It was a short hike today, but it was Zeke’s hike, so it took much of the day. It was the route he loved most, from water hole to water hole along Alameda Creek in Sunol Regional Wilderness, and today the first day we’ve hiked it since. How can it be two months? Last week I stood on a steep hill among oak and bay and miner’s lettuce ripening its seed, and wondered at the tenacity of this grief. The realization seemed to come from somewhere outside me: the grief was the only part of him that still followed me wherever I walked. Letting that sorrow dissipate would be the last act in our friendship. I could not move for some minutes, the conclusion shook me so. But it lodged in me, and I found the sadness ebbing over the week as I watered the flowers we planted on him. And so I was surprised, a little, at the depth of the grief renewed as we walked from pool to pool. There he would splash noisily across the wet cobbles. He ran full-out at a ground squirrel there, only a slight yip to mark his crossing of the unseen barbed wire fence. Every twenty yards a memory, and I said to Becky “this really was his second favorite place in the world, wasn’t it?” She nodded. The first was home, if we were there with him.
We passed the single-track he would head down no matter how earnestly we called him back to the fire road.
We always relented, and he’d be waiting for us at the creek’s edge, already dripping.
Today the miner’s lettuce was bleaching yellow, fiddlenecks and poppies dappled sun-raked cliffs of serpentine and chert, and in the wet shade along the creek were violets. Becky found one of his hairs run through the teeth of her daypack zipper, and we watched it opalesce in sunlight. She let it go and the wind took it, carried it downstream with the creek he loved, and we climbed up into the hills to chase the cows for him.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Hiking
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