This is Getting Old by Susan Moon Page B

Bush’s presidency, when the Constitution was under siege, and I thought it might come in handy somewhere down the line, if not in the High Sierra.
    My legs felt strong as we set forth. We hiked up high and moved camp each day. I took small steps and made my own little switchbacks when the trail was steep, and sometimes my muscles felt wobbly after a long climb, but I managed just fine. My two strapping sons carried the heavier packs and kindly kept to a gentle pace, claiming it was what they wanted, too. We swam in little lakes along the way, and admired the flowers, and watched the clouds scud over the mountains. We hardly saw any other hikers; most of the time the three of us had the trail to ourselves. And not just the trail. We had the universe, as far as we could see, and that was far indeed, and there was no one else I would rather have been with.
    My renovated quadriceps took me and my backpack up and over Paiute Pass, twelve thousand feet above sea level. On the third day we found our own miniature alpine meadow, sheltered from the wind by granite boulders, beside Lower Desolation Lake. After the tent was up, Noah and Sandy went to explore Upper Desolation Lake and I lay on my back in the grass, surrounded by yellow arnica flowers, letting the afternoon sun soak into my sore knees. The strange trill of a marmot bounced off the rocky slope above me. My bones had been working against gravity all day, and now they laid themselves out on the mountain; the longvertical bones became horizontal, and gravity took them and held them. I took a nap.
    The next day we headed back over Paiute Pass. We paused to look back at the lake, steel gray under a threatening sky, and I managed to balance my camera on a rock and take a picture of the three of us, grinning and holding onto each other, dizzy in all that space. Before we started down, I looked hard at the wide bowl the mountains made, taking a picture of it with my mind, the kind of picture you can’t take with a camera, one that has the smell of the wind in it and the relief your shoulders feel when you give them a break from the weight of the pack. I knew I might never see such a view again.
    I was grateful for my hiking poles—my knees needed all the help they could get now that we were going down. Noah and Sandy took from my pack the little bit of common gear I was still carrying, along with my camera, sunscreen, and extra flashlight batteries. Each of their packs was probably twice as heavy as mine.
    In the late afternoon, as we were descending a steep and rocky slope above tree line, it began to snow. There was no level place to camp, and so we had to keep going down, while the wet snow kept on coming and the sky grew darker. We hurried slowly—my steps got smaller as my knees got sorer, and the trail was slippery. I was slowing them down, but they didn’t make me feel bad about it; they were patient, asking from time to time how I was doing. Other than that we hardly spoke, focusing our attention numbly on the trail. We were eager to get the tent up before dark.
    Just at dusk, we came to a rocky field, and with frozen fingers we pitched the tent on a level spot of ground that didn’t have too many bumps to poke into our backs. By the time the tent was up we were wet and cold and hungry, and it was almost dark and still snowing. We took our packs inside the tent and put on some dry clothes, but then we felt the sloshing of water beneath us. It turned out there was no drainage where we’d pitched the tent, and it was already sitting in its own private lake of meltedsnow. We all crawled out again, and while Noah dug a drainage ditch around the tent with the plastic trowel we’d brought for our bathroom needs, Sandy went into the mostly imaginary shelter of a nearby grove of bristlecone pines to heat water on our stove for our freeze-dried dinner of macaroni and cheese. I held the flashlight.
    I wondered: What if the storm blew our tent down in