What Happens in Breakneck Stays in Breakneck

I spent many hours of my childhood hiking and probably twice that many hours complaining about hiking.  The Northwest babies of outdoorsy parents are forced into the woods at an early age, cajoled and bribed in hopes that someday we too self-identify as outdoorsy. Good Portland families hike together, and what yuppie family doesn’t want to be a good one? In my case, the instilling of outdoorsy values was a success (thank you, mom and dad).  In what would be an absolute shock to my frizzy-haired, ten-year-old self, hiking is now something I do of my own free will. As a wannabe adult, I contemplate the pros and cons of the Chaco toe strap and drop fifty bucks on Patagonia hiking shorts because “that stuff really lasts.”  Sometimes, it’s like my mother is a ventriloquist, throwing her own trademark sentences into my confused mouth. I’ve climbed straight up volcanoes and traversed miles of snow. Turns out, not much beats eating a soggy sandwich on a sunny, flat rock.  

New York City is a peculiar choice for someone who enjoys life’s greener side. Somehow, though, all these Northwest kids ended up here—trading mountains for subway cars and wondering about the urbanity of it all.  My Portland friends and I talk a lot about how we really should hike. After all, we come from good Portland stock, and we’ve got something to prove out here.  But we’re lazy and busy and hungover and full of excuses; without the bribes of forceful parents, hiking is lip service.  My friends own a book of day hikes from NYC that functions as coffee table literature more than trail map.  Something’s gotta give, though, because for people who think the woods are dope, sustainable city life depends on getting out there.  After months of cheap talk, we decided to get real and do our parents proud.   

The best laid plans of girls and boys are hatched at East Village bars after a few strong cocktails. Like little drunken chicks, we blindly hatched a plan.  

Much like my freshman year of college, I was overconfident and under-prepared—the most perfect of storms. The plan was simple enough: we’d each get a bagel for fortification, meet under the information sign at Grand Central and ride the Metro North to Breakneck Ridge. It’s cool when the actual name of your chosen hike also serves as overt literary foreshadowing.  If only we had been so foreshadowed. 

The rest of this story is not so interesting.  A five-mile hike turned into a ten-mile hike, and we had enough food and water for three.  A flippant attitude—because, we are hikers—caused us to follow the wrong trail for four miles, only realizing the error of our ways when we were far, far from our destination.  No sunscreen and no bug spray caused a slew of rather obvious problems.  The last two hours of the strenuous hike were spent deliriously contemplating Gatorade flavors and who would keel first if this were The Hunger Games.  Though a misadventure of the finest variety, we managed to have fun. 

Clearly, myriad mistakes were made on our shoddily-executed hike. People spend a lot of time cultivating identity.  We are hyper-aware of how others view us, and do things every day to alter and perfect the vision.  My Portland friends and I want to appear like urban outdoorsy types—equally at home sipping cocktails in the Village and chewing Cliff bars on a mountain.  In a way, this dichotomous identity is valid.  What we failed to admit to ourselves is that in the past few years, we’ve tipped far to the cocktail side of the dichotomy, those Patagonia shorts collecting dust at the bottom of our dresser drawers.  We’re not such hot stuff that we can throw caution to the wind and hit the trail without proper preparation.  If hiking is to be part of our adult identities, we must transition from whiny kid to prepared adult.  No one’s there to bail us out when our water bottle’s dry or to offer us peanut M&M’s and a piggy-back ride. 

This story has plenty of morals, most of which you’ve probably gleaned. Basically, if you’re planning on cultivating an outdoorsy identity that would make your parents proud, bring plenty of water.