The Trail to the Left

Today I went on a hike in my beloved Superstition Mountains. It was a good hike.

It was good in the same way that they say any airplane landing you can walk away from is a good landing. In other words, I survived this hike but it was, by all other objective standards, a failure.

First, let’s talk about preparation. It was late last night when I decided that, even though the hike I had hoped to take with my daughter, Beth, didn’t work out, I was still going to go hiking. So I set the alarm for 5:30, with the goal of being on the trail by 7:00.

Two minutes after driving away from the house, it dawned on me that I had forgotten to bring any food for the trail. So I turned around and went home for my usual trail snack of an apple and cheese sticks. It’s really too bad that, at that moment, I didn’t think to ask, “I wonder if there’s anything else I forgot?” If I had, perhaps I would have remembered that I hadn’t used the inhaler which helps me with the mild asthma I suffer during demanding physical activity. Or I might have recalled that I had failed to put on the knee wrap I wear on the trail thanks to an old volleyball injury.

Oh, I did eventually remember these things. I remembered them after about five minutes on the trail. I could have turned back then, but that goes against my push-through-the-pain philosophy. As a result, within minutes, during a steep ascent, I was wheezing like an old woman with a three pack a day habit. There were also some moments when pain shot through my knee like I’d grabbed hold of a live wire. Still I pressed on. These were mere inconveniences to overcome.

The real spoiler came with a decision I made just a mile or so into my hike. Trails sometimes split for no particular reason other than people like to go different ways. Some people would rather take the harder, steeper, more direct route, while others prefer a kinder, gentler, less direct approach. Generally speaking, whichever way you go, the paths will reunite.

I came across a split in the trail today. I started to go the right. But then I took a few steps back and looked to the left. It was too soon for this to be the junction of the trails where I would turn off the trail I was on. So I reasoned that this must be one of those ‘six-of-one, half-dozen of the other’ trail choices. Left looked a little more aggressive and looked like it made a more direct course to where I wanted to eventually be, so I went left.

Let me pause my story for a second to explain cairns to the non-hikers reading this. Cairns are markers left along the trail by other hikers when that trail is indistinct. They alert you to which way you should go. The classic trail cairn is a stack of rocks, usually three or so, which sit on top of a larger boulder or beside the trail in order to lead you in that direction.

As the path to the left started to become more and more difficult to follow as it crossed over large fields of slickrock and boulders, I thought to myself on more than a few occasions, “Thank goodness for cairns and the kind souls who take the time to set them.”

I followed the cairns further and further in the direction of a small mountain. I had picked my way along this ‘trail’ of cairns for over an hour and a half, and then it dawned on me: This trail I was on was no simple alternate path to the place I had wanted to go. It was a peak baggers’ trail.

Peak baggers are, to my way of thinking, a slightly odd subset of hikers who see a mountain and their only thought is, “I need to go to the top of it”. They ‘collect’ conquered peaks the way some men collect romantic conquests. It’s all about the challenge and the resulting bragging rights.

Now I like hiking the mountains. Or, perhaps I should say, I like hiking among the mountains. As for hiking up the mountains themselves…not so much. I have a fairly intense fear of heights. I do not need a view from the peak to grasp how tall a mountain is or to appreciate its grandeur. If I must climb a mountain, I prefer gentle ascents on secure switchback paths or scampering up nice sheltered draws which shield you from seeing the full scope of the height you are gaining. You will never see me picking my way up the exposed face of a mountain or cliff. If you do, look for the large bear that is chasing me.

So, needless to say, I was not amused when, after an hour and a half of following the trail to the left, I was forced to conclude that this trail was never going to rejoin my desired trail. Standing midway up the side of this mountain I realized I was at a dead end. I had two choices: I could either go up or go back.

And, thanks to what, counting the return trip, would add up to a three hour detour, I also realized that I would never be able to complete the hike I had planned in the time I had available. In other words, measured against what I had set out to accomplish, my hike was now doomed to be a failure.

Once I started back down, I had to retrace my steps by following the cairns I had been guided by on the way up. This was not as easy as you might think. There were a number of places where a careful examination showed that there was more than one cairn I could follow. I tried to remember which route I had traveled on the way up. But a boulder often looks different when you’re passing it heading north than it does when you’re approaching it heading south.

At one point on my return I was stuck. I was on a high rock surveying the land below. I could see the trail I wanted to be on, so I wasn’t lost. But I couldn’t see any way to get there from where I was that didn’t involve sprouting wings. The cairns I had followed on my return had, for reasons I couldn’t understand, lead me to another dead end.

Then God sent some angels (effectively camouflaged as three foul-mouthed, middle-aged men and a golden retriever) whom I spied from a short distance. Once I saw where they were walking, I knew where I needed to be. A quick recalibration of my course and I was heading home.

I caught up to the three of them a short while later and we struck up a conversation. I commented on having been misdirected by the cairns. That’s when one of them made a reasonable observation. He said that sometimes hikers start out on a course that they think will lead them where they want to go. To find their way back later, they set up a cairn. But soon they realize that they are on the wrong path and they have to try another route. But they leave the original cairn in place. They never go back and remove what becomes a false marker for another hiker.

After thinking about that for a few minutes, my earlier appreciation for cairns and those who set them was modified. It now became, “Thank goodness for accurate cairns and the kind souls who take the time to set them, and the even kinder souls who knock down the cairns that might lead others astray.”

This thought led me to reflect on some trail-inspired lessons. (You can ask my daughter, Emily, who has heard her share of these while we’re hiking; I come up with these all the time. Despite her sometimes tepid response to my profound thoughts, I’m actually thinking of a series of blogs based on some of the lessons I have learned, or been reminded of, on the trail.) As for the lessons learned today:

Just because someone has gone down this path before, it’s no guarantee that it will take you someplace you want to be. Today when I followed the trail to the left, I was making a huge assumption that the people who had walked that way before me were going somewhere I wanted to be. And, as it turned out, that was a mistaken assumption.

And the number of people who have walked down a path is no guarantee that it is the one that will take you where you want to go. Sadly, a huge majority of people are making some really unwise choices that have been unwise choices every one of the millions of times they have been tried before. But people headed in the wrong direction never seem to lack traveling companions.

Has anyone not had the experience of saying to your parent when you were a kid, “But everyone is doing it”? And, when you did, did your parent not say, “So, if your friends all decided to jump off a cliff, would you want to do that, too?” This little script is written down in some secret, sacred text somewhere. Everyone who wants to be fully human has to repeat these words at least once in their life. But just because the conversation is cliché doesn’t make its point invalid.

We get invested in our path, even as we suspect it’s taking us someplace we don’t want to go. There was a point, much earlier than the point when I actually turned around, when I started to strongly suspect that I was not on the right path. In fact, somewhere inside of me I think I knew that. But I didn’t want to admit I had made the wrong choice. And I kept hoping that I would perhaps see a way to get from where I was to where I wanted to be without turning back. I couldn’t help but think, “Look at all the time I have invested in going this direction. I don’t want that to count for nothing. And who knows that I won’t be able to make this work out?” But I couldn’t. The only viable option was to swallow my pride, cut my losses and return to the path that would take me home. Pride is a hard thing for a lot of us to overcome, even when doing so would bring incredible relief.

Setting a path is a responsibility. You are saying, “You can trust me to take you where you want to go”. Many of us are in positions of leadership over someone else. Maybe it’s defined leadership like that of a parent or teacher or boss. Or, maybe it’s informal leadership that we have because we’re influential by nature. People tend to want to do what we’re doing, have our approval, or win our respect. Or they’re just friends who want to fit in. When we have a leadership role like that, we also have an often unacknowledged responsibility to not set a bad example. It’s a serious and weighty matter to think about where we are leading others by our example. How seriously are you taking that responsibility? How comfortable would you be if someone said to you, “I want to be just like you”?

When you realize you’ve taken the wrong path, knock down your old cairns. Redeem your bad example. Some of the really important steps associated with twelve-step recovery programs have to do with acknowledging failure and confessing wrongs we have done to others. Until we do that, we are harboring some secret belief that what we have done wasn’t that harmful and doesn’t demand restitution or the seeking of forgiveness. We whitewash, we rationalize and we justify. And in so doing, we prove we haven’t really relinquished our bad choices, our harmful actions.

One of the great opportunities we have when we mess up is to use for good the wisdom we receive from the process of owning our mistake. It is wisdom we can pass on to others. There’s a saying, “God never wastes a hurt”. That’s equally true for self-inflicted hurts, wasted opportunities and bad choices. A compassionate God would prefer to protect us from those choices and the hurt they bring, in the first place. But a gracious God provides opportunity to redeem them. We can redeem the poor example we have set if we acknowledge our mistakes in humility.

When I ended up on the wrong trail today, I thought my hike was wasted, a failure. But I think God used it to help remind me of some things and reinforce some lessons I needed to have refreshed for me.