Escape was on our minds when we made the flight reservations and booked a house in Phoenix, a week’s escape from winter’s end, from mud season, and the tight routines of too much time indoors.
Six inches of snow fell the night before we departed. We swapped boots for shoes in the airport parking lot (boots we would need a week later when we returned in a storm) and eight hours later shed our fleece jackets when we passed through the doors of Sky Harbor into the Arizona evening.
Because we had added three hours to the day by flying west, we could get off to an early start the next morning for a hike in South Mountain Park, the sun already bright, the air dry, and the temperature already in the 80s and headed for 100. “What will you do out there?” people had asked when we said that we were going to Phoenix. “Will you get up to Sedona?” meaning that seeing spectacular rocks from a distance would be age-appropriate in a trip to the Southwest. Two and a half miles later we had climbed 1,000 feet to Dobbins Lookout, where to the north we had a cockpit view of the city of Phoenix and to the south a wide panorama of craggy mountains.
So it went for us day after day — long, dry hikes in the desert spring on uphill trails through ancient rocks, stately saguaros and gangly ocotillos with their blazing tips, and everywhere the chatter of cactus wrens from palo verde trees. And escape it was for our bodies and spirits, because how is it possible to stare at petroglyphs etched in stone before the arrival of Coronado and not feel that the unfinished business you have left behind has no significance in the grand wheel of the universe?
Each day we had fresh adventures with intriguing names: Lost Dutchman, Syphon Draw, The Mormon Trail, Fat Man’s Pass, Signal Hill, and Echo Canyon Trail. And each day we receded a little further in time.
Old stones are like time machines, formations dating back millions of years, fragments underfoot sheared from parent rock before the birth of man. Against this setting we juxtaposed our lives and our 50-year marriage, our pale skin smeared with SPF 70, and our capacity for wonder.
What else did we leave behind besides snow banks the size of islands, an exhausted wood pile, winter clothes and Yaktrax? Well, Hamlet explored this idea with a list in his famous “To Be Or Not To Be” soliloquy:
… the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely … the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns,
That patient merit of the unworthy takes …
Hamlet spoke of escaping Claudius, the usurping king. For me it was President Donald Trump and Washington, a nation divided and apoplectic and the endless media conversation without clarity or resolution. Who doesn’t want to escape this madness?
One morning as we paused to rest, I pointed into the desert and said, “Without us, this setting is timeless,” a cliché of course, but like most clichés also true. These were ancient trails used by native people, direct routes through the mountains for hunting and trading and for escaping enemies. For me it was impossible not to imagine a man my age stopping at that very spot a thousand years ago and having the exact same thought.
In truth we left very little behind. I traveled with a laptop and an iPhone, and my wife was equally connected if not more. We read the news online, kept up with the streaking Red Sox, and we texted with our children although never when we were hiking. I answered most of my email and kept a journal.
With us we brought our memories and personal history, our biases and tastes, and before we set out I had researched online the trails we would take and the museums we would visit. So, both past and present were witness the morning we squeezed through the narrow walls of Fat Man’s Pass.
On the trails we were never quite alone. In Vermont we can hike for hours without seeing a soul, but in Arizona seeing people on the trails reassured us that we were neither lost nor crazy and that it was unlikely that we’d be surprised by a rattlesnake. On a couple of the trails we saw only half a dozen people over three hours, but on the Holbert and Echo Canyon trails we saw more than a hundred flowing in both directions — red, brown, black and white people in even proportions, a few as old as we, but most of them astonishingly young. This was a surprise to me because I had come to believe that the young don’t love being outdoors the way I do. Wrong again, as I often am, and soon I was struck with the thought that in addition to the past and present we had the future with us as well as we hiked. This is what experts say America’s face will look like in a few decades, not just in the great cities but everywhere, even Vermont.
Not lost on us was the fact that all our trails were in public parks — three of them in city parks, one in a state park, and one in a national park. In Washington there are leaders who scorn parks and call them playgrounds for the liberal elite, and who believe public land should be privatized and mined for its riches. If only they would spend an occasional morning hiking a trail rather than huddling with lobbyists in congressional hallways, we would have a better, smarter country.
On the summit of Camelback under a deep, blue sky I handed my camera to a young couple and asked them to take our picture. They were newlyweds from Atlanta, sweet and respectful in that Southern way. If we had talked much longer, we might have discovered how different we were in belief and politics. But for that moment, all that mattered was that, like us, they woke up believing that climbing a mountain early in the morning was a good way to begin the day.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford. He can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.