today's truest truth

I was re-reading my "itchy feet and trip dreaming" post and it suddenly occurred to me that many of my favorite travel memories with Greg were times that didn't sound like that much fun; indeed, some of them were pretty awful as we lived them. (Fleabag motel in Seligman, AZ, anyone?) If any of you read that post, you probably thought that if those were some of my favorite memories, you would hate to see the bad ones.

I realized that for me, anyway, something is almost never really great unless parts of it are really bad, too, or really hard, or really not that fun. I was reading something I wrote about our Cracker Lake hike (in Glacier National Park 2 years ago). That hike kind of sucked. First of all, I started our time in Montana out by leaving my wedding rings in Wyoming. So we had to go get them, and by the time we got back to Montana, the weather had turned for the worse. It rained and rained and was foggy and rained some more. Well, we decided to hike anyway, and the sadistic guys camped next to us told us Cracker Lake would be a nice little day hike, maybe "a little" muddy, though. Well, we started off one gray morning, and made a couple miles pretty easily. Then the mud. At this point, we didn't really want to turn back and kept hoping it would get better, but it just got worse. We could barely hike, I slipped and fell and ended up wearing a good portion of the trail (and horse apples) on my clothing, and it was so thick it totally covered our boots at times. (I believe the muddiest boot contest was invented on this trip, but I'm not entirely sure.) Then it started to rain in earnest. Not long after that was when we started noticing the bear tracks in the mud. Large, dinner-plate sized tracks. And scat. Enormous piles of it. Gargantuan scat. Still we trekked on, thinking that if it was going to suck this bad, we were at least going to get to see the view at the lake. We stopped briefly for lunch in a meadow. As soon as we weren't moving, we were freezing. That's about the time it started to snow, as well. Well, we made it to the lake, turned around, and hiked out. This simple 12-mile day hike took us 8 hours. It really wasn't that much fun while we were doing it. About that hike I wrote, "it was wonderful in the way of wonderful things that are comprised largely of terrible ones." To this day, that hike is still one of my favorite memories. It wouldn't have been nearly as memorable if the weather had been great, or there were no bears. We were proud of just doing it, I guess. It was wonderful in the way of wonderful things that are comprised largely of terrible ones. I like that line. Today it feels like the truest truth I know. That the best memories and the best stories are the best precisely because they are also the worst.
That's all....my truest truth for today....