Hiking with Bruno

Each moment is a place you’ve never been.

Mark Strand

For the past three years I have started hiking season with an injury of some kind. Two years ago it was a torn hamstring muscle that kept me off the trails until mid-July. Last year I had a fractured scapula that was painful with each step. This year I begin the season with hip pain, reportedly a repetitive use injury, which comes as no surprise. I have been hiking since I was a toddler. Of course I have some aches and pains and injuries that have accompanied me on the trail as I age.

I admit that I have spent some time feeling sorry for myself, always wondering if this is the injury that will keep me off the mountain trails for the rest of my life. I try to limit my episodes of self-pity to a few minutes a day when I indulge worst case scenarios for a while, then I do what I must do. I go for a walk.

Fortunately I have had some distractions. I am currently dog sitting for a friend. Bruno, a two-year-old Bernie Doodle, has come to join my little family for a week. He and my standard poodle, Lulu, have been going for our usual daily walks and trying to find room for all three of us to fit in the bed at night. Lulu is a bed hog, stretching out her long legs each night, and is not happy about the arrangement. Bruno seems to be perpetually happy no matter where he is or what he is doing. I can learn from him.

Yesterday I dropped Lulu off at the groomers then drove to the Lambert Creek Trailhead, the western terminus of the Old Wagon Road, which once traversed the Kettle River Range in the days before modern highways. It is a relatively easy route that was designed to allow wagons to pass, so it is a good early season hike. The snow was gone but just barely, the dead grass still flattened by the weight of it. A few tentative flowers were in bloom. The weather remained cloudy and cool, and it rained briefly in the afternoon. It was a perfect day on a mountain trail with my friend Bruno. I ignored the hip pain and the rain, which is easy to do when there are tiny blossoms of soft pink kinnikinick that border the trail.

Until recently Bruno lived in a suburb of Indianapolis, so he had never before experienced the joys of a mountain trail. He leapt out of the car when we arrived at the trailhead and did not stop running until we returned seven miles later. Each rabbit hole was a new and wondrous discovery, each pile of coyote scat a gift to be thoroughly inspected, each log, each small stream, each squirrel that ran across the trail. It was all filled with wonder. I was reminded of the Buddhist concept of beginners’ mind, in which each moment is experienced as if it were completely new. Dogs are good at that.

Bruno and I returned home in the afternoon. The pain in my hip was still there, but my spirits were considerably brighter. When we take our cares as well as our aches and pains with us on the trail they do not go away. We simply place them in a bigger container, one that includes the way the shadows play with the afternoon sun, the happy sound of a small stream as it flows from a melting snowfield, the satisfying feeling of placing one foot in front of the other and feeling my body move, and of course watching my dog discover a world of wonder, a world that is still there for me, this old woman with an aching hip.

That world becomes more immediate for me when I include regular hikes in my schedule, regardless of the pain. I get up in the morning, and the pine trees that surround my home are no longer ordinary, the morning texts from my daughters each day are a gift, and the streptocarpus blooming on the windowsill in the bathroom is another affirmation that the world is alive and well, and so am I.