I’m thinking this morning about the peaceful hike Leah and I did yesterday high up on a foggy ridge in the Olympic mountains. I'm thinking too about the amazing, way-too-perfect Thai food we ate on the trip home, and about my buddy Bob, back in the days when he owned a sailboat.
Bob’s period of sailboat ownership, now about 20 years ago, coincided with his time as wild-man bachelor. Smart and very funny, Bob’s bachelorhood probably wasn’t actually all that wild, but I’m married, have been for over 30 years, and married guys like me tend to assume (hope? fantasize?) their single male friends are hell-raisers.
Anyway, I remember a day when Bob invited me to go sailing, and I offered to bring the beer. I assumed brewski was an essential ingredient to the male bonding thing that would happen when two guys spend eight hours sitting around on a sailboat. Bob declined my offer, explaining he didn’t want to “confuse the sailing experience with the drinking experience.” For a second, I thought Bob was being funny. Then it dawned on me that he was serious. It was such a drag to realize my single, wild friend had turned ascetic on me.
Leah and I have no problem, combining the hiking experience with the eating experience. Hikes and other outdoor adventures are filed in our brains with the following information: distance of the hike, elevation gain and loss of the hike, and where we’ll eat on the drive home. And though our hike yesterday was one of our best this year and our eyes feasted on views of peaks and forests as far as we could see, we couldn't help but think about the Thai restaurant waiting for us down in town. For us, gluttony is an essential part of the hiking experience.
