Have I ever mentioned that I am perhaps a bit stubborn and a bit slow to change directions? There’s an axiom from the world of commodities and stocks: Your first loss is your best loss. Which is another way of saying “don’t throw good money after bad.” That came up while hiking in the rain with my upset dog this week.
Some readers may know that we’ve had an exceptionally wet summer in Northern Colorado this year. Almost every Thursday evening hike that my Mountain’s Edge Meetup Hiking Group has scheduled has been cancelled. For rain.
But this Thursday it looked like things were different. And I had been training my beloved CB to hike with his doggie backpack so that when we finally got a chance, I could show up with my dog and be cool. Like another hiking club member who always hikes in a tennis skirt and has this black Cockapoo. Plus, I reasoned, CB would love it! What dog doesn’t love the woods?
Trouble at the Trailhead
When I got to the trailhead, some of the friends were there. Others, no. And then, I noticed the sky had suddenly become gray. And a rumble was heard in the distance.
“That’s it! Thunder, forget it!” a couple of people said as they headed for their cars. Only me and John seemed minded to go up the hill in the face of incipient rain. He was getting out his poncho, and I took out my raincoat. What’s a little rain? It was just a few drops. I put on CB’s backpack and we headed up the hill.
“I have never been on a hike that people bailed on, because of weather, that didn’t go great in the end,” said John, striding along with a walking stick, which seemed to highlight the skinny bareness of his legs emerging below the rain poncho. He’s a friend, a guy who, like me, was married for a long time, but unlike me, he’s stayed married. Although it’s clear something is not quite meshing between the two of them. There was some talk last time I saw him of a ruined trip to Europe.
Doggie Rebellion
I walked behind John. He was going fast and I was struggling to drag CB up the hill. CB was mad because he doesn’t like his backpack. This is why the post is called Hiking in the Rain with an Upset Dog. But I make him wear it so I don’t have to carry doggie cleanup materials. I feel guilt if I don’t clean up after my dog. But the idea of carrying dog poop the entire hike is too much. Therefore he has to carry disposable poop bags, empty or full, in the dog backpack, a small price to pay, in my mind, for him to get the chance to get out in the great outdoors. But for first two hundred yards or so, CB tends to pull back on the leash, angry about the backpack.
So I was dragging him.
John forged ahead, as the rain increased.
“It seems to be getting worse,” I said.
“Maybe,”
“It should stop soon, though, right?”
We talked a little about the recent tax raised on homes in Fort Collins. John is of the opinion that this is highway robbery. CB got over the backpack sulk but the rain kept getting harder. We crossed the creek and scrambled up the other side, the steep part, where every footfall is a stone step.
Match Comes Up
We talked about Lars, who 15 minutes earlier, before he jumped in his truck and left the trailhead, had shown us a picture of his new girl friend. “Where’d you meet her?” I asked.
“Match.”
“So good on Lars who’s got a new girlfriend,” I said to John now, noticing that the water from the rain was getting worse, and was rolling into the collar of my raincoat and my arms were getting wet.
“Oh yeah, well, I give it two months, then that will be it and he’ll get another the same way.”
“You really think so?”
“This has been ongoing for a year,” John said knowingly. The rain increased.
“We’ve got to find somewhere to wait this out,” I said. My hair was getting soaked. I tried to put the hood up on my rain jacket but it fell down. John just kept going.
Hiking in the Rain with my Upset Dog
“Here,” he said, “under this tree in the lea of this rock.” I’m sorry to say that the rock just didn’t stop much of the water. The rain began to really pour, like in New Orleans. CB, noting the situation, huddled up close to the tree we were under and began to whine.
Water was everywhere. I noticed that it was beginning to run in a rivulet down the trail. I had a vision of a flash flood coming down the canyon we had just hiked up. The news story: “Woman, 57, died in hiking accident with dog.”
Header underneath: “Dog’s backpack may have slowed them down, been final straw.”
As we stood in this ineffective shelter, I told a little bit about my year, how I was going back to school for the admin certificate, about losing my mother, about all that stuff.
The Problem
“The problem with me and my wife is, we have nothing in common,” John said.
I looked at him. I wondered if that was really the reason. Because, as people know, Leo and I had a lot in common. We even both put down for the last marriage counselor, “intellectually compatible,” as a strength. The problem was not that we had nothing in common. The problem was that Leo was insufferably selfish and despite decades of patient waiting for improvement, none had come.
I reread that. Am I being hopelessly self-serving? “Only God can judge me,” I think, echoing a popular creed of the students I teach in Greeley.
Back to my conversation with John. “I dunno,” I said. “CB and I don’t have much in common, but we get along okay.” CB, by the way, continued whining. The whining was now competing with the sound of the rain, which showed no sign of slowing down.
The Costs of Engagement
“I just found out that Leo says he’s going to fight my request for a Catholic annulment,” I said. CB whined louder.
John, who like me is also Catholic, looked over. “What’s up with that annulment, some kind of idea that you were never married?”
“No, it’s more a kind of spiritual exercise to see why things were wrong from the beginning, because the Church’s idea is that if not, it should be fixable.”
“So it wasn’t fixable?”
“I’d come to the conclusion that, no.”
He looked at me. I could not tell you what he was thinking. But I can tell you what I thought. I thought “Ah, sometimes we don’t want to think about things and figure them out, what went wrong and why. Sometimes we want to just keep going, and hope that magically, it will stop raining. But the thing is, the odds for things stopping are not all the same. It always stops raining, but bad marriages very rarely ever become good, especially not if there’s been foundational problems.”
I Insist We Give Up
The rain pounded as hard as ever. “Look John we gotta go down,” I said. And CB whined the same message in Dog.
He was disappointed. He didn’t want to give up, even though by this time my feet were wet, sloshing in my wet wool socks, my arms were wet, and the rivulet of water running down the trail had doubled in size. CB was whining louder than ever. Both is backpack and mine were soaked.
“Well, I can’t actually argue,” John said. “Though I admit I don’t quite agree.”
ll”My raincoat hasn’t worked,” I said. “The water got in.”
“It got in through the collar,” he told me.
It only occurred to me this morning that, in struggling to take care of CB and keep up with the fast striding John I’d had no chance to adjust my gear. Had I had that, perhaps I wouldn’t gave gotten wet inside the coat, and might have been able to continue. Although CB had checked out by this time. The whining was constant, along with the plaintive stare.
It seems to me now that the three of us were like a dysfunctional family, focused on a goal that was receding in the distance, and none of us able to help the others …
All’s Well That Ends Well
That is the way it is sometimes, and when you’re in that situation, you have two choices. Refuse to admit that things have gone south for good, and keep striding on, getting wetter and wetter, hiking in the rain with an upset dog, or call the thing off.
We got back to the cars, the creek not having flooded — though it had risen several inches, doubling in size — and I turned on the heater. CB, freed of his backpack, sat in my lap. The REI windbreaker shell, which had been soaked, dried within ten minutes once exposed to the heater, and I felt good, too, warm and safe inside the car. I felt like it was a good hike after all, incomplete though it was, I was glad we tried, even if it failed.
Sometimes, you don’t have to get all the way to the top to feel like you’ve won. That may be hard to accept sometimes. But for me, it’s gotten a lot easier this year.