![]() ![]() How do you ever expect to get a marriage proposal, she would ask. She told me how her mother had scolded her repeatedly for beating her boyfriend at tennis. There we sat on our generous butts, sweat trickling between our not so generous breasts, smelling of insect repellant and the previous night’s campfire, two women who had never met before yet shared the same memories of school years in the fifties and sixties, when the most important message we should have learned was how to attract a husband. Large breasts and well formed butts were acceptable. class, the theory being that girls were incapable of doing regular ones and that well defined muscles were unsightly on a girl. We reminisced about having to do modified push-ups in P.E. We sat down and talked away the afternoon, comparing and sharing the stories of two women alone on the trail. I remember that I met her on the steep climb over LaCrosse Pass in the Olympic Mountains Her blonde hair was worn in a ponytail on one side of her head. On the trail in those days I would occasionally see men hiking alone but never once saw a woman alone until many years later. ![]() ![]() It did not seem particularly formidable at the time, for I had plenty of backcountry experience, though my trips had always included friends. It was an easy decision to begin hiking alone. My friends all seemed to have normal jobs, Monday through Friday, so were not able to hike with me, nor was I usually free on weekends, either working or spending that rare time with my husband. I began going on day hikes in the Alpine Lakes area east of Seattle, where the trailheads were only about an hour’s drive from my home. My husband had a job as a corporate pilot, which required him to be gone much of the time, and my job as a nurse allowed me to have days off during the work week when the trails were less crowded. The 2.3 children had not arrived yet, and it would be several years before they did, but I was on the right course, or so it seemed. I was newly married and had begun the life I thought I wanted: a husband, 2.3 children, and a house in the suburbs. I first started hiking alone in my early twenties and had started my first job as a Registered Nurse after graduating from college. Yet to learn to see, to learn to hear, you must do this–go into the wilderness alone. ![]()
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