I have given Juno two brushings in the last two days. After each one, I removed a big handful of hair from the brush, along with grass seeds, beggar’s lice, cockleburs, twigs, and pine pitch. I also, both days, applied antibiotic ointment to the pads on the bottoms of her feet. They were blistered and cut from our anniversary hike last Wednesday. We hadn’t planned on taking her along, but she was dancing with excitement the moment we took our daypacks out of the closet, and we didn’t have the heart to make her stay home. We gave her half a doggy NSAID, and I told her she’d get the other half if she made it back. She was in the car as soon as we opened the door.

We had intended to climb one of the Sawtooth peaks, but decided to visit a lake instead, by a long and roundabout route, one through alder thickets, spruce swamps, miles of talus, and wild raspberry patches. We got rimrocked several times. Mosquitos and horseflies were thick. The air was sticky with humidity. The day turned out to be the hottest of the summer.

We had planned on climbing out of the canyon the lake was in and going home via a more congenial drainage, but we would have had to climb a thousand vertical feet up a sun-blasted sandy couloir to get over the ridge.

By the time we reached the lake, we had decided to stay close to water, and go back the way we had come. It would take longer, but it wouldn’t involve heat exhaustion and search and rescue volunteers.

At the lake, we found a large flat boulder at the water’s edge. We each dove in a couple of times to cool off. Drying off was a matter of sitting on the rock in the sun for a minute or two.

For most of my life, diving into a lake in the Sawtooths meant hitting water heart-stoppingly cold, but this time, it was a relief from the heat. It wasn’t all that cold, either.

I worried that we had chosen a lake too far, and that the hike out would seem a lot longer and more brutal than the hike in. It turned out to be a reasonable worry.

 

We were back in the car ten hours and thirteen minutes after we’d left it. Juno limped into the backseat and immediately went to sleep. We rolled down all the windows and headed for home with the air conditioner blasting. A mile or two later the car thermometer finally dipped below ninety degrees.

We were footsore, bug-bit, lacerated, sunburnt, sweat-soaked, dehydrated, and about to be late for dinner at Redfish Lake Lodge. Julie called the reservation desk and we got an extra forty minutes to clean up. We needed it.

“It was a great hike,” Julie said at dinner, somewhere between our anniversary toast and the arrival of our entrees. “A hike to remember.”

“No kidding,” I said. I could hardly move.

It really was a great hike. We had climbed up and down waterfalls, waded through fields of wildflowers, gotten high into the peaks on a sunny day, jumped into crystalline water, walked through primeval forest, climbed over long stretches of glacially polished rock, watched the sun-haloed afternoon clouds, sat on a giant warm rock while a breeze dried us off: these things are the stuff of January daydreams, and we were able to live them in anniversary celebration. All it had taken was a turn from the beaten path and a willingness to keep moving and climbing up and down, up again and down again. You can go a long way in the Sawtooths in five hours. You can go almost twice as far in ten hours if it doesn’t kill you.

“I’ll bet nobody as old as we are has done that hike,” said Julie. “Not in a day, anyway.”

“Most people as old as we are know better,” I said. “Most people as old as we are have maps, and can read them.”

 

The pads on Juno’s feet are healing. So am I. Judging from the way Juno acts when we get ready to leave the house, she’s ready for another giant hike, even if Julie and I aren’t. I’ve told Juno that we’ve abused her enough for a while, but she doesn’t see it that way. She would go hiking all day, every day, if we would go with her, bloody paws or not, exhausted or not. You have to admire her spirit.

I remember when a similar spirit moved me. My pack and tools, when I was a wilderness ranger for the Forest Service, weighed sixty-five pounds, and I carried them five days and fifty miles a week, occasionally up slopes so steep that a tip over backwards would have been fatal. I traveled off-trail when I could, hopping over ridges and climbing peaks. I remember the sixty-five pounds as being heavy but doable. When I dropped my pack at a campsite, I bounced around in reduced gravity—astronaut on the moon style—while I set up camp.

That was fifty years ago. What was easy then is not easy now. Gravity has gotten a lot stronger.

Julie may be wrong about nobody else our age making that particular hike. Certainly there are old people out there in better physical shape than Julie and I. A bunch of fit old people could have hiked our route the week before we did, probably with cooler weather and fewer bugs. They could have been hobbling around the Redfish Lodge lawn while we were getting rimrocked, bragging about where they’d been, showing off their gnarled, scratched, and sunburnt legs and swallowing ibuprofen with their margaritas.

One of the lessons of old age is that no matter how tough you think you are, there’s always somebody tougher. One of the other lessons is that you don’t have to compete with those tough old farts. Nobody’s timing you on hikes or anything else and anyway, the people who reach the finish line first aren’t the winners.

 

I was forty-five when I got married. Julie was twenty years younger, and the joke on our wedding day was that on our fiftieth anniversary, I’d be ninety-five. Lots of people, looking at our difference in age and assuming a difference in power, predicted that the marriage wouldn’t last, but they didn’t realize that Julie was and is a sharp and fierce old lady at heart, and that if there was to be an imbalance of power in our marriage, it would be in her favor.

For twenty-six years we’ve tried to boss each other around and we’ve both failed miserably. But we’ve learned that most differences of opinion go away if you wait for the facts to come in, and few decisions we face are so urgent that we can’t wait for them to clarify. We’ve also learned that twenty-six years is a long time, fifty is longer, and being ninety-five is nothing to joke about because the actuarial tables predict I won’t make it that far.

We’ve learned that if one or the other of us really wants something to happen, we both need to work together to make it happen. We’ve learned that wanting the best for each other makes a lot of arguments disappear before they start. We’ve learned that we were both deadly serious when we pledged that our marriage would last until one of us died. There was no escape from each other while we lived, and that has turned out to be a good thing.

Early on we realized that if you live with another person for a while, a big part of what bothers you about that person is mostly your fault. After twenty-six years, anything that still bothers you is something you’ve had a big hand in creating.

We share the blame for the bothers, but we also share the day-to-day ups and downs, the grief and the joy, the worries and triumphs.

Personal boundaries get violated, but one of the functions of love is to restore each other to wholeness, and that means affirming, repairing, and respecting those boundaries. Being separate people is a necessary part of being together. It’s a long process, full of contradictions, and after twenty-six years we’ve just made a start on it.

For twenty-six years we’ve tried to love each other, and we’re doing all right so far. For twenty-six years we’ve tried to have a good time without overthinking it, and it’s hard to remember a day when we didn’t succeed, at least for a moment or two.

 

These are the things you think about on your 26th anniversary when you’re walking logs across a swamp and the flies are biting right between your shoulder blades and your knees are hurting and Juno is starting to limp and it’s still four—maybe six—miles to the car. Julie says Juno can’t go with us next time, that we’re committing dog abuse, that we’re shortening a life that is already measured in dog years.

We’ll see how it goes the next time she tries to tell Juno she’s staying home when we’re headed out the door with our packs. If Juno stays home, I’m going to tell her that I wanted her to go but her mom wouldn’t allow it.

I think about being ninety-five, and which side of the grass I’ll be on by then, and if I’ve shortened or lengthened my life by hiking off trail when I could be sitting on the porch at Redfish with a margarita. Certainly, hiking makes life seem longer, especially while I’m trudging through underbrush hour after hour with the same stanza of Lee Marvin singing “I Was Born Under a Wand’rin’ Star” stuck in my head.

But at my age, I’m thinking that hiking helps you live the way you should always live: deeply embedded in space and time. Sore feet and thirst place you on a hot rocky hillside, hurting and sweating here and not some other place, now and not some other time, with the people you love instead of some other people.

If you’re lucky enough to be in the here and now, look around. What you see will fill you with wonder.