JDZ

HIKING
Happy animals

“You’re like an agile goat,” Jennifer suggested, as I sprang onto a narrow wooden bridge 45 minutes into our 7 mile descent of Mount Tamalpais on our weekly Californian hike. We were walking through groves of gnarled purple trees on steep hard mud trails by cascading streams surrounded by giant ferns. We ate our bread and cheese and bright green apples halfway through the climb in sunshine that made us peel off our long-sleeved shirt/sweater and drink our water out of Jennifer’s longsuffering glass bottle.

We met more big dogs and their tall outdoorsy owners than apartment-sized dogs and their little owners and we talked about what kind of dog we would want to have if we were wanting to have a dog. I would like to have an old one with extra skin that made him look sad and content to lay around in the sun and hoarsely bark on command. Jennifer says she would want a dark little dog with dark eyes and short hair that likes to sniff things and say nothing (something like the lab puppy we saw). Jennifer says she thinks I would want a bull dog. But then she said she said that only to hear me protest.

I do that too. I told her that when we get to bridges on the path we are like two pigs at a little trough rushing to get at it. She didn’t think so. Yesterday when we rested our sore feet by sitting around in the Golden Gate Park botanical garden and then watching the sun set on a bluff overlooking the bay and the bridge she said we had a perfect weekend. I tried not to think about our lives with tired clichés involving time and the ocean, or trees and light, systems and poetics, futures and histories, and just sit there close to Jennifer and be happy.