Camping: Part III, The Joys And Trials Of Hiking With Like-Minded Friends

Camping: Hiking Trail

After suffering the grumbling crowd over lunch and tidying up the place, a few hiking enthusiasts among us expressed a strong desire to go test-drive their legs on the walking trail. Although, I am against all sorts of walking, jogging, running, or any other exercise fad that puts unnatural strain on one’s body, I went along because the best of the gossipmongers—X, Y, and Z—had decided to go, and I was afraid in my absence they would invent some juicy stories maligning me and reinforce their pre-conceived prejudicial notions about me.


We, the four couples, left our children under the care of the remaining families, and ventured out. Passing by the other campsites, we realized that our fellow campers were a little different—some of them had tattoos and shaved heads, some had colored hair. Quite unlike the ones in designer clothes, walking their poodles around their luxury RVs fitted with home theatre systems that we had encountered on our previous trip.

As we entered the trail that went around the lake, I was completely taken with the beauty—green, serene, and enchanting—without any trace of human tampering. After every few yards, I had to stop to soak in the beauty. I felt as if I were the first person to discover the joy of hiking.

“Mind blowing,” I would say and make my women friends appreciate the scenery too.

“Awesome,’ they would chime in.

The men walked away in a hurry, as if another civilization would take over the world if they slacked. They considered themselves too important and worldwise to waste their time.

“What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare,”

There was a quaint wooden bench facing the lake—the kind you see on greeting cards with a couple sitting on it and blowing heart-shaped bubbles. Y and Z sat down on the bug-infested, moldy bench, X and I stood facing them, and we blew our own shiny, green bubbles by continuing our discussion about A, a perpetual tag-along even though she would find our food too spicy and our behavior unsophisticated, who kept on bragging about her five-star vacations with her equally starred friends.

About B, who complained about everything and made us feel guilty for not making the trip enjoyable for her. About C, who was having an affair with A’s husband. We had been observing and interpreting their nonverbal cues, and passing comments to both A and C to no visible effect. Much later, I learned that the story was an out-and-out imagination of our exceptionally gifted friend, Ms X.

When we stopped talking, there was an eerie calm, and I realized how loudly we had been confabulating, and also how long. We seemed to have over gossiped. The two lazy bums got up flicking away the unwanted attachments to their clothes, and we proceeded on the trail. The charm of the trail had now faded away like a wife of ten years, but we kept on walking, consoling ourselves that it would benefit us in the long run, as there was no other option.

And then suddenly, tabhi achanak, there came a diversion. A slightly broad path was going to our left, but we kept walking straight along the lake.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by…”

Now, yours truly has been an avid Robert Frost fan, so when the road bifurcated once again, I convinced my friends to take the path less trodden. It was obvious that if we went along the lake we would reach the same spot from where we had started. But the lake that had earlier looked a benign oval, insidiously grew large tentacles rather pseudopods in different directions to bewilder us. The beauty of the trail was now comparable to an overbearing, intimidating wife of twenty years. All I could think of were ghosts, beasts, and serial killers. At any rustling sound, I would cry, “Ghost!” and then X would curse me in her heart. Everyone started blaming others. The bonhomie that had developed while gossiping was now swallowed by the jungle.

Finally, we arrived on the main road. Here at least we could see some passerby and ask for help. A vehicle came along. We flagged it down by frantically moving our arms. X proceeded to talk to the driver. To me, he looked like the Misfit, a serial killer from Flannery O’Connor’s story, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

(Read Wikipedia entry, or online text of the story here)
To be continued.

(Any resemblance to you or your friends is purely coincidental.)