Day 31: Gifts

Once upon a time, there was a young woman.  This young woman had a boyfriend (whom she eventually married) who loved to hike.  He had grown up hiking, and had a real love of climbing to the tops of things.  And he wanted to share the tops of things with her.

Now, this young woman was in reasonable-ish shape.  But not climbing-to-the-tops-of-things shape.  And her boyfriend (later her husband) wasn't particularly good at calibrating those climbs to what she could actually do; he was calibrating them to his desire to share the outdoors and beauty with her.  So he took them on hikes that were really hard for her (but not for him).  And she spent those hikes struggling, and watching him not struggle, and feeling like she was holding him back, and feeling like a failure, and hating herself for that, and hating him for putting her in that position, and just generally being miserable and unhappy and angry and resentful (not to mention red-faced and panting).

And then one day, they got a puppy.  And, since she was about to spend a month in the Trinity Alps doing dissertation research, she took the puppy with her.  This puppy was a long-legged, happy, playful sort of puppy, with breeds like german shepherd and collie all mixed into her heritage, and she had energy to spare.  At home, she got three walks a day (to set her up for success, you see - a tired puppy is a less-destructive puppy), with lots of romping and playing.

The Trinity Alps are the mountains around the Trinity river, which has cut a gorge right down through the rock.  The tribe that the young woman was working with* have a language whose directionals intimately reflect this landscape: everything is described as being either upriver or downriver of other things; and also as being uphill or downhill of those things.

So this young woman found a trail where she could take her dog hiking.  A trail which ran upriver downhill from her car, and then downriver uphill back to her car.  It was steep.  And really hard.  And the first time she went on that trail, she spent a lot of the downriver uphill leg hating herself for being slow, and out of breath, and...  Her brain travelled that familiar path (also uphill, as it turns out), to the usual refrain: holding someone back.  Except, it was just her and her puppy.  And as she slowed down on a switchback to regain her breath, she could see that her puppy wasn't impatient or resentful.  Her puppy LOVED it!  Just as much as she LOVED going fast!  Or stopping entirely!  There were smells to smell, and running back and forth to be accomplished, and dirt to scratch at, and squirrels to consider. 

And panting?  Far from being embarrassed about needing to pant as she climbed uphill, this puppy panted all the time.  Happily, unconcernedly - the puppy breathed the way she needed to breathe to be comfortable and to do what she wanted to do.  And so the young woman, unobserved by other people and in the company of a dog who couldn't care less, learned to breathe hard without being embarrassed about it. 

There wasn't a happily-ever-after ending.  Life is a lot more complicated than that.  The young woman and her soon-to-be-husband still went on hikes where she often felt incompetent and miserable.  But she also hiked alone with her dog, and, on those hikes, she learned to love the quiet of the hills, and the growing strength of her body.  She learned to pace herself, because she knew she wasn't holding anyone back.  That dog offered her the gift of companionship without expectations of anything except time together.  She taught the young woman that stopping to smell a plant, or look at the ground squirrels, or to pant a little bit isn't such a bad thing. 

In fact, it just might be the whole point.


*As always, my most profound thanks to all of the Native California tribal communities who have given me the gift of their time, and who have allowed me to learn from and work with them over the years.  The tribe in this case is the Hupa (the language is also Hupa).