When I’m loading gear into my daypack before heading up into the mountains for a hike, there’s a funny memory that often pops into my head: The recollection of a conversation I had with a reporter colleague 20-some years ago when I was a photographer at the morning newspaper in Seattle. The reporter, a smart-as-a-whip young woman, had grown up on the East Coast, graduated from an Ivy League college, and was a recent transplant to the Pacific Northwest. We were talking about our away-from-work lives, and Pam was telling me that she was a runner and was training for a 10k. I, of course, bent Pam's ear about hikes and climbs my friends and I did. Most of my hiking pals were also journalists, and Pam knew many of them.
Pam had a kind of quizzical look on her face as I talked about a hike several of us had done the previous weekend, and it seemed to me that she might appreciate an invite to take part in one of our adventures. “You should join us sometime,” I said; and Pam’s response, delivered with a mock-East Coast Snob/Broadway theater deadpan, was worthy of a Tony Award nomination:
“I don’t put things on my back and go walking,” she declared flatly, and I cracked up.
It turned out, though, that Pam was serious. She never joined our group for a hike...which was too bad, because her dry wit would have fit right in.
Anyway, I think of Pam’s wisecrack when I’m about to sling my pack on my back go for a walk, as happened last weekend. Her humor was a good beginning to my day as I rambled in one of my favorite places in the state, a Central Washington valley that was positively glowing in the colors of fall.
