“Dad,” Barrett said, “let’s hike up to one of the high mountain lakes. They say the fishing is really good up there.”

Barrett’s suggestion surprised me. Usually my thirteen-year old son says he hates walking. I was pleased with his suggestion but also concerned. A hike to the high lakes is strenuous, and you need to be in shape. I am not in shape.

“That would be great, Barrett. The closest I know is Lone Pine Lake.”

“Is the fishing good?”

“I would think so. It’s about six miles up the East Inlet Trail. I doubt many people get up that far to fish.”

“Are you sure? I want to catch fish. Are there any lakes higher up?”

“We could go a couple of miles further to Lake Verna and Spirit Lake.”

“We’ll go to Spirit Lake.”

It was settled, just like that. Both of us would get what we wanted. I would get a hike with my son, and he would get fish. A fifteen, almost sixteen, mile round-trip might be a bit long, but I wasn’t about to say a discouraging word.

So on Sunday morning Sybil dropped us at East Inlet Trailhead at the end of Grand Lake. Barrett complained we were getting a late start. It was 6:15.

From the outset I recalled making the same hike two years ago to Lone Pine, which is one of four glacier lakes that sit in the lap of Mount Baldy. I went alone then and spent a good deal of the day thinking about a college friend named Harrison Kohler and how he almost got himself killed in Vietnam but got back. I had my guidebook to Western wildflowers along and stopped to identify some along the trail. I especially liked the lupines. They reminded me of bluebonnets in Texas.

“Come on, Dad! Pick up the pace. We’ll never get there at this rate.” For the first of about a hundred times, Barrett used the words “pick up the pace.” He seemed to derive from them the same kind of sadistic pleasure that drill instructors have in barking orders to recruits at Marine boot camp.

“Pick up the pace, Dad!”

“We’re going fast enough, Barrett.”

“No, we’re not. I don’t want to fish Lone Pine. I want to fish Verna and then Spirit Lake. The sign at the trailhead said that it is seven miles to Verna and eight to Spirit. We can make it to Verna in two and a half hours.”

“Barrett, there’s a 1900-foot elevation rise on this trail.”

“So?”

“So we’re going up.”

“So we’re going up. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is that this is hard work.”

“Dad, I want to be fishing at 10 o’clock. Pick up the pace.”

That’s pretty much the way it went. Barrett kept insisting we speed up. I kept insisting we were going fast enough. I couldn’t go any faster.

Barrett had no trouble walking and talking at the same time. He ranged across movies, music, friends, school, and sports, endlessly he talked.

A son can never appreciate the pleasure a father receives from hearing his son’s voice. My taking pleasure in Barrett’s voice had to be enough, because I couldn’t keep up my end of the conversation except for an occasional grunt or brief question. You have to be able to control your breathing to talk, and I started panting about a half-mile up the trail, just above Adams Falls.

“I’ve been waiting for ten minutes,” Barrett said as I flopped down on the rock beside him.

“Thanks for waiting,” I wheezed. My chest heaved. My legs ached.

“We’ll never make it like this, Dad,” he said. “It’s nearly 8 o’clock and we haven’t gone three miles, have we?”

“Three miles in less than two hours up a trail like this is pretty good, son.”

“Dad, we won’t have but a few hours to fish. You’ll want to head back by 3 o’clock.”

“Listen, son, people my age die doing things like this. I don’t care how much time we have to fish. I just want to make it to Lone Pine Lake.”

“Dad, I told you I want to go to Spirit Lake. It’s only two miles beyond Lone Pine.”

“We can talk about that later. First, we’ve got to get to Lone Pine. That’s another three miles from here.” I trudged past him. Over my shoulder I asked, “Say, Barrett, do you know CPR?”

“What’s CPR?”

By now we were moving beyond the Lodge Pole pines and into Engelman spruce and Douglas firs. The spruce glimmered in the broken light of a partially cloudy day. Most of them were small, not over ten and fifteen feet. The firs were grand, especially along the streams that regularly crossed the trail. Here and there we moved through a grove of aspen. “What’s that smell?” Barrett asked. “It’s terrible.” He had waited for me again, and I was glad to catch up.

“That’s smoke. Haven’t you noticed the fire damage? We’ve been in it for three hundred yards.” I pointed above the trail to the burned over region. A band of aspen was charred and still reeking with the stench of smoke. “It looks like the trail helped the firefighters contain the fire. See, the fire jumped the trail only in one place, right back there.”

“I didn’t see that,” Barrett replied. “I just knew that something around here stinks.”

The difference between us was clear: he wanted to catch fish; I wanted to take a walk with him.

Maybe that’s the way it has to be with parents and kids: parents are ancillary to what kids have in mind. We resist and complain and ask them to consider others, especially us. But we lose out and end up serving whatever projects the kids devise. We thus are disposable, to be used for a while, and then to be left behind as surely as Barrett left me yesterday morning on the side of Mount Baldy.

Kids don’t serve any purpose for parents other than to be kids. I huff about expecting this or that from Barrett, but it’s a show: he’s enough in himself, at least for me, and he knows it. He doesn’t have to do much of anything. I’ll be satisfied. He can disappoint me, but my regard for him will not change. It is unconditional. Well, almost.

“Dad,” Barrett said as we moved across one of the steepest parts of the trail. It was already 8:45. We were still a ways from Lone Pine Lake, but had made five miles in two-and-a-half-hours. Not bad on a steep trail. “Dad, it just occurred to me: I might not catch any fish today.”

“That’s right,” I huffed. “You might not.”

“I tell you what, Dad. I’m going to be really pissed off if I don’t catch any fish.”

I’m uncomfortable with my son using such an inelegant expression, but I didn’t correct him. Let him use words proper to the occasion, I thought. He was right: he is always pissed off if he doesn’t catch any fish.

“Will you?” I replied.

“You’re damn right, Dad. I’ll be pissed off. This will be an incredible waste of a day if I don’t catch any fish, I mean, a hell of a lot of fish.”

Again ignoring the infelicity of speech, I gasped, “We’ll see.”

Another few turns on the switchback and I had to stop again. Even Barrett seemed content to stop for a drink of water.

“Barrett, I’ve been thinking of something that Saint Teresa said.”

“Who’s that?”

“Saint Teresa of Avila. She was a mystic, a holy woman in Spain six or seven hundred years ago. She had visions, and the Pope made her a saint.”

“So, what did she say?”

She said, “It’s heaven all the way to heaven, and it’s hell all the way to hell.”

“Say that again.”

“It’s heaven all the way to heaven, and it’s hell all the way to hell.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

I said, “I can’t explain it.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“It’s one of those things that” . . . and he interrupted me to take over the sentence.

“I know,” he said. In a tone mocking me, he added, “”It’s one of those things that you to have to know before someone can explain it.’ Dad, why do you always say that?”

“I don’t always say that. I say it only when it fits. There are just some things you somehow have to know before somebody else can explain them.”

“Dad, that’s doesn’t make any sense.”

“I think it does.”

“But if that’s true,” Barrett said,” how will I ever know what Saint-whoever-she-was meant.”

“When you need to,” I answered.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you will know what it means when you need to know it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense either. But tell me, if it’s heaven all the way to heaven, and it’s hell all the way to hell, what is it right now, right now on this hike? You tell me: is this heaven or hell?”

“I’m not sure,” I panted.

“OOOO-KKKK,” Barrett said, standing up. “Enough of that stuff, let’s go.” He backed down below me on the trail and said, “Here, let me give you a push.” He placed both his hands on my butt and started pushing me up the mountain.

“Barrett, that’s great. Amazing,” I shouted, as my breath returned. I was a blocking dummy in football practice: he was shoving me along. I felt fifty pounds lighter.

“That’s enough, man,” he said, after a hundred yards or so. This summer Barrett has taken sometimes to calling me man. “Okay, man,” he will say. I don’t know what this change means, but man is not the same as Dad. “You go ahead, man,” he continued. “Go way on up. I want you to see me run up the hill. Here, man, take my backpack.”

“No way, man,” I said. “I’m lucky to carry my own backpack.”

I moved up the mountain without benefit of Barrett’s posterior propulsion. I still felt lighter from the push. I hiked a hundred yards or so into the rock field and remembered those grayish granite rocks from two years ago. I wrote to my friend Harrison and told him they reminded me of a bombed out region, something like he must have seen in Vietnam. It’s moon-like, eerie and intimidating, all that geologic debris pulled haphazardly by an avalanche down the craggy face of the mountain.

I turned down the trail to see Barrett racing up across the rock field. His red backpack bounced above his shoulders. His stride looked two yards long as he bore toward me. It was as amazing as anything I saw all day, my son striding up that trail like an antelope. I was frightened, thinking his heart might burst with the strain. I read in the paper just last week about a well-conditioned basketball player falling over dead after a pick-up game in Salt Lake City. I wanted to tell Barrett to slow down, don’t over do it, but I was struck dumb by the sight of this lanky youngster leaping grayish rocks, bounding toward me.

“How’s that, man?” he asked, as he bent over to breathe.

“That’s great,” I said. “I don’t know how you did it.”

“You didn’t think I could run that far, did you? I could have gone further.”

Barrett stood for a minute, and I found myself doing what the old are bound to do: I resented his youth and energy, his victory over the mountain. My resentment turned to thought: He is no happier, no more accomplished, I thought, in his youth than I was in mine, and maybe less. Compared to me at his age, he has traveled more and read more books, seen more baseball games, and caught more fish. But I was more self-sufficient and less dependent on being entertained. I could bear silence and didn’t mind being alone. I could milk a cow and play the piano and hammer a nail and paint a house and stand up and give a talk. I knew how to pray and didn’t sass my mother. I could work all day and do things I didn’t want to do just because I had to do them. I loved Chopin. I don’t remember whining, and I didn’t know what the word bored meant. When I was thirteen and saw these same mountains for the first time, I stood and gawked until my eyes hurt. Why, I thought, doesn’t he?

“Come on, man,” Barrett said. “Pick up the pace. We gotta make it to Lone Pine by 9:30.” We picked our way through the rocks, those grayish-whitish-deadish-moonscape rocks.

I thought it would be good to rest under the huge firs at Lone Pine Lake as I did two years ago and eat an apple. I could use my favorite knife, the one I’ve had for twenty years—I call it Old Crafty —to carve the apple and clean a few fish if we caught some keepers. Two years ago Lone Pine jumped with fish.

But Barrett insisted we keep moving, so we turned up the trail, on toward Spirit Lake, another two miles and over an hour up. He left me about the time the trail ran into the mountain. “Unimproved Trail” the map said for that stretch of the way, and it was. I lost sight of him among the trees and through the boulders.

I didn’t mind: I knew the justification for his day lay ahead. It was all out ahead of him, the very reason for his coming to that mountain was yet to be. It was almost 11 o’clock and we had walked almost eight miles and his day had not begun to happen. Everything that preceded his arrival at Spirit Lake was to be gotten rid of as fast as possible. It was like his life: it wasn’t happening yet. It had not begun, not his life, not his day.

My day was already sufficient. I didn’t need anything more. I would push on to Spirit Lake, but I was pleased to have made it again to Lone Pine and with my son to boot. I didn’t need a fish.

By mid-afternoon, Barrett had no reason to be pissed off. Thirty-nine Brook trout, that’s what we caught. We released them all. Barrett had a yen to stay at Spirit Lake until we had landed forty-two. That way he could break the record of forty-one he set a few years ago with his grandfather “Racehorse” Cochran. I told him that thirty-nine should stand as his personal record because that other time Racehorse caught most of the Bluegills. This time Barrett did most of the catching.

Time and rain ran us off Spirit Lake. With a light rain falling, we packed it in at around 5:30. I wanted to be off the trail before complete darkness fell and we got too wet. Even with my orange poncho on, I could feel the dampness getting through.

Barrett caught a lot more fish than I because he spent more time at it and because he is a better fisherman. He takes risks. I don’t. I throw my fly to the open water where there is little chance of getting hung up. Barrett likes the edges, under the rocks or alongside the willows and submerged logs. Sometimes he misses and gets snared on a log or a branch. Several times I watched him scrambling around a stretch of water, balancing on rocks and logs, moving through the river willows, trying to get to a point from which he could free his fly without breaking the line. I told him his mother would be mad if he got his feet wet, but he kept on going. Fifteen minutes before we quit, he stepped into a marsh and got mud and water over the top of his boots. Both feet were soaked, but he said it didn’t bother him.

“Coming down is much worse than going up, Dad, much worse.”

“Not for me.

“Yes, it is, Dad. Coming down, you don’t have anything to look forward to.”

We had passed Lone Pine Lake and the rock field and Slippery Rock camping area. But another five miles lay ahead of us, and it was already 6:30.

“Going up,” Barrett said, “I thought about catching fish. That took my mind off walking. Going down, all you got to look forward to is getting back home. There’s nothing to do at home.”

“I feel great coming down. I feel great because we made it all the way to Spirit Lake. I wasn’t sure I could make it eight miles up this mountain.”

“Oh, man, you knew you could make it.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I don’t know what’s the big deal about walking eight miles,” he said.

“And going down is good, because I can think about watching you catch all those fish. I like to watch you catch fish.”

“That’s good,” he agreed, “yeah, that’s good. It was the best fishing I ever had.”

“Better than Magnolia Lake with Papaw?” I asked.

“Yeah, better than that. I was fishing with worms then. Papaw used a fly. Today I used a fly, and that’s more fun. And trout are more fun to catch than bream, they just are.”

We dropped into a stretch of silence as you always do on a long hike. The light rain continued, and I liked its tingle on my face. I thought of John Updike and how many of his characters take pleasure in rain. They drive through it, and get out and walk around in it. They turn their faces up to it. One says, “We do love being touched from above—by rain, by snow.”

“You go ahead, Dad, and pick up the pace.”

I don’t know where the energy came from, but I found myself half-jogging down the trail. I found it easier letting go into gravity’s force and allowing my own corpulence to carry me downhill. For a good mile, I skipped ahead, deftly (for me) moving my feet among the rocks. The switchbacks were fun going down. A couple of times Barrett stumbled and had trouble keeping up with me.

By 7:15 the rain stopped, and we came to the towering rock ledge that presides over the meadow. I recalculated our ETA, and told Barrett that we would reach the trailhead by 8:30, maybe 8:45. We had less than three miles to go, but I didn’t want to hurry now. The mountain and valley and everything in it had been refreshed by rain.

I told Barrett to stop for a preview of what was ahead. We walked over to the ledge and looked down on the lush meadow stretching westward to Grand Lake. Looking across the meadow, Barrett and I saw the lake shimmering down and out ahead, and the sun dropping behind the hills. For the rest of the day we would be walking in the afterlife of sunset.

“Dad,” Barrett said after another thirty minutes of silence, “the worst thing about coming down is thinking you are almost there when you’re not.”

“I know what you mean.”

By now we had settled into a steady pace and the trail was wide enough to accommodate the two of us side by side. At one point, Barrett broke off and walked over to get a good look at East Inlet Creek where it broadens and slows down in the flatness of the meadow. I was afraid he might want to start fishing again, but he only said he wanted to come back there and try his luck another day.

“I would like to have another long hike before we leave Colorado,” I said, “another one like this.”

“I don’t know about that, man. I don’t know if I want to do this again or not.”

“We’ll see. Say, what time did we tell Mom we would be back?”

“You said around 8. But how will she know when we get there?”

“I told her we would walkinto town and call.”

“Dad! That’s another mile at least. You mean we have to walk another mile into town?”

“Maybe Mother will come to meet us,” I said. “Let’s hope she’s at the trailhead waiting for us.”

“Man, I hope so.”

Passing through the long stretch of meadow, Barrett took hold of my elbow and held lightly to my sleeve. I wasn’t sure whether he was letting me escort him down the trail or whether he wanted, so late in the day, to protect his old man against a fall. Maybe he wanted to walk by my side, the two of us together.

“Dad, look at that!”

“Incredible!” I said.

“That’s beautiful, man!” We stood quiet for a minute or two. “Mom would love that, wouldn’t she, Dad?”

“She really would,” I said.

“Dad, look! There are two!”

A full double rainbow stretched the length of the meadow. I usually live in the Lone Star State, but I don’t know what they call this one. Maybe they call it the Rainbow State. In three weeks we’ve seen five or six stunning ones. Last Sunday we saw a double over Shadow Mountain Lake. With so many, you would think they would become commonplace.

But rainbows never become commonplace, not double ones, anyway.

“Tell me when we get close to the end, man. I want to run the last half- mile.”

“Then, man, you had better start running right now.”

He let go of my arm and took off down the trail, oblivious to the fifteen miles he had already covered and forgetful of fish, fatigue, and his father. The last thing I saw through the trees was a red backpack and a shock of blond hair catching the fading rays of reflected light. Earlier I had wondered whether he had blisters from walking in wet shoes. Now he was running away from me. I thought I might catch a glimpse of him from the next rise in the trail.

I stopped and turned for a last look across the meadow at Mount Baldy. It’s notorious in these parts at sunset. Baldy is rightly named. It is a massive, bare rock mountain, stark and grand in its austerity. It scowls. But yesterday, Baldy glowed deeply iridescent, beyond red, nearly crimson. It seemed that the source of the glow was not reflected sunlight off the clouds but light internal to the mountain itself, so radiantly it shone.

I walked in alone thinking about getting back to the cabin. I didn’t want to walk another mile to a telephone in town. I hoped Sybil would come on to meet us, and figured she might. She would be anxious to see us and to hear how it all went, whether Barrett caught fish and whether I made the hike okay. I didn’t want to tell her that I had let Barrett get his feet wet and maybe blistered.

As the trail dropped below Adams Falls, I heard her voice through the dark. She was there, waiting for us.

---

For thirty-one years, Ted Estess was the leader of Honors education at the University of Houston including as Founding Dean of the Honors College. Though he left the deanship in August of 2008, Estess remains a member of the Honors College Faculty and a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston while holding the Jane Morin Cizik Chair. He has contributed a wide range of scholarship and creative work and has incorporated this research into his teaching and service. He has published a book on Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel and a number of articles on various writers and topics.