Escaping the Black Dog

At the last eye exam, the optometrist, who I suspect is a few years my junior, noted that I'd get by for one more year - two, tops - before "we need to start thinking about reading glasses.' Bifocals are a distinct possibility, but we need to see how things "progress," he said.

On my forehead, I have eight lines - I counted them today - that don't go away, etchings like crude cuts from a pocket knife along soft wood. Like scars, only these have no singular story, rather ones accumulated over time.

My right ankle pops loudly after I've left it in one position too long. A cliff jumping "accident" some 10 years ago stiffens my back, and I compensate by using my knees too much instead of bending over. So they pop, too. My knees, that is. My back doesn't. It just hurts. All the time.

My scalp bears no hint of balding, the gift of two grandfathers who both met their maker with full heads of wavy hair. You can't really tell how many of my sandy brown strands have turned a dull gray - except when my barber takes his clippers to my temples, and those tiny reminders of age come cascading down to lie in sharp relief against the black smock covering my shoulders.

This month I'll celebrate a milestone birthday, one that seemed impossibly distant when I was a child, and even more so in my 20s. So, naturally, I'm noticing all of these signs of impending doom, pieces of evidence that tell a story: I'm close to gathering half of the rosebuds I'll take with me to eternity.

And, just as naturally, I'm suddenly overcome with the urge to buy a motorcycle. Maybe get another tattoo or two. Sensible ones, of course, not procured at 1 a.m. in a parlor that caters to impetuous youth, located on Church Street in downtown Orlando.

I re-read Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" the other day. But perhaps I should have turned to Eliot, whose J. Alfred Prufrock seems more like a contemporary and less like a cautionary tale.

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Such are my thoughts as, during these past few weeks, I've given myself over to dreams of a serious hike: a real, honest-to-goodness gut-check trek that tests whether I believe, as I swear I do, in the redemptive power of suffering.

The AT is a natural candidate. Oh, I'll not likely attempt a thru-hike anytime soon. I'm too soft. I don't have enough time. I have too many responsibilities. Blah, blah, blah. But somehow I need it, or at least the dream of it. I've come to rely on the idea that a month or so of hoofing it in a mountain range that gave rise to my ancestors is necessary to shake off these mid-life doldrums. I see it as a trans-formative experience, as much that which took place when I was baptized in the cold waters of Guano Creek on a cold September morning in 1982.

And so the baby steps have begun. I'm seriously following a diet for the first time in my life, and trail running a few miles a week. Modest efforts, to be sure, but enough that I should be able to shave a few pounds off a midsection that's grown increasingly doughy since I discovered the joys of craft beer around the same time my metabolism took a nose dive.

These past two weeks, I spent some time traversing the Foothills Trail in my new home of upstate South Carolina - moving from West Virginia and starting a new life 500 miles away from the land of my birth is another of those signs of aging, of taking stock, of looking forward to where I'm going instead of where I've been.

The Foothills flows up and down in a jagged line across modest hills and valleys as the Blue Ridge falls away, heading east toward the Carolina piedmont, sloping ever downward to the coast, its soil turning from the black loam of eastern hardwoods to the red clay of evergreen forests. The trail is some 76 miles long, connecting Table Rock near the North Carolina/South Carolina border to Oconee State Park, nestled amid mountain laurel above Lake Jocassee. I spent four nights on the trail recently, waking early to raccoons sniffing my tent and rain drifting through the leaves before heading out, alone, along moss-covered rocks and ferns tickling my legs.

These steps, small though they may be, are ones that could lead to testing myself against a stretch of the AT, perhaps as early as next fall, when the Blue Ridge wraps itself in a chrysalis of red, orange and yellow, waiting to give birth to something approaching beauty.