Walk This!

Walking? Sure, I love to walk. Just give me a wide, flat city sidewalk, and I’m good for miles of, um, brisk window shopping.

Several years ago, when my then boyfriend suggested a hike, I had visions of a carefree ramble on gently rolling hills.

Cut to scene of one short-legged person of small lung capacity, panting as she struggles upward on a rocky path just wide enough to accommodate a wobbly, unbroken-in boot.

The summer sun pours through the top of my sunglasses (mental note: get hat with visor) and bathes my back in sweat. He has the lone water bottle, and it’s now swinging merrily along at a higher elevation. I am doing this just because I am a Good Girlfriend, I think glumly.

From somewhere above comes a cheery voice. “What a fantastic view!” View? I flick my eyes off the path for a millisecond. Sure enough, there’s a gratifyingly sweeping vista, complete with hills and pine trees.

*

As we trudge, my companion alerts me to brilliantly colored wildflowers, tantalizing scents, bird calls--and those shiny leaves I’ve been so impatiently brushing past.

“That’s poison oak.”

But how much further are we going?

“Oh, just another couple of turns.” Hiking with a cranky novice turns otherwise honest people into bald-faced liars.

Each rest stop is an oasis of sit-down bliss. I don’t even care about finding a shady spot. Finally, my legs just stop moving. Why do we have to go all the way to the top, anyway?

“We’ll have a martini when we get down,” my boyfriend proposes, in a brilliant dual assessment of human potential and the civilized person’s fatal weaknesses. “We’ll have two.”

Hearing those magic words, I perk up sufficiently to make it to the top, where the view proves stunning and I suddenly feel really great. Somehow, we don’t even bother to hunt up a bar when we get down.

But months later--when I had bought my own water bottle and recovered from poison oak--we were still rating hikes by the glass. There’s nothing like a two-martini hike to give an urban slouch the heady feeling that life is a pretty good deal.