Page 47 - WTP Vol. XII #2

canyon in which a roaring river ran. As shameful as it felt, Matthiessen didn’t think twice about dropping to his hands and knees to crawl his way across.
Before this moment, the sherpas, each carrying at least fifty to sixty pounds of supplies, had spent the day loudly talking, laughing and singing. When they reached this spot, though, the young sherpas sud- denly went silent. The quiet continued until the mo- ment the danger was past, and they were all back on a wider path. Then the noisy chatter started right up again.
In the years my husband and I hiked trail after trail, we often came to sections that forced us to pay closer attention. When we reached these spots, we would stop talking, just as the sherpas had. Once we suc- cessfully passed the challenging point, one of us would say, “The sherpas were very quiet”.
I couldn’t help thinking of that phrase when on my first group hike in Utah, we reached a place I would have preferred to avoid. Up to that point, we had been hiking on a mix of dirt and rock-strewn trail, broken by stretches of slickrock. Now, we faced a nearly ninety-degree wall of rock.
If I had been expected to step up that wall, I would have been anxious but not ready to give up. Here, in- stead, I faced a thick metal chain hanging down. Our young friendly tour leader, Katie, explained that we needed to grab the chain and hold on, while scaling the rock.
From the moment we reached that point in the hike and Katie told us what we should do, I knew
I would go forward, no matter what. My determi- nation wasn’t only because I wanted to reach that day’s goal—to view several beautiful arches up close. My desire to get up the wall also didn’t come from a need to prove myself. Three of the women hikers had already decided to forego this challenge and find a nice place to sit in the shade and wait for the rest of us.
I wasn’t even choosing to keep going because I hap-
pened to be the next oldest person in the group, with one woman beating me by two years. Amongst friends my age at home, I was by far the most active, so had no need to prove my fitness or abilities to anyone.
In many ways, that chain was a metaphor for my cur- rent life. It spoke to me of the hard place I found myself. I was a widow, having lost my spouse, the
love of my life. Without children or close family, I was alone, needing to learn how to do everything for and by myself, including the most difficult—making a new life without Richard.
Since Richard’s passing, I had faced hard tasks alone, the most difficult, to wake up each morning and remind myself he was gone. I understood that I could open myself to whatever the world offered and, per- haps, create a life that felt worth waking up to each day. Or I could follow the example of some people I knew who’d aged into predictable lives, shielded from new and unfamiliar experiences, sleepwalking from morning until night. My choice had to be the former, which meant grabbing hold of that chain.
Decades younger and inches taller than me, Dawn was first to step over to the wall. She grabbed the chain, lifted her right foot and then the left onto the wall. In moments, she was standing on a ledge at the top.
“It’s easy,” she assured me, smiling.
Katie offered to hold my thin red trekking poles, which I gratefully turned over to her. Closer to the wall now, I saw what hadn’t been apparent before. To the right of the chain, there were indentations in the rock. They were there, all the way up.
As if to confirm what I’d observed, Dawn shouted, “Put your foot in the hole.”
I grabbed the chain, which was warm from the sun, in my left hand. Then I started to climb.
A short way up, I couldn’t help but smile. Dawn had been right. It was easy. Not only that. Climbing this wall was fun.
As it turned out, the indentations in the rock ended up being perfectly sized for the front half of my boot to rest. Yes, the sherpas were very quiet, while they searched out the next spot to set their feet down and feel the support of the earth, holding them steady there. But all along, they knew. Mother Earth would hold them, as she had done countless times.
The chain was only the first obstacle that made me
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