Every summer, Tim packs a backpack and heads off into his beloved Wallowa Mountains. He’s been going off into the woods as long as we’ve been together, which today just so happens to mark 45 years of married bliss and chaos, heavy on the latter. In fact, when we were planning our honeymoon all those years ago, Tim just assumed we’d head off into the mountains together. It was just the first of the many wrong assumptions he made about me. We spent our honeymoon at the Inn at Otter Crest, along Oregon’s beach instead.

As our grandchildren all know: Granny loves the beach and Pa loves the mountains.

We are polar opposites who just happen to love each other. Still.

I did eventually make that backpacking trip thru the Wallowas over Labor Day of 1980. We were joined by my sister-in-law, Gloria, and her husband, Jim. Tim’s dad,Gene, dropped us off at the trailhead at Two-Pan, and we followed the East Fork of the Lostine to Mirror Lake, and on from there to Wallowa Lake. It poured the rain the entire first day. I couldn’tsleep that entire first night because I was wet and cold and because Gene had me terrified we were going to be mauled by bears.

That was the last backpacking trip I made, until last week.

When Tim started planning this year’s trip with daughter Ashley and her two boys, Sullivan, 11, and Austin, 8, I sorta of hinted that I might join them. The girls all count on making the trip with their dad. I didn’t want to impose. Ashley came back a week or so later and said that the grands really wanted me to join them. “We knew if you went, we could take more breaks,” Sullivan said, as he waited for me at the head of yet another switchback during last week’s hike.

For the record, all the hiking books list the hike from Two Pan to Mirror Lake as “difficult.” Some even say “hard”. Of course I didn’t read those or even look up how far or how high we were climbing until after we were back out of the woods. Denial really is a necessary component of a happy life. Ask anyone who has been married for decades.

Mirror Lake is about 7,600 feet in elevation. Translated that means a person should be prepared to feel like a pack mule for part of the trip. The hiking books might come with a warning about people with heart conditions or possibility of strokes. I don’t know. As previously mentioned, I didn’t read it. We weren’t an hour into the hike before I was beginning to curse myself for thinking I could do such a foolish thing.

The first part of the climb starts out gentle enough but it wasn’t long before I was wheezing like a ward full of iron lung patients. While Tim was off like a mountain goat, the grandboys kept waiting for me at every switchback. The higher the climb, the lower to the ground I got, until soon I resembled a fiddlehead. My first melt-down happened about two-thirds of the way to our first night’s camp. There would be other moments, but the first found me crying alone in the gloaming hour as Tim and the others headed further up the mountain in search of a camp site, since, of course, it had started raining.

Tim has made this trip numerous times, only two of which has it rained. That first hike with me, and then this one. Apparently, I am the Mother of Rain. 🙂 We woke that first morning to an absolute frog-drowning downpour. The grands and I huddled in the tent playing cards, while Tim and Ash sought shelter underneath a canopy of trees. Guess which hiker hadn’t packed a raincoat or a coat at all?

I could write a whole chapter on the challenges of crapping in the woods, but I don’t want to be embarrassed the next time we meet up. Let’s suffice it to say that I have mastered yoga poses I never even knew I knew.

The greatest joys for me came each night when the boys would ask if they could join me in the tent, where we would talk and they would invariably ask, “Tell us another story, Granny.” We told ghost stories, and stories about various friends and family members. We talked about some of life’s big challenges and laughed over some of Granny’s silly antics, the topper of which was when Granny actually stripped down and went skinny-dipping in Mirror Lake.

“Right next to the hiking trail!”

“You are crazy, Granny!”

If they never remember anything else from their first hiking trip into the Wallowas, I hope the boys come away laughing and with a story they can retell their own grandkids one day.

Also, I hope they become mountain goats like their Pa. Somehow, I think they surely will. They already handle hard things better than I ever have.