continued on, trying to look around her, and absorb the trees, and not look down at the ground although it was easier to walk if she only looked at the ground. The pack straps were hurting her shoulders, but there was nothing she could do about it.
Feeling as though her legs could not go another step the trail leveled off and she entered a small clearing.
The sunlight was like walking into the lobby of a Hilton. The clearing was level and there were several patches of white flowers resembling miniature daisies. She let the pack fall heavily to the ground and plopped down beside it. After several minutes, she dragged the pack over to the edge of the trees. She figured she had gone no more than two miles but it was far enough. “You’re not in as good of shape as you thought you were,” she said as she rolled out her tent, “Pocahontas my ass.”
It did not take her long to pitch her tent and roll out her bag and sleeping mat. She found a small stump and rolled it over to her tent for a table and picked several of the small flowers and stuck them in a crack in the stump. She leaned her pack up against the stump. Stepping back, her camp was beautiful in its simplicity. Her legs no longer hurt as much and, her shoulders, though sore, felt stronger. She spent thirty minutes picking up dead branches and carrying them back to her tent, and another thirty minutes bringing rocks to form a circle for a fire. When everything was in order, there were still several hours of light remaining. She did not want to sit down and tried to fight the feeling that she had to do something, anything. Over the past years she had never really been idle—when she was idle—she could not face her pain.
She decided to walk down the trail she had been on and try and see what she had missed on the way up. She felt as though there were springs on her feet without the weight of the backpack. As she back tracked she noticed ferns growing in damp areas and the way moss clung to the trees. Several chipmunks scolded her from the safety of a pile of boulders and she saw the footprints of a doe and her fawn. She had not noticed how noisy the forest was as she huffed up the trail, but now, she could hear the wind, the distant calls of unseen birds, the rumble of a stream and her own steady, rhythmic heartbeat. She stopped walking and shut her eyes. “I’m alone, but I’m not alone,” she said. “I’m a part of all life, of all time.”
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