Whose woods these are, I wish I knew.
It only takes a few steps into a hike before I’m turning the whole thing into a metaphor. Perhaps that’s why I like hiking so much. On a January trip to Estes Park, Colorado, my husband, John, and I did a lot of hiking in the snow. And it all seemed to be a metaphor for parenting.
We took a trail I know well at the Glacier Gorge trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park. At the intersection of Mills Lake vs. Loch Vale, we turned left to go to Mills. We followed the prints of other hikers and went straight up — steeper than we would have thought possible without the assistance of microspikes, which look like snow tires for boots. Somehow, we ended up at the Loch. I didn’t recognize it even as I sat on a boulder and ate lunch. I’ve sat on that same boulder and eaten lunch there before. I still didn’t believe it when the GPS showed the facts. I had to hear it from my father-in-law — hiker extraordinaire — who texted, “You came out on the left side of the Loch because u weren’t on trail. You did an awesome hike up that gorge!!”
But I didn’t want to do an awesome hike up the gorge. I wanted a nice, not-too-hard walk to a pretty lake. I wanted parenting to be the same way. I didn’t want to impress anyone. So often I have thought was on the trail, only to be proven wrong.
It used to be so easy, back in 2004, the last time both kids hiked with us in the park. That year, when they were 8 and 5, we did the trail from Bear Lake to Bierstadt Lake. It’s not very long or steep. Our son was anxious to prove what a great hiker he was. He had a small backpack filled with toys — things precious to him but not very useful. Our daughter had no interest in impressing us, so John ended up carrying her after lunch at Bierstadt. That day, we learned that she could be bribed with M&Ms.
So much has changed. My son doesn’t care to impress us. My daughter needs a little more than chocolate candy. Suddenly, it’s just John and me on the same trail.
Right at the beginning, we get turned around. It’s difficult to figure out which set of tracks to follow. We make a short circle and end up back where we started.
We regroup. Try again.
Quickly, we hit the junction of footprints where we strayed before. We take a different path, hike up a bank, and then we see it — an orange flag. There, on one of the trees, about six feet up, there’s a metal flag, about two inches long, drilled into the bark. We go a few more feet, see more flags. Some are orange. Some have faded to yellow.
“You don’t think they just put these up in the winter?” I ask.
“No way. They must have always been here,” John said.
I never noticed the flags back in 2004, back when parenting wasn’t exactly easy but was certainly clearer. We took care of the kids. When they did something wrong, we took away a privilege. What happened? Now each parenting decision is day by day, flag by flag.
Once we figured out the orange flags, our hike went fairly smoothly. We reached the frozen lake and ate on the same rock where we lunched with the kids eight years ago. On the way back, we did get off the trail once. At the top of a hill, at a big boulder, the tracks appeared to go straight. After a few steps, John and I both realized that although there were tracks, there were no more flags.
“I think we need to go back a little,” John said.
I was about to say the same thing.
We went back to the boulder and found a different set of footprints. In a few more steps, we saw an orange flag.
Where are the orange flags to tell parents when we’ve veered off the path? Oh, sure, if we go way, way off we’ll know because we’ll sink into the snow, even with microspikes. But there are well-trodden paths that lead to dead ends.
Finally, we reached the intersection where we got lost in the first place. Looking at it from the opposite direction, we could see there was more than one path back to the parking lot. We counted four, including the one we had used with the kids back in 2004. We didn’t take that one. It seemed used. Instead we took the new one, the one that had gotten us lost earlier that day. This time, we knew where it led.
