Our footsteps dominated a small part of Pisgah National Forest in the Summer heat. Reading maps from local hiking stores, information tough as plastic Nalgene water bottles. Letting the snails make their way across the trail, watching spiders construct their webs in an articulate manner. Licking the dirt off your leg to compare to your natural skin tone, squashing ticks and eating ants. Conversations of back home, discussion who dates who, how one got in a car accident, and how one's football team lost in overtime during the Homecoming game, thus distracting from the pain presented by trekking up and down the trail. Peeling off wet socks at the end of the day to relieve pruney feet, taking care of blisters and bug bites which dominate the skin. Turning to your friend in the middle of the night in the tight, snuggly tent, deciding whether to wake them up to see the stars, and before a decision is made on your end, they get up and ask you the same thing. Time moves slower.
Having to drink the excess chicken juice during dinner as no waste would be produced. And being attacked by a hive of yellow jackets that woke up on the wrong side of the bed. The pain. Running three miles with a forty-pound pack on your back in the pouring rain as lightning is chasing you, just to arrive at your destination at a lower elevation right in time for the hail to invade. And the lightning. The feeling of the ground rumbling as you see the bolt strike a tree multiple yards away, the sound blasting off every cilia left in the ear. And the strangers met on the trail; the only topic of the conversations were the bears and the weather.
I witnessed everything. I woke when the sun rose and I slept when the sun set. Everything moved slowly with the assured fateful speed of the stir-fry being consumed after a long day of milage, like the snail making its way across the trail, like the spiders constructing their webs.
