A Walk in the Woods

We had been walking for about half an hour when another hiker--a fit-looking middle-
aged guy--came along from the other direction. We asked him if he had seen a girl named
Mary Ellen in a red jacket with kind of a loud voice.
He made an expression of possible recognition and said: "Does she--I'm not being rude
here or anything--but does she do this a lot?" and he pinched his nose and made a series
of horrible honking noises.
We nodded vigorously.
"Yeah, I stayed with her and two other guys in Plumorchard Gap Shelter last night." He
gave us a dubious, sideways look. "She a friend of yours?"
"Oh, no," we said, disavowing her entirely, as any sensible person would. "She just sort
of latched on to us for a couple of days."
He nodded in understanding, then grinned. "She's a piece of work, isn't she?"
We grinned, too. "Was it bad?" I said.
He made a look that showed genuine pain, then abruptly, as if putting two and two
together, said, "So you must be the guys she was talking about."
"Really?" Katz said. "What'd she say?"
"Oh, nothing," he said, but he was suppressing a small smile in that way that makes
you say: "What?"
"Nothing. It was nothing." But he was smiling.
"What?"
He wavered. "Oh, all right. She said you guys were a couple of overweight wimps who
didn't know the first thing about hiking and that she was tired of carrying you."
"She said that?" Katz said, scandalized.
"Actually I think she called you pussies."
"She called us pussies?" Katz said. "Now I will kill her."
"Well, I don't suppose you'll have any trouble finding people to hold her down for you,"
the man said absently, scanning the sky, and added: "Supposed to snow."
I made a crestfallen noise. This was the last thing we wanted. "Really? Bad?"
He nodded. "Six to eight inches. More on the higher elevations." He lifted his eyebrows
stoically, agreeing with my dismayed expression. Snow wasn't just discouraging, it was
dangerous.
He let the prospect hang there for a moment, then said, "Well, better keep moving." I
nodded in understanding, for that was what we did in these hills. I watched him go, then
turned to Katz, who was shaking his head.
"Imagine her saying that after all we did for her," he said, then noticed me staring at
him, and said in a kind of squirmy way, "What?" and then, more squirmily, "What?"
"Don't you ever, ever, spoil a piece of pie for me again. Do you understand?"
He winced. "Yeah, all right. Jeez," he said and trudged on, muttering.
Two days later we heard that Mary Ellen had dropped out with blisters after trying to
do thirty-five miles in two days. Big mistake.
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way,
two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of
conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small
community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.