Trust the trail

The Friday Harbor Marine Laboratory, where I am doing research right now, is the most amazing place. Besides all the water and the diversity of sea creatures, there is this drop-dead wow beauty. It is set on a peninsula of maybe a couple of square miles of just amazing old-growth pine forest. They have a hiking trail that goes through this forest. Everywhere you look there are giant pine trees, but even more amazing are the fallen trees. No one can take anything out of the forest, so the fallen trees just get covered with moss and gradually rot.

So I’ve got my running togs on (I forgot my hoody in California, so it’s just my shoes and socks and shorts and t-shirt). First day. Jogging up the main trail. I see a sign “Shoreline trails.” Yup, that’s the one for me. I’m trying to keep a decent pace (cause I’ve been lazy recently and not run enough, so I’m trying to compensate), but the trail gets thinner and bushier, and I have to bend down low to get through the underbrush, and suddenly I realize that it is just a deer trail. Not meant for humans at all. Then I realize that this trail is not trustable, unless you are a deer. I reach the shore and turn left, go for 15 min or so, flush a bald eagle out of a tree (I’m not kidding here, the national bird, huge, beautiful). But now there is really no trail at all. So I realize I probably ought to head back. So I decide to walk through this old-growth woods without a trail (I could try to retrace my outward path but nah). It is overcast and the sun is almost down anyway. Ok, I’ll just walk back in the general thataway direction and find the trail I was on.

Man there are some stickery, beautiful, thorny, shrubs in those woods. I’m getting my legs cut up pretty bad, and I’m going pretty damn slow. Nobody anywhere. I’m not sure if I’m going the right direction. This is not going too well. And then I start looking for fallen trees aligned in the direction I want to go, and getting up on them, and avoiding the brambles that way. But some of these trees are 10 or 15 feet off the ground, and I become aware that if I fall off one and break my leg I’m in a pickle.

So I’m up on a huge tree trunk about to traverse its length. And then I stop. What the fuck are you so nervous about, Bill? You are in the most beautiful woods you’ve ever seen and you're worried cause there is no trail. What is wrong with you? Breath! Look at this place. Just look around. This is amazing.

But I can’t shake being nervous about what is going to happen to me. I get tangled up in briars and nettles, and it goes on and on. Getting up on fallen trees, balancing and testing them for rot and going very slowly along. I realize I am not as agile as I used to be. Not so much spring. Not so much balance. I’m dying. We are all dying. We trust this trail we are on, but ultimately at the end it betrays us. We just don’t know when. Maybe today is my day.

But maybe it isn’t.

Whoops. There’s the trail. Of course it is. So I turn right, heading for the main trail, which I will take back to the labs, leaving this existential crisis in the nettles. So I’m walking along expecting the main trail any time now. Then I meet a couple of students from the labs. We’re talking, and they inform me that I’m actually already on the main trail. I've been walking in the opposite direction from the labs. Oh. Oh well, I might as well continue this direction then.

Jeezus, this story is long. The point is. That even when you’re on the fucking trail, you might be going the wrong direction. So stop being so damn nervous and look around! It’s so easy. Just look around. Just absorb the scene. Breath. Your trail will end soon enough. Just breath.