Saved By Hiking
In 2010, I lived in Topanga, California, a rural enclave nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains in the middle of Los Angeles, with more than its share of eccentrics, including me.
I was somewhat isolated. My company had bit the dust in the recession, my marriage was dying, the kids were pretty much out of the house, and my dog had died, but at my firstborn’s prompt, I had finally made some local friends.
One of them was the brilliant Patti Mc, who happened to live next door. We started hiking together, which was not a small proposition considering how out-of-shape we were. After our first long hike, we were left broken and groaning for a week, but we stuck with it, and every time we hiked, blown away by the beauty of our environment, we would randomly stop, look at each other and scream at the top of our lungs in perfect unison: “We. Are. So. Lucky!!!!!!!!!!” Since we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, we deafened no one but ourselves.
Our hiking skills kept getting stronger, but then Patti got extremely sick. She recovered eventually, but it was touch-and-go and scary as hell for a while. Meantime, I missed my hiking, so I joined a bunch of hiking groups on Meetup and almost immediately found my perfect posse, a group led by the extraordinary John M. His expeditions were perfect for me: late morning starts, challenging hikes with enough stops to recover…
