alone. I am never alone; today I am alone. I walk through curling exhibits without tugging tiny hands along while they squeeze Morse code into my palm that translates to a desire for McDonald’s over education. I squeeze one palm into the other, and I still do not draw breath. I walk without straining my neck from searching for a somewhat oblivious husband, undoubtedly spotted deeply squinting at the visions which long-dead creations inspire in his mind. I convince myself I am a fighter, no! An Olympic swimmer. I over-estimate my ability to hold my breath.

This museum houses a mammoth I-Max, and as I pass the entrance I remember the last time I took my son to see a movie there. Sea Monsters, or some similarly generic title, was a 3D documentary, breathing graphic life into deep sea creatures of the past and present. The movie caused my son’s Morse code to turn from pleading to panicked; I myself understood his almost sub-conscious distress by nature of my (morbid, really) fascination with deep sea and the fear we find in it. What if I could prick my finger on a Lionfish? But it’s a dream, or a fear. We fear the ominous deep without considering its impossibility, just a child’s intrinsic fear of the dark. We feel and fear the promise of unrelenting pressure, yet we marvel at it, sick masochists.

Perhaps the lesson learned during this trial is this here — this tandem squeezing of my son’s beautiful hand when a particularly dark shot loomed ahead. I am not alone in my masochism. I wonder at the number of you, readers, who have sat at the bottom of a community pool with a neighbor or sister, waiting until the last second before your lizard brain contracted you upward, gasping towards the edge. I cannot fathom the remediation of my self-destructive tendencies because they are inherited, an internal lake of fire. I set fire with the touch of my palms to those things I reach towards for buoyancy, sparking a ringed enclosure on concrete lips.

It explains why I was recently moved to tears by the narration of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, which reads as such – “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. “

So I will beat on, in the stubborn way that is my calling card, but with modification to my backstroke. A child, resisting her lifeguard, eschewing the preservers thrown to her, does, in fact, run the risk of having her light snuffed out – now a child facing an eternity of darkness-induced guesswork. I embrace conversion, not to Christianity, but still a re-commitment of sorts. I discard my previous lackadaisical permissiveness in favor of steeled resolve. I will be miserly in my permissions when they take my loved ones father than the reaches of my (mother’s) squinting eyes. I am, after all (and not without irony), their lifeguard.

My Boots Tied Tight

Disclaimer – This is essentially just a teaser post for the post to come after my return from a week-long hiking trip to the beautiful mountains of Colorado. I would squeal with excitement, if I was that type of girl.

I know it’s cheap of me. I should, ideally, wait until I’m back to start rambling about hiking, but I’m WAY too pumped. Besides, I’ve never claimed to not be cheap. So in order to scratch the premature hiking post itchies, I’m going to reminisce about my last foray into the wild, A.K.A  ”Death Hike – August 2010″.

Let’s start by describing my version of hiking/camping. I don’t believe in hikes that last less than 2 days, and I don’t want to be within 20 miles, bare minimum, of a road, mall, store, whatever. Seclusion is my ultimate aim and my personal pathway to nirvana.

This is what it looks like.

Target identified – a seemingly harmless train, the Eagle Rock Loop, or ERL. It’s a 26.8 mile trek that boasts the best of Arkansas; meadows, waterfalls, valleys filled with smoky filtered light all add to the serenity of the loop. And serene it was, until night two. The trail had been of medium difficulty to this point. There were no surprises or rough patches, only bliss worthy waterfalls and more than one skinny dipping excursion. My mood? This:

I kept my clothes on for the swimming excursions while the camera was out. You're welcome.

So, after my 3rd swimming session, we hike further into BFE. When my husband start voicing mild complaints about his fatigue and muscle cramps, I inwardly groan like the b-word I can sometimes be, and agree to make camp. He awakes seemingly refreshed and we’re off again. But with each mile we hike, my husband’s steps become slower, his complaints louder, and his coloring more suspicious. By the time we reach a camping point a mile out from the south trailhead, which was our two-thirds completion point, he was cramping and woozy, with a rapid heart beat and lips that made me finally start to worry. When he timidly informed me that he couldn’t remember when he last urinated, I realized that he was severely dehydrated and was physically unable to complete the journey with me.

Ok, Donna, don’t panic. But, being a natural and coached (Mom, I’m looking at you) worrier, panic started to flutter in my chest. I was roughly 19 miles from the truck if I went back the direction we came from, which is longer than one thinks when you factor in elevation gain an altitude. It doesn’t sound like a daunting trek, until you remember that we’re hiking peaks with 20 pounds on our backs. If I opt for the other direction, it’s only 8 miles – but they’re miles over a portion of the trail that I wasn’t familiar with, and was rumored to be very, very strenuous. We only had enough food for another night, and eating it was dependant on both of us being together to prepare the single pouch of camp food. One night of water certainly wasn’t going to ready my husband for the hardest leg yet.

So, 8 miles it is, no matter the daunting difficultly. From there, I can grab the truck at the north trailhead, drive back down to the south, and pick up the husband who would be waiting for me. We figured the mile from camp to the south trailhead would be manageable enough once he had rested and recouped a bit.

I awoke early, scarfed some grub and headed out to make the best time possible of the hardest portion of the trail yet. The few blurbs I had read about this portion of the trail, know as “Athens Big-Fork”, had only identified the rating as “Extremely Difficult”. What I hadn’t read was this:
“”The north-south route crosses eight ridges, each with a climb of 800 to 1,000 feet vertically. When combined, however, the hiker gains over 6,000 vertical feet in ten miles.”
Surprise! The leg of the trip I was destined to hike solo is considered the hardest hike in Arkansas. Not to mention that I had already covered 20 miles. I won’t go into great detail about my experience on that trail, alone. Just know that I was sick with worry and fatigue. I thought about the possibility that I wouldn’t make it to the south trailhead soon enough, and worried my husband would become concerned and try to follow behind me. I knew if he even managed to make it past the first two peaks, he wouldn’t make it out again. We had seen only three people, all one unit, in three days. I thought about breaking my ankle on the trail, which was only loose stones and rocks for large stretches, and being stranded in the mountains. I thought about what it must feel like to slowly drown as the elevation kept rising and it was all I could do to take ten steps before my muscles screamed with pain and fatigue, and my heart pounded with exertion. I sat for minutes at a time when I reached the peaks, and looked out across unadulterated beauty that made my heart ache in tandem with the rest of my body. I ran down the declines into the valleys as though I had wings instead of boots.

Yeah. I only hiked a portion of this, but you get the drift.

I made it, and literally sank to my knees beside my truck at the north trail head. After a few minutes of fighting back tears of joy and exhilaration over what I had just experienced and accomplished, I jumped in and gunned it down gravel forest service roads, anxious to see my husband and make sure he was okay. The trail head finally jumped into sight… but my husband didn’t. I waited, waited. Finally, on the off-chance that I would have a signal, I pulled out my cell phone. One bar, the first time I’d had service for three days. But would my husband? Four unanswered calls, five, and finally a “hello?”

Good news and bad. He’s alive, but lost and extremely sick. More bad news – I drove with such gusto that my rear tire went completely flat somewhere along the gravel road. When the forest service arrived, thanks to a panicked call to my mother with my coordinates, I was changing a tire. My husband was eventually rescued and after refusing (dumbass) to go to the hospital to receive fluid, limped into Cracker Barrel with me that night.

The end, for now. I’ll have more adventures to tell after next week. Let’s hope they’re of a different timbre.