It had taken a bit of cajoling to get Kathy to come along, as she referred to Deb and me as “real” hikers whose abilities, she felt, surpassed hers. If real hikers are people who spend an hour looking for trailheads, leave the keys to their destination car in their starting car, get lost on a regular basis, and tend to overestimate their abilities when planning a hike, then she had us pegged, we were real hikers! Needless to say, we had to maneuver delicately when persuading our dear friend to join us; we had to paint a picture of competence without scaring her with our incompetence. Apparently, we finessed our script well enough to entice her on a less than desirable day.

The first mile of the hike was a flat section of road that took us east through a sleepy suburban neighborhood, before turning south onto an old woods road. This wasn’t a particularly appealing section of trail, as it was littered with old tires, appliances, car remnants, and other assorted forms of detritus left over from its more accessible days. Soon, however, the steady climb to Lamentation Mountain commenced and within a quarter of an hour the views opened up. We were trekking easily along the ridgeline with views of the Hanging Hills and Hubbard Park to the west. Ascending down toward Crescent Lake (also known as the Bradley-Hubbard Reservoir), I illustrated to Kathy what a “real” hiker I was by tripping headlong over a rock and wedging myself, face-first, between two small boulders. We laughed uproariously, and I popped two Advil to help stave off the discomfort that would inevitably wrack my middle-aged body that evening.