Ain’t No Mountain High Enough
How Hiking Got Me Through
Post #6 of #20: I’m reflecting on twenty years of personal and professional experiences in Birmingham and beyond. Visit www.medium.com/HonestlyEd to read the full #20For20 series.
My introduction to hiking was dark and scary.
I was a 12-year-old Boy Scout (Troop #250) when my Scoutmaster, Cid Duncan, took me and my fellow scouts — North Milwaukee neighborhood kids — on occasional camping trips upstate at Wisconsin’s Indian Mounds Park. Our camping trips were traditional. We enjoyed swimming, fishing and other traditional boy scout activities.
But, the final night of the camping trip always ended with the “midnight hike.” It probably sounds pretty cool to you, but it was downright scary for us.
After all, the midnight hike was preceded by campfire horror stories of serial killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, demented white men with an irresistible urge to rape, torture and kill. I especially remember the stories about John Wayne Gacy because all of his 33 victims were men and boys. He murdered them after he performed at family-oriented parties as a clown. Cid was an excruciating storyteller with a penchant for details, using his fingers to illustrate how the skin was pulled off here, or limbs cut off there.
