Working The Pole

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Working The Pole

I think it was when our teacher put Peter, Paul, and Mary crooning “Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore” on her boombox with wheelies, and barked at us to make hearts with our shoulder blades there under the redwood canopy, that I first wondered whether I had come to the right place.

Well, that’s not exactly true. When I came around the bend of the trail in the Oakland hills one morning last week, to see a dozen senior citizens in bucket hats and windbreakers all standing around a picnic table covered by hiking polls, my heart (and not my shoulder heart, my real heart) sank. “This is the hiking pole class I signed up for,” I thought, and my whiteknuckled grip on youth slipped by a full digit or two.

What had happened was, I went to see my orthopedist in July about my very very very slowly healing knee, to see if there is anything I can do to speed up the healing process besides all this. My husband and I have planned a multi-day hiking trip in Patagonia next February, to mark the beginning of the Empty Nest Years and the end of the initial flurry of activity around my book launch. I explained to the doctor that I plan to hike some 16-mile days in the Chilean mountains in early 2020, and it would be super great if my knee could come with me.

Initially, he told me that I’ll probably be fine hiking on the flats and uphills, and that it’s really only the downhill that will compound the problem in my knee. “So just ask your guides if they can adjust and maybe give you an option that doesn’t include downhill,” he said. I am pretty sure that’s not how mountains work, even in the southern hemisphere, but I didn’t want to be disrespectful to a man who had the power to say “KNEE REPLACEMENT SURGERY” in his next breath, so I shut up.

Then he brightened. “Do you hike with poles?” he asked.

“Not usually.”

“Do I have the class for YOU!” he said and spun around his stool to grab a photocopy of a registration form.

It turns out there’s a lady in these parts who teaches people how to use hiking poles on order to – and I would soon be chanting these words under some redwoods with my new friends in bucket hats while we marched around in a big flat oval – “increase efficiency on the flats, provide power on the uphills, and reduce strain on joints on the downhill!” She has a video too, but the doctor said the in-person class was a must.

So that’s how I spent $45 and a giant chunk of my dignity last week.

I mean, the worst thing about making fun of something easy is when you can’t even do the thing. Turns out there is a special way to put your hands through the loops: up through and down. Ask me how many times the teacher in the flowered baseball cap accessorized by a jaunty dragonfly pin woman-handled my hands back into the right position in front of my septuagenarian classmates and I will answer: so many times.

I don’t even know how my hands kept changing position, but I suspect it was because I was also practicing the “swagger” walk, the “plant n’ push”, and the “6 Ps” of hiking poles. (You can’t handle the 6 Ps until you’ve been there, man.) Meanwhile, Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” played on the boombox in the clearing in the woods as we swagger-marched back and forth in formation.

After almost four hours of instruction and, according to my Apple Watch, less than one mile hiked, I had the basics down. I can adjust my poles with one click flip of the middle section, I understand the principles of using poles to ascend and descend stairs, and I can keep my hands mostly in the right position, most of the time.

What will take longer to reconcile is the disappointment that I finally got around to taking a pole class, and it wasn’t even the kind that involves high heels.

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