The Hike

December 4, 2023

The Sassafras Trail is a winding path, about two and one-half miles long, through a corner of the local state park. We arrived on an overcast Sunday morning, Noah and I, to get some fresh air and a dose of the woods. He was about to turn 10, and has a lot going on with school and fourth-grade debate team. He doesn’t get to do much hiking.

It was all I could come up with as an outing for the boys. I got them fishing gear last summer, we went once and caught nothing. They weren’t impressed.

I pitched the idea of the hike both to him and the younger grandson, Patrick, who just turned seven. Noah said sure, Patrick wasn’t up for it. It’s a twelve-mile drive, when we arrived at eleven o’clock the parking lot at the trailhead was full, meaning we had to park at an overflow lot about a quarter-mile away and hoof that stretch along the park road.

We took a shortcut down through a leaf-covered ravine, slipping all the way, crossed a creek, and climbed the short rise to the trailhead. It was chilly. I handed Noah his jacket. I wished I had brought one, but usually you can count on warming up as you move. We turned right, or east, onto the trail loop, although the sign points hikers left, or west. We kicked at the leaves.

“What time is it?” Noah asked. I told him, hoping he wasn’t already tired of it. “We have to go two miles. Let’s see how long it takes,” he said earnestly. So maybe he looked at it as a challenge, rather than a boring afternoon with grandpa. I couldn’t tell. “We’ll be done in about an hour,” I said, just guessing.

We moved up the second rise. It was quiet; despite the full lot, we seemed to have the trail to ourselves. Noah was full of pep, striding easily, telling me “part two” of a story he had started a couple of days ago. It was a fantastic, creative yarn mixing bad guys and good guys dueling with lasers, unlocking gates with key cards. Lasers and key cards? I wondered where in heck he picked up this stuff.

Elementary schoolkids today are growing up in a different world than I did, the world of casual technology that we all lean on. Even the first-graders are issued laptops at school that they take home for assignments and then nearly anything else they want to do with them. Ten-year-olds are more comfortable with computers than I am. They play video games, most of them, not cowboys and Indians.

They’re still kids, like all kids before me and since. But they’re busier. Noah played Little League baseball last spring, soccer in the fall, and is signed up for basketball starting in January. Last month he sang in a talent show. Both brothers have been in kids’ golf programs. I asked about debate team. “I’ll tell you when we see grandma, she’d like to hear about it, too,” he said.  

The trail is level for a quarter-mile or so into the forest, curves left then right, rises and falls. Ahead, we could see the rough surface wind up a long hill. The trees had mostly lost their leaves, but were still densely packed. A few weeks ago I had hiked the same way and spotted a mature female white-tailed deer grazing. She heard me and raised her head as I passed.

We moved more slowly, Noah just behind me. He said maybe he’d go to Clemson because it’s a good engineering school and he likes math. Or maybe Penn State, his dad’s school. Or maybe one of the service academies. I hadn’t heard that before. I talked up the Naval Academy, ships, fighter aircraft, world travel. I dropped it before he got bored.

“Maybe you get the math from my dad,” I said. Noah never met his great-grandfather. “It skipped a generation. Your Uncle Michael is good at math, too.”  

We kept walking. I pointed out trail features around us, the steep drop-offs, the hills and ridges, the winding route the path took ahead. “Do you like being out in nature,” I asked. He said, “Sure!”

About midway through the two miles we climbed a long hill, the trail broken up by boulders and tree roots, the going more difficult. The summit was obscured by the trees. We slowed down. I could hear Noah breathing hard behind me. To encourage him I pointed at the next ridge, where the trail levels out and begins to descend. He didn’t say anything but pushed on.

I grew up in a suburb a lot like Noah’s. The land behind our street was a woods-covered buffer between our community and the next one, maybe a half-mile wide and three or four miles long. Over the years before I went to high school my neighborhood friends and I spent many hours in the woods, hiking, exploring, camping, and fishing in a creek that flowed through the area.

Years later my younger brother bought a home on the outskirts of the woods. On one of our rare visits, he led me along an overgrown trail to a dead fallen tree. My name was carved in the trunk. I had no memory of that, so long ago, in a different time and, it seemed, a different world.

The halfway point on the trail loop is also the highest point. We slogged forward. “Just a little farther,” I said more than once. “We’re almost there.” Noah kept moving, still game but a bit winded. “How much more to the top,” he asked again. Finally I said, “okay we’re here, all downhill now.” We could move a bit faster.

My grandfather was a city man who lived all his life in the Bronx, New York. He never took me hiking, and probably had never been hiking himself. Instead, he took me to watch the New York Yankees play in the old Yankee Stadium. That was the era of Mantle, Maris, Berra, Pepitone, Yankees world championships. It was the big city, the Big Apple, the family anchoring place. Those memories are forever.

There’s not as much excitement here in Greenville. No roaring, clattering subways, no Empire State Building or Greenwich Village. No Yankee Stadium. We do have hiking trails.

As we turned on the back of the loop, I reminded myself how time is passing in a bewildering blur. In a few years Noah will face his coming of age. He will find excitement and achievement, and maybe some setbacks and heartache. Like all of us, he’ll engage in life, find his purpose, his meaning, find himself. Maybe in some quiet moment in the middle of all that, he’ll recall our hike on a chilly Sunday afternoon.

We walked a bit faster on the downhill. Closer to the trailhead the route zigzags back and forth through thickets of young tree growth, then turns, and turns again. “How much farther,” Noah called. “Almost there,” I yelled back. He laughed. “You already said that, grandpa.”