Trail Fever

Posted on January 25, 2010 in Body Language

Saturday’s hike was easy though the way was steep — I didn’t feel the grade cutting me with my shoulder straps as it did yesterday. I knelt to catch my breath several times on the modest uphills and a couple of times on the downhill. Drake, my Boston Terrier, stayed close until we came into sight of my wife. When I came home, I felt my forehead and it was hot. No idea what caused this though I nearly blamed my own psyche for its manufacture.

That’s a tendency best curbed, a relic of the old assume-the-guilt. I know that something was genuinely wrong — how could I explain the ease of Saturday’s walk compared to yesterday’s? From whence came the weakness that I felt from lugging a ten pound pack that had grown lighter because I drank some of the water I’d packed the day before? This was not laziness as the voice of my last therapist in my head suggested. It was real and it brought me down. I wanted to walk bravely up the slopes of the Santiago Trail, but couldn’t. None of the explanations — exhaustion, lethargy, laxity — were congruent with my experience. I could only assume that I was sick, so I told my inner therapist to just shut up.