Midlife Meditation

May 31, 2013: Amy at Tunnel Falls. Looking through folder after folder of photos, trying to find just the right one to begin this essay, one thing lept out at me: if it weren't for hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, Amy and I might not be a couple. Before we met, Amy had never been much of an outdoorswoman, but she'd always wanted to give it a try. I, on the other hand, had always aspired to outdoor feats, but had never had a fitting partner for my adventures. Almost all my hikes were solitary affairs, including one 18-mile one-day trek through the Sawtooth Wilderness in August, 2007, that could easily have been the end of me. That one began as an out-and-back, then turned, on a whim, into a loop that was far longer and more grueling than I imagined. I'd started too late, and at that altitude, it was really more than I could handle, but once I was invested in it, I really had no choice: all I had was a light windbreaker and a couple of Cliff bars. It was well af...

9  Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.  10  Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.  11  Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.--Ecclesiastes 9:9-11 The race is not always to the swift, but to he who keeps running. --Motivational poster from the 1970s Prior to 1984, this would never have been me. As a child, I was a couch potato. There wasn't much to watch on TV in those days--just three or four channels, depending on where we lived, all of them black and white on our 19-inch screen--but it still drew me in. Even in high school, I ...

I grew up a short drive from God's country, and I never knew it. I've had more moves in my 52 years than I can count. Last night at ComedySportz, I was doing a quick calculation in my head about how many addresses I've had because I need a new trivia item for the pre-show slides (due to AT&T's lack of coverage in the Olympic wilderness, my New York Times daily crossword streak ended Monday at 987), and I came up with 30. That's just addresses, by the way: it doesn't include how many times I moved everything I had from one location to another while keeping the same post office box. By the time I entered college, I'd lived in seven houses and, very briefly, one apartment, located in five different states. Family vacations took me to and through some of the most spectacular scenery in the United States and Canada. We drove through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, up the coast of Nova Scotia, through the Badlands of the Dakotas, the Grand Tetons of ...

World War Z  is a messed-up movie. I'm not going to spend any time on comparing it with the apparently excellent novel by Max Brooks, because I haven't read it. Nor will I go into any detail about the plausibility of the zombie virus and the behavior of the zombies, which, apart from a couple of zombie swarm scenes (both "spoiled" in the trailer), they just aren't that interesting. No, the thing this movie most messes up is the role of the United Nations and its relationship with the United States of America. The zombie apocalypse happens in the first few minutes of the movie, and apparently spreads globally in a matter of hours. Soon Brad Pitt and his family are being helicoptered to an American ship somewhere off the coast of Nova Scotia, where they learn that most of the leaders of the US are already dead--and apparently the United Nations has simply been placed in a position of global leadership. This is the part that is, in my mind, far less believable...

It came out of the green. By that, I mean we were climbing up a slippery, ridiculously steep trail through the dewy trees on the south face of Dog Mountain when Amy popped the question: "Do you want to get mountain married?" It took me completely by surprise. We'd been together for three years at this time, and we were both extremely marriage-averse, for reasons I'll explain (but not in too much detail) later in this post. We were engaged in one of our favorite things to do together, something we'd done on our second date, and as often as we could ever since: hiking. Of all the things we enjoy together, this is the one that probably brought us closest, and has most cemented our relationship. We've been up every significant trail in the Columbia River Gorge, as well as trails in the Coast Range, the Cascades, and Utah. This summer we'll be backpacking, most likely in the Olympic National Park, possibly somewhere else, as well. In two days, to celebrate ...