The Hike

by Lucy Clarke

She’d been scrupulous with her packing. She enjoyed the efficiency of it, the paring back, whittling down, every gram counting. It was pleasing to be able to step out with everything she needed on her back.

She loved maps. It was the combination of precise organisation married to the promise of adventure.

Homo sapiens had always walked – even before there was language, they’d walked. It was a simple, fundamental need of their species: walk. So why did everyone outsource it: cars, electric bikes, escalators, lifts? She liked reminding her patients of the incredible mechanics of the human foot: twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, and over a hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments – all working in structural harmony to enable us to walk.

They could have been twelve, or eighteen, or twenty-five. That was the magic of old friends: the years were stripped away.

How much sympathy can reasonably be mustered for someone else’s blisters?

You start choosing the parts of someone that you’d change or alter, and you realise those very parts are what also makes you love them.

Joy was the reward that followed a struggle.

It is why people lose themselves out here. There’s no judgement. You can be anyone in the wilderness.

Loneliness wasn’t the absence of people, she realised. It was the absence of people who understood you.