Pride as my Guide
Hi! I’m Sasha and I’ve traveled full time since 2018 with my best friend and partner, Jeremiah, and our raccoon-slaying dog, Bernadette. I write stories short straight from our RV. If you like this newsletter, you can press that cute little heart.
I read somewhere, some time ago, that the average person remembers only a handful of days of each year. Each day is mostly like the day before it, and that day tumbles forward like water into the following day. I forget many days, even while traveling, but it is common for me to remember days I take hikes, especially when a hike has a tiny secret kept just for me.
Last week, I opened my Alltrails app, found a nearby hike of an easy 3.2 miles with a small elevation gain of 400 feet, and Alltrails noted it as a “moderately trafficked loop.” I decided to venture out on a warm January afternoon.
At the trailhead, I passed 5 people and 3 dogs: one of which was named Haley who jumped up on me and made me sneeze.
This was the only group of people I would see on that entire trail. This is not a spooky story. It is just truth. This hike was not moderately trafficked.
When I had read the hike reviews, several people mentioned that the trail was so poorly marked that at about a mile in, they were forced to turn around. Others (in hindsight: those who reviewed it in summer, pre-leaf-fall) noted the route was well marked. They couldn’t both be right. I decided the people who said it was poorly marked were wrong. Certainly, I wouldn’t have trouble finding the trail. I do this a lot: decide someone is wrong and go to extremes to prove it when the better thing to do is realize there’s a chance the person was right all along.
And then, about a mile in, after stomping over many dried and rotting leaves that had a musky perfume, I kept on walking...right to the edge of the cliff overlooking Nickajack lake.
Well, this was a hiccup. I turned around and plodded right back to the very obvious pathl. Then, like a confused Roomba, I repeated my exact previous steps towards the cliff, this time pushing my body around some scraggly trees that had disrobed months earlier.
Was this the trail? A perilous strange climb that would force me to use my hands and knees that was ranked as an easy hike?
It was not entirely still here, but the cars and semis, which I could hear as they climbed the road near the ridge cut back, were nowhere to be seen even with the sparsely-leafed trees as coverage. I was hidden enough that I was alone with my pride - or determination- to find the covered pathway.
I paused. Rocks crept out of the slanted ground like steps. The gray stairs which would have matched the morning gray sky were outlined by the browns of soggy leaves. I placed my weight on the uneven boulders and took a few steps up the very obviously not-a-trail-trail before recognizing my pride was pushing me towards a non-existent pathway.
Once again, I walked back a tenth of a mile or so back to the place I’d lost the path. Still, I saw no markers. Maybe the previous hikers were right. Maybe I would have to turn around.
The sun had started heating up the day, and I knew that I had two options. One: responsibly take the route back to the car from whence I came, drink the water I had left in the car, and be miffed I didn’t finish the hike the way I intended. The second option: stubbornly continue searching for the leaf-covered route in the rocky area.
And for one moment, I actually thought there were two options. Then, I came to my Sasha-senses and started to fight to find that trail. I was not just returning the way I came. The trail existed in June; it existed in January.
Then, I saw it, on a tree further up the hill: a white marking on it. Now, the finicky trail did not unroll before me like a yellow brick road, but I found a way to the dang tree. I only tripped through one thorny bush, but my ego can take falls and scrapes better than it can admit defeat.
Once I had found the trail again, I paused to catch my breath in celebration. Two deer appeared from behind large boulders about twenty feet in front of me. Startling to me is the sheer clumsiness with which deer emerge from landscapes, their feet thumping through ankle-high leaves, before bounding away gracefully, hoping that nobody saw their rather gawky lumbering.
“Hi,” I hollered at them as they leaped across the terrain. They weren’t in the stopping to chat mood.
I was reminded of a time when Jeremiah and I went to a bar in Virginia per a local’s recommendation. Where we sat, we spied two deer in a river in late afternoon. They played like dogs, careless. Nobody else at the bar could see them from their tables, and we sipped our beer flight and watched them, a small secret for us.
All hikes have the potential for a secret: a nature secret, a human spirit secret, an unfortunate discovery secret. These moments are only secret to me, though, or to you, on your own hikes, and their tiny magic vanishes like dried dandelions in the wind as soon as they are spoken of. If I speak of it, the secret special moment vanishes, no longer sacred.
I would tell you my hiking secret from that January afternoon, but it would break the spell.
Instead, you can imagine the hum of vehicles in the valley, the strange dancing of deer, and my pride leading my way through the muddled leaves that were smooshed into rocks with every step. Also, my hike was 3.7 miles - just half a mile longer than it should have been.
Thank you for traveling with me,
Sasha
A huge thank you to Louis Pereira who, out of the blue, created a logo for my newsletter last week after noticing I didn’t have one. He writes Complexity Condensed, so if you want to know more about Free Masonry, Caffeine, or a variety of other subjects, subscribe to his newsletter. You’ll learn something new every week.
Down the rabbit hole
Nickajack Lake is part of the Tennesee River; it is considered part of the “Grand Canyon of Tennessee,” or Cash Canyon. The area is home to endangered species. The gorge is home to many rare birds and is absolutely stunning in mid-autumn as the leaves turn colors of caramel and crimson.
While most of us only remember a few moments here or there, and very rarely entire important days, some individuals have what is known as hyperthymesia. This very rare condition leads people to remember much more than the average human, with some people remembering what they ate on any given day, or being able to recall specifics about nearly any part of their life.