Walking

Around 8:00 am, we arrive at the trailhead. To call it a trail is misleading because this is shifting sand (well gypsum) and the wind tends to erase other people's passage. The way is marked by plastic orange and white stakes -- one visible from the next -- unless one has fallen or been buried. The trail is 4.6 miles and the air is cool although, this is July and things will heat up quickly. This part of Whitesands is mostly dune shapes with little vegetation and the imagination is free to run wild as it did when as kids we looked at clouds to see elephants and ships and other magical shapes floating, shifting by. We are far from traffic and people; the only sounds are those made by our feet, our breathing -- today there is no wind. I enjoy this. We are together but quiet; communicating but without the need of talk. Two are one and two.

About 90 minutes into the hike I remember the last time we were on this trail. Ten years previously we took the three kids with us (ages 9, 10, 13). What I remembered was a pleasant, leisurely family walk. I mentioned to daughter that we would be walking the alkali-flats trail again and she said, "What? You're going out on that trail where we got lost, wandered for hours and almost didn't make it back?" "You thought we were lost?" "I didn't just think it, we were lost?" So I broke the silence and asked, "Did our youngest think we were lost when we walked this trail as a family?" "Yeah, he kept asking how long before the rescue copter was sent to save us. When I told him there was no rescue copter, he drank the rest of my water." How could I not have picked up on this tension -- it would have been easy enough to show the younger kids how we knew where we were and that as long as we kept spotting trail markers we were not lost. Later, I did ask the oldest who said he didn't think we were lost. Hot, crazy maybe, but not lost.

About two and a half hours into this trip and it's starting to heat up. So far we've seen not a single other hiker and I'm really enjoying the chance to get quiet. I really think that's why I go. In the city there are too many noises, too many conversations, too many broadcasts, too many (you fill in the blank) and it's hard to hear yourself think. Each step on this journey sheds a distraction and makes the underlying current of thought more discernible. I'm hot but at a kind of peace with myself that I cannot achieve in Houston. We're about an hour from the trail head, following the stakes, keeping a steady pace that will get us safely back to the car. My mind and eye wanders freely.