It was a calm day, a sweet temperature at 75 degrees or so, a perfect, leisurely day to climb Diablo, and so of course I chose today to break in a new stiff pair of leather hiking boots. My feet still hurt. The boots are uninjured. They weigh two pounds each: assuming a thousand paces per mile, certainly a conservative estimate, I lifted twenty-nine tons of hiking boot between noon and six-thirty today. They will be good boots once they are broken in, or once I am.
Other numbers of note: after fixing a problem in the spreadsheet, I see I have actually climbed just under 66,500 feet so far this year on my hikes, in just shy of 290 miles. A foot climbed for every thirty walked. Sounds easy that way.
Mitchell Creek was dry below the quarry, dry for a mile or so upstream, where placid cold water sank into the gravel. At hike’s outset, an older couple with a small child, grandparents perhaps, and the boy had a butterfly net. They stood, puzzled, gazing down at what turned out to be a coyote’s head and right front leg. A pup, I suppose, or teenage whelp, eaten by another coyote, perhaps a puma. I resolved to bring the head back home and then forgot. Just as well, for Becky’s sake, though she would appreciate the cleaned skull and we have abundant leaves out back beneath the oak tree in which to bury such a thing for a couple years, to let the worms do their job.
The road to the summit is closed for repairs. I had the very unusual experience, for ten minutes or so, of having the summit of Mount Diablo entirely to myself on a sunny weekend afternoon. The others who then arrived had earned the summit the way I had, one of them walking the same route I had, he with only a liter bottle of water to my twenty-pound pack, light sneakers to my 29-ton boots. But I am not doing this to avoid exercise.
On the way down I distracted myself from my increasingly fiery feet by thinking of Becky.
The coyote will not rest beneath my oak, but I rested beneath a few of hers. It would be a good place to stay for a long time, to watch the leaves curl and uncurl each year, watch the branches thicken and lichen invade fresh territory. I lay beneath a clump of mistletoe today and the breeze kissed me. Gray bark plates and cynipid wasp galls, swelling: I would like to be planted beneath one of these one day, to have this flesh turn to a pulse of deepening green in spring leaves, to have ground squirrels burrow in the softer ground that I become, their hearts beating between my ribs.
