What Hike?

Saturday morning, my husband proposed an "easy hike."

(You may think you already know where this is going, but you may be surprised, as I was.)

I agreed.  He had a particular one in mind.  He said he had been on it before.  "In fact," he said, "it's where we had our first date."

We got the morning play-date and lunch behind us, then headed to a nearby canyon.  When we got there, we were stopped by an official who told us we could drive no further, but could wait for a shuttle to take us to the campsite where the hike trail started.

"I don't remember any of this," I said.

"We could drive all the way then," he explained.

We waited for the shuttle, which gave us a bumpy ride a few miles higher up the canyon, then set off on a trail.  Nothing looked terribly familiar to me.  Of course, our first date was sixteen years ago, and there were abundant wildflowers all over the place then.  And, I only had eyes for Paul.

Paul was talking about a lake, and how we had taken "this hike" on our first date.

I didn't remember anything about a hike.  What I remember about that first date was the wildflowers, madly swatting away hoards of mosquitoes, and trying to find a place to set down our picnic.  "That explains a lot!" I said.

Paul asked, "What do you mean?"

"I don't think you said the word, 'hike' then.  I think you only said 'picnic.'  That you thought we were taking a hike explains why you kept ignoring me when I said, 'How about here?' when we came to this clearing, or 'How about there?'  I thought we were just going on a picnic.  If I'd known it was a hike, I wouldn't have kept asking you to put the picnic basket down."

My older daughter was amused by this.  She may be anticipating her own awkward dates in the future.

We crossed a couple of small streams, walking on carefully-placed rocks.  The baby clutched at his sisters and shrieked and giggled as he crossed.  He also theorized aloud that barbecue sauce would make a good "cow re-pellet" and gave us a brief anatomy lesson about his lungs being right behind his "nibbles."  He is our usual entertainment committee on hikes.  Last year, when we were hiking in Yosemite, he amused everyone around us by singing, "I like to move it, move it!" nonstop at the top of those lungs as he walked.

We passed a few clearings, and a huge cloven rock.  We walked over a very large, slippery, granite boulder or two.

"I don't think we made it this far, back then," I observed.

"No, the mosquitoes were too thick," Paul agreed.  We had soon turned around and gone down to a park in the city for our picnic.  We had each received one mosquito bite a piece, right on the left elbow.  Our identical mosquito bites are what had told us we were meant for each other.

A good while after the trail steepened and three of the kids had grabbed walking sticks, I observed to Paul, "I wouldn't call this an 'easy hike'."  Although I was handling it fine.  It just seemed too steep to be so classified.

"No," he agreed, thumbing through a pamphlet he was holding.  "It says 'moderately steep'."

I stared at him.  He had said the words, "easy hike" in the morning, which was why I had let our teen-aged daughter wear flip-flops.  I don't know how she hiked this moderately steep, rocky trail in them, but, bless her heart, she did not complain.

I hadn't noticed a couple and their young son sitting out nearby where we had this exchange, but the woman spoke up to agree that it was definitely not an easy hike.  She was overweight, sweating, and panting.  "All the information I could find on it said, 'easy,'" she complained.  "I thought it would be good for our little boy."  That was interesting, because Paul had said, "easy," too.  I came to find out that he had apparently read the same information as the woman and had received the pamphlet at the campsite.

The little boy held up four fingers to tell us how old he was.

The trail continued to steepen, and, while I made it fine because I am used to working out a lot harder than that every day, I wondered whether the woman we had met would.  My older daughter and I stood at the top of the trail when we were done, watching the little kids scamper out onto rocks in the small, peaceful lake and Paul take pictures of them.

I turned around, and the woman was right behind me.  "You made it!" I congratulated her.

She was still sweating and panting and just gave me a weak smile.

As my family started to head back down, Paul mentioned that he had not ever seen that lake before.  "I thought you had taken this hike before."

He said he guessed not all the way.  All the way back down, I marveled about our sixteen-year misunderstanding. Paul can be full of surprises, and any marriage is fraught with culture shock, just because the spouses grow up in different families.  The more different the culture of your spouse's family than that of your family, the greater the culture shock, I guess.  He's taught me how to say, "peony," and I've tried to teach him to say, "laurel."

But to find out sixteen years later that our first date was a hike, not just a picnic, blows my mind.