In the first mile I saw what I needed so I went no further that day. That is to say, though the topo map and my memory presented me with a 4.7-mile trail to the highest point in Arizona, within the first mile flower color slowed me down again and again. Purple and yellow caused me to bend over and finally stop altogether, take my hat and pack off, and stand completely still to my core. Aspiration gave way to inspiration, so filled was I. To add more mountain to my morning would only crowd my heart.
By walking a mere 20 minutes from my truck I had traveled far enough. Just by getting out of bed and passing up the TV and the cell phone; just by ignoring the errands calling out for completion, their details piled by the front door; just by giving no mind to assorted missions hovering, by looking past the left overs and incompletes from last week and the week before, I had traveled far enough. On the way out I’d taken care to collect four quarts of water and remembered the half meatball sandwich wrapped in foil from the fridge. I’d stuffed a down jacket in place, and a windbreaker and a hat, even a flashlight to be ready to be out the whole day. But pollen caught on a hairy bee leg stopped me. Enough, my eyes said. This is plenty.
That was the August day I became a collector of first miles. With that bee on a hillside, with memorizing its lifts and landings and framing its shape against color and horizon, I built a memorial in my brain around the grace of pausing. No longer would I make an expedition out of getting outdoors. My mantra became, “Go. Walk. Now.”
Go to a trailhead.
Go walk the first mile only.
By letting go of the logistics of making a day of it every time, I free myself to hear other stories than the ones stated by maps and trail signs. Now I walk toward whisperings wherever they might be. A mix of bird voices in an aspen grove might cause me to sit for an hour. A tiny trickle of spring runoff in Schultz Pass might lure me to the roundest note of gurgling I’d ever heard, and that is where I’ll turn around and go home once I’ve had my fill. I no longer have to go anywhere, though I still let trail names lure me out. Picking a trail sets me loose in the woods, causes me to be caught in a canyon, puts me upright and mobile on a hillside, sends me cruising a meadow to a flat spot where I eat a meal bar and when I look up, there is bit fairy fishing line floating across a canyon, a spider web catching low western light.
How lonely, you might say, that woman by herself, that dot on the landscape without the companionship of human, animal or earbuds. Of course there have been times when I beamed at a view and wanted to lean toward another soul with my pointing, my exclamations, my insights. But actually, when I walk alone without an animal along, the other humans on the trail begin to look to me like wild creatures. The couple with matching windbreakers looks like swans gliding across the landscape, mated for life. The lone mountain bike focused on an uphill becomes a strong guardian elk presence about to hoot a warning to calves.
I carry enough water. I am an old Arizona gal after all. But I also carry silence in my pockets. Often I am map-free. Usually, I take no pen or notebook. Yes, my nylon windbreaker adds its rustling note to the swoon of wind in the pine tops. That glugging of water bottle sounds so loud after forty minutes of left, right, left, right shoe sound. Then a note of whump as a retreating deer pops up like a critter launched out of a toaster. When it stops its ears don’t stop, radar scanning for news of me. Such large wet eyes. Such brittle looking slim legs. How do they crash through the underbrush?
To go out alone on weekdays early in the morning or with the last hour of light, often shows me who lives out there. The fox that undulates between fallen logs to a crevice in a drainage. The owl disturbed from a roost, its wing beats carving a one-of-a-kind path through the air. With palm-size binoculars around my neck, I am quick to look closely when it roosts again. How oddly the head turns to peer back at me. A rabbit’s scurry. Lizards that startle the dry oak leaves. And that blonde yellow streak of scar on a tall old pine. Did last week’s intense wind tear the top off? Or was it an explosion of stray lightning? I find naked strips of wood caught in grass and pick one up, smell it, imagine it on my window sill at home, but then leave it to its next life.
It turns out the gift of my First Mile practice is its agility. Be it first hour of the day or last hour, I needn’t consult anyone to get launched. And whether I have an hour available or three, I needn’t plan much. In a way that August day forever changed the way I put my footsteps on the planet. For decades I’d been a goal-oriented, list-making consumer of outdoor places, proud of the maps on my walls where I drew lines along the miles I’d accomplished. Look at the glory shots tacked up nearby! But though it has been years since I stopped by a flower and a bee, I can still feel the deep breath I took there, how it informed my belly then, and still does. Because I was on a trail this morning, giving in to my deep heart’s hunger to see with stillness. Though, of course, there is no time for a hike, I have things to do, I’m alone, I don’t know where is the best place to go next, I went anyway and what stopped me this time was four dandelions at the edge of a rivulet. The globes of yellow mirrored in water made them eight dandelions, actually. A bouquet I didn’t rush past.
No longer do I need to know so much to get outdoors.
I don’t need much time.
I go. I walk.
