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Childhood memories.
Jun. 22nd, 2002 10:34 amMy family didn't do much in the way of tourism. Vacation always meant the same thing: two or three weeks at a rented cottage in the mountains, preferably near a lake. We'd swim and sail and have cookouts and attend instructive interpretive programs, and we'd hike - the Adirondacks in New York, the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
I loved hiking when I was small. It's funny what I remember about it now: my mother saying look for trolls every time we came to a bridge or stream crossing, learning that don't talk to strangers didn't apply on the trail, finding usually-forbidden foods like candy bars in our lunches, drinking water and lemonade out of clear plastic bottles whose faded labels read sterile water for irrigation. A sunny hillside field beneath a firewatch tower, studded with wild blueberries. Clambering over every boulder we passed, while the grownups went around. My mother calling my brother Sport. "I want to be Sport, too!" "Okay. He can be Sport One and you can be Sport Two."
I went on the short hikes - suitable for little kids. I knew that when I grew up I would go on the big hikes, the ones my father took with my brother and oldest sister, for which they left the house before sunrise so they'd reach the summit and be down below treeline before the inevitable afternoon thunderstorms. And in the meantime, when I complained that I wanted to climb a real mountain my father produced what he called "Mount Severance" (which turned out to really be called Severance Hill), and taught me how to follow the orange paint blazes on the trees to what he obligingly referred to as "the summit." I marked my progress, and knew that someday I would climb the ne plus ultra, Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, more than 14,000 feet high. My brother climbed it when he was ten, I think, to much fanfare. I could see it from almost any point in the park, and from my vantage point it looked like a family rite of passage.
( this got very long )
I loved hiking when I was small. It's funny what I remember about it now: my mother saying look for trolls every time we came to a bridge or stream crossing, learning that don't talk to strangers didn't apply on the trail, finding usually-forbidden foods like candy bars in our lunches, drinking water and lemonade out of clear plastic bottles whose faded labels read sterile water for irrigation. A sunny hillside field beneath a firewatch tower, studded with wild blueberries. Clambering over every boulder we passed, while the grownups went around. My mother calling my brother Sport. "I want to be Sport, too!" "Okay. He can be Sport One and you can be Sport Two."
I went on the short hikes - suitable for little kids. I knew that when I grew up I would go on the big hikes, the ones my father took with my brother and oldest sister, for which they left the house before sunrise so they'd reach the summit and be down below treeline before the inevitable afternoon thunderstorms. And in the meantime, when I complained that I wanted to climb a real mountain my father produced what he called "Mount Severance" (which turned out to really be called Severance Hill), and taught me how to follow the orange paint blazes on the trees to what he obligingly referred to as "the summit." I marked my progress, and knew that someday I would climb the ne plus ultra, Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, more than 14,000 feet high. My brother climbed it when he was ten, I think, to much fanfare. I could see it from almost any point in the park, and from my vantage point it looked like a family rite of passage.
( this got very long )
