Common Sentences

The Joy of the Solitary Hike

Welcome!  I’m Richard Schwartz, a retired high school Social Studies teacher from Morristown, New Jersey.  In “Common Sentences” I’ll share my thoughts on history, sports, popular culture, politics, religion.  I hope you’ll find it engaging.

Traveling drab I-287 and I-80 constitutes the small price I pay for hiking at Jenny Jump State Forest in northwest New Jersey.

You pull off 80 West, at the end of the Exit 20 ramp, and there is a sign.  The left arrow points to…

HOPE

The right arrow does not point to…

DESPAIR

…It points to Blairstown.

Take that left turn.  You will soon find yourself at a crossroads in a place that defies Jersey stereotypes.  It’s the village of Hope, New Jersey.  Hope has a Brigadoon feel; its fieldstone buildings conjure the eighteenth century.  Turn left and you’ll pass an ancient mill, now an inn; its downstairs taproom contains a little indoor stream.  Drive a little further and turn right onto Shiloh Road and you’ll feel as though you’re in the hill country of Maryland or Kentucky or Pennsylvania.  Cattle graze in a field.  You’re a long way from strip malls, the Tick Tock Diner, Caesar’s Atlantic City or the Bayway oil refineries.

In retirement I like to hike on Friday mornings.  Friday school teaching offered fun and challenge.  You could often feel a special energy on a Friday morning as the weekend approached.  Maybe there was a big game or a staging of the school musical that night or the next day, or maybe it was just eagerness for the weekend.  You had to know how to channel the students’ energy.  I learned that I had to shut up as much as possible on Fridays and to make that a day for small group work and moving students out of their seats and around the classroom in multiple short duration activities.  When I figured that out, Fridays became a fun teaching challenge.

As I walked along Jenny Jump’s trails the other day, I thought of how liberated I felt to be hiking on this winter Friday morning.  My work brought me fulfillment, friendship, purpose.  I worked with delightful young people and wonderful colleagues.   But I was glad to be in the hills of Warren County this Friday morning rather than in school.  On Friday morning hikes I always think of the noble work teachers are doing in their classrooms even as I’m enjoying my freedom.  But I don’t wish to change places.

This was a solitary hike.  There are also non-solitary hikes, and some other day I hope to write about the joys of hiking with others.  Today is about the joy of the solitary hike.

Friday morning at Jenny Jump began with spitting snow.  I encountered no human being from the moment I began walking to the time I ended.  From 9 AM to noon it was just trails, trees, rocks, changeable skies, birdsong, and water; water singing its way steeply downhill, and the still waters of Ghost Lake.

I walk along.  I forget my things-to-do list.  Although at spots I can hear traffic on 80, the prevailing soundtrack is the wind in the trees, along with my footfalls and, as I head uphill, my own labored beathing.  There’s time to pay attention to my surroundings.  There’s time to reflect, time to think.  I say nothing for three hours.

Sometimes important things happen in the quiet.  One mild day last winter, on the Mount Tammany fire road atop the Delaware Water Gap, I came to understand that the time had come for me: I was so in love that I wanted to marry.  On April 15 of last year, I sat on a rock by Ghost Lake and decided that it was time to retire from teaching.  In both of those cases, I came to understand what I wanted and needed to do.  Both decisions happened in places where I was the only human being in sight.

How does the solitary hike lead me to good decisions?  I’m outside my customary environs, for one thing, so perhaps I’m a little more alert, alive, attentive.  I’m also a lot less distracted by the daily demands of home or workplace.  There’s time—I’m going to be out here for two or three hours, and I don’t need to sustain conversation or complete tasks. And there’s space.  No one crowds me.

But perhaps it’s not just environmental.  As I take in the hills, the boulders, the waters, the woodlands, the skies, the sounds, as I think about the good people who dug and maintained the trails and painted the blazes to guide hikers along, I feel thankful to a Creator who I believe put all this in motion.  And somehow my best decisions tend to come when I feel loved and blessed by that same Creator.  The solitary hike gets me to that place of awe-inspired thankfulness, and great good comes of that.