The Hike

by Lucy Clarke

If there had been a road to this beach, if they’d stepped out of a car, their pleasure at reaching this place would have been diminished. Joy was the reward that followed a struggle.

Wasn’t it that joy and struggle were so deeply enmeshed that you couldn’t experience one without the other?

Grief was like that—pockets of memory bubbling to the surface unbidden.

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

“To me, a friend is someone who is there when it counts: when a parent dies; when you’re going through a divorce; when life isn’t shiny and bright.

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

You can’t go into the wilderness without uncovering your wild self.