I went for a walk in the woods today-or more accurately, I went for a hike in the woods. 

I enjoy walks. They allow me to exercise without me even being aware of the fact that I’m exercising.
One rule that I’m very committed to following when I walk is the “no incline” rule. If I feel the slightest hint of an incline on the surface I’m walking on, the muscles in my legs immediately file the following protest with the head office: “According to Chapter 17, paragraph 6.2 of the WALK Agreement, any surface with an incline greater than 0% is considered a hill, and therefore not allowable under the Terms and Conditions spelled out in Chapter 22, paragraph 8.2.c.ii through 8.2.c.iv. Any violation of this agreement may result in an immediate muscle cramp.”
But today I went for a hike, which meant that any incline ranging from 1% to 135% was fair game. Hiking any incline steeper than that would be considered repelling-in every sense of the word.
Since I was able to write this column, it’s quite obvious that I survived the ordeal. But I am now dealing with a very disgruntled body. In an attempt to re-establish total body-mind unity, I requested my body to help me describe the difference between a walk and a hike. Here was my body’s immediate (and unedited) response.
The difference between a walk and a hike is like the difference between getting a full body massage from a licensed masseuse on a comfortable massage table and getting a full body massage from a licensed semi-truck on uncomfortable pavement.
One of the phenomenal perks of living in the Great Northwest is easy access to thousands of miles of hiking trails. Ten minutes after backing my car out of the driveway, I was standing at the trailhead attempting to stretch the muscles in my body. I allowed them to officially file their protest, and then we disappeared into the vast wilderness.
As several hikers passed me, it didn’t take long to realize that I was not wearing the latest in designer hiking apparel. And after several snubbings from my fellow hikers, I began to feel inferior, and my hiking fun-o-meter dropped dangerously close to the red zone.
Just as I was about to turn around and slink back towards my car, I realized that nature didn’t have the same discriminators. It didn’t care what I was wearing. In fact, it didn’t even care if I was wearing. And that was all the reassurance I needed to forge ahead.
The other thing that didn’t take long for me to realize was that I was monumentally out of shape. The average person’s lungs hold about five liters of air, whereas I appeared to have the same lung capacity of a small rodent, which holds about one milliliter of air. I was so completely out of breath that I couldn’t find it, let alone catch it.
I had heard about this phenomenon during exercising called the “burn.” The burn apparently occurs early in a person’s workout routine, when every muscle in their body feels like it’s on fire. The good news is that the burn is only temporary, and it’s immediately followed by a burst of increased energy and drive. The bad news is that when my body reached the burn stage it just kept burning.
In my younger days, I was a very competitive person. I lettered in three sports. I did not like to lose at anything, whether it was running a race or determining which one of my two brothers and me could hold our breath the longest. I always managed to find enough reserve in my tank to finish strong in whatever event I competed in.
So as I was hiking, I would occasionally hear someone approaching from behind me and my competitive nature, rusty from dormancy, instinctively tried to kick in. Unfortunately, when I hit the accelerator, it was obvious that there was nothing left in my tank but cobwebs.
The first to humiliate me was a pack of cub scouts trying to earn their plant and wildlife badges by identifying various species of flora and fauna. “There’s an indigenous Mossback Bipedal.” A scout the size of a sapling was pointing his right twig in my direction. The other small trees erupted in full-lung laughter as each passed by me. It was too much to hope for an American Black Bear to suddenly appear on the trail in front of them. I’d like to see which snot-nosed sapling would be able to earn his wildlife badge by pointing to the snarling fauna while shrieking, “There’s an Ursus Americanus” without wetting himself uncontrollably.
Later, as I was traversing a series of perilous switchbacks, I heard this high-pitched raspy voice directly behind me: “On your left.” Before I was able to figure out what “On your left” meant, this frail, spindly, grey-haired lady blew past me. I don’t know how old she was, but I would bet she was probably hiking these hills when the old-growth trees were considered new growth.
Now I have nothing against old ladies. I am married to a beautiful lady who some day will turn into a beautiful old lady. I am very respectful of the elderly-as long as their behavior is age appropriate. This lady was certainly not acting hers. I can just imagine the discussion later that evening at the local retirement center’s bingo night.
Eunice: “So, Harriet, what did you do this afternoon?”
Bingo Caller: “G43.”
Harriet: “I sat in my rocker listening to Perry Como while crocheting a pair of baby socks for my great-granddaughter. What about you, Mildred?”
Bingo Caller: “D13.”
Mildred: “I watched my soaps. That Doctor Filbert is a handsome dish. If he were my doctor, I’d become a hypochondriac. What did you do, Eunice?”
Bingo Caller: “I27.”
Eunice: “I hiked up the side of a mountain using my new handheld GPS navigation system while listening to my MP3 player.”
Bingo Caller: “E32.”
Harriet: “Did you pass anyone?”
Bingo Caller: “M29.”
Eunice: “Pack of scouts and a man who looked like Welton Carp did just before he stroked out. BINGO!”
I have found that communing with nature by oneself is extremely rewarding. You get to enjoy the relaxing sounds of nature. You get to set your own pace. And you have no witnesses who will ridicule you in front of family and friends that you got passed “on your left” by a granny.
I’m going to take a breather from writing this column and address a pet peeve of mine. Until I went for my hike, I did not even consider this a peeve, let alone a pet peeve.
When I was at the trailhead today, there was this plastic bag dispenser. If you are hiking with a canine companion, you are supposed to carry a plastic bag with you in case he/she decides to squat in the middle of the trail and drop a gomer. It’s not fair for some unsuspecting hiker to step in your dog’s gomer. A commercial pressure washer that produces 5,000 PSI can instantaneously peel eight layers of paint off the side of a house. But once you get dog gomer packed deep into the complex tread patterns of your multi-grip rugged-terrain hiking boots, it is not leaving.
So for all you hikers with dogs, I’ve modified a very famous quote uttered by every wannabe environmentalist: “Take only memories (and plastic bags with your dog’s gomers), so others can leave only non-gomer footprints.”
Back to my column.
When I finished the hike and returned to the trailhead, I was both exhausted and elated. There is something both peaceful and therapeutic about communing with nature. Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Since I’m about 150 years too late to have a chat with Mr. Thoreau, I’ll have to draw my own conclusion to this famous quote from his book, Walden. After all, he lived in the woods for several years, whereas I lived in the woods for several hours.
A visit to nature is cleansing. We walk into the woods carrying a forty-pound backpack stuffed with stress, problems, worries, and burdens. Every aspect of our lives is complicated and complex. There are no easy answers or simple solutions. Life weighs heavy on us. And although we each have our own unique ways of dealing with this reality, the objective is universal: to protect what is internally meaningful against all that is externally meaningless.

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Check out L. Dustin Twede’s website at www.ldustintwede.com. He can be reached at ddtwede@yahoo.com.