A Walk to Remember

I cringed a little as I wrote the title for this blog.  But I think it's the correct one.  In college, my very sweet roommate, still a close friend, brought the movie "A Walk to Remember" with her on DVD. 

Now, in your freshman year of college, your first time living on your own, your little area in your dorm room has a way of becoming a first form of independent self-expression.  At least, that's how it was for me.  My first time living on my own, dorms where people come in and out all the time, I wanted my space to SAY something about me.  And I figured it was the same for other people.  And I had talked to my roommate on the phone before I went and I knew she was going to be super nice and respectful and I was so excited to meet her! 

When move-in day arrived, we unloaded and moved in the sweltering humidity to our tiny dorm room, meant for two but housing three people that year, with no A/C.  Eventually when we had our own areas set up we got the TV and the fridge and our little storage areas rigged up.  Rebecca had brought a ton of DVDs with her, and one of them, I recall, was "A Walk to Remember".  I had plenty of friends who loved the movie. I had seen it and hated it ("You have to promise you won't fall in love with me..." 🤢😣🙅). My roommate was/is more sentimental, more romantic, much more in touch with feelings than I am. And I could tell that from our first phone call together over the summer when got to know one another a bit and decided who would bring the fridge and who would bring the TV that we would be great friends and that she was way nicer than me.  

The reasons I don't like movies like "A Walk to Remember" have to do mostly with the fact that I hate feelings and they confuse me. Also, I will add, it is an emotionally manipulative movie and goes for the teen-girl jugular.  Boo.  But I am naming this blog post after it because I went on this very REAL walk, for a very REAL reason, and had very REAL feelings about it.  Which I will now describe to you. 

Meet John J Petty.  

He's no longer with us.  Everyone that knew him misses him a lot.  I'm his second child. Whether we know our parents at all, love them, hate them, or both at the same time, we think about our parents a lot.  Especially when there is something unfinished, unresolved.  I spend the entirety of this blog and a lot of my life stumbling all over the world, taking long walks and lots of pictures of rocks, and I spend a lot of that time thinking about my parents. It's also his sense of adventure that keeps my feet moving, and his intense pursuit of trying to hold ephemeral things in his hands for as long as possible that makes me like to take pictures, just like him.  

Capture the moment. Capture it.  

Even before he died, I had started to adventure more.  I liked to think about adventures we would take together, places we would go in his retirement that would lead us to places he loved that I had never been, the inverse, and then places neither of us had ever been.  We had plans, we two.  

Things change. I learned to love camping, then backpacking, and then I decided I wanted to try a 5 day backpacking trip to cross the Grand Canyon twice, alone, for my first-ever trip.  This is pure John J Petty.  

Thankfully, through a very silly set of circumstances, I did not go alone, and someone with backcountry experience and trained in survival skills ended up coming along.  But I would have gone by myself for sure.  I carefully planned. I took classes and a wilderness first aid course and got certified in a few things I thought I might need out there.  I outfitted to perfection. I meticulously mapped routes.  I calculated elevation changes and potential calorie burn per day. I looked at weather patterns and average temperature changes between day and night.  Even if I am a bit lofty in my aspirations, I am still a planner.   

I knew this was my place, and I knew this was my time, and I knew I was going to do it. I wanted to go in the dead of winter, when its quiet and cold in the canyon.  I wanted it to feel like it was all mine and see the bare minimum of other people. So, in mid January of 2020, just 2 months before the pandemic set in, I had the biggest adventure of my life to date. 

I used Las Vegas, where my fellow adventurer lived, as the home base and we started out from there. We took one day to drive there, did a warm up hike along the South Rim, which was absolutely frigid, packed and re-packed our packs, and bright and early the next morning, we set off into the canyon, down the South Kaibab trail.  

I remember a lot about that day.  It was so cold in the morning.  I barely knew the guy I was hiking with but I was so glad he was there.  He jacked up his knee 20 minutes into the descent but pressed on.  We talked about everything under the sun, and I remember feeling like my dad was with me the whole time.  

We crossed the Colorado River and made it to Phantom Ranch where I had made reservations months and months in advance.  TB waltzed in with no preparation and things worked out exactly perfectly for him.  We drank beer and played Connect 4 in the lodge.  A lady at dinner, who I don't think spends a lot of time around other people, stole my chocolate cake dessert.  Just stole it and ate it right in front of me. I was so surprised I couldn't really be mad. And I remember thinking I hope I stay this warm when I'm in the tent for the next three nights.  The night skies were immaculately clear and beautiful.  

I woke up sometime in the middle of the night and went outside with my sleeping bag to lay on a picnic table and look at them for a while, then I was locked out and had to wake someone up to let me back in to my cabin at some horrible hour.   

Day two was the easiest day of hiking we would have over the 5 days. Just seven short miles of relatively little elevation change to get to Cottonwood campground.  I got to know TB a bit better, I could see he clearly thought about camping in a more logical yet somehow very technologically-forward way, and I was sort of lost in the scenery.  His pack was too heavy and he was dying.  I was blissfully unaware of anything and felt great. Cottonwood was beautiful and secluded and I think there were maybe three other people in the canyon at the same time.  

That night was the coldest night I can remember, except for the first night I camped in Banff NP alone and my sleeping bag was definitely not warm enough.  I put on all the clothes I had and just prayed I would be able to sleep.  We got up early because we had the most miles on the third day, but we didn't have to bring our packs.  Up the north side of the canyon and then back down to Cottonwood was on the agenda.  We hiked three miles up the wall and then stopped and had a hot breakfast.  What a treat.  

Then we had to traverse icy trails and use the crampons TB tried to tell me we didn't need.  We totally did.  For the last two miles we were in three feet of snow but it was warm and sunny and smelled like pine the whole way.  Summiting on the North side of the canyon was exhilarating.  

Then it was back down again for a long rest, a lot of hot drinks and trying to stay warm when the sun went down again.  The next day we started our hike out of the canyon and made it to Indian Gardens, where the winds howled all night but the campground has trees and a nice rock wall to shelter a bit. Slightly warmer this night too.  

And then after that, we hiked out on the final day, day 5.  We crossed back over the Colorado and then climbed with heavy packs and weary bodies all the way back up the Bright Angel trail to the South Rim lodge.  

 

I can't tell you what the piping hot water from the tap, sitting by the fire in the lodge hall, and brushing my teeth with running water felt like.  I don't think there are words that can convey it. And then on the drive back to Las Vegas from the Grand Canyon, it was hard to talk.  I knew that I had just completed something important. My dad had been there, but not in body.  And a real person had been there, and knew he was part of my experience but not the totality of it. 

Climbing into the canyon and then climbing back out of it, the main thing I was looking at was reading the story of time through the rocks. I was thinking about how with each layer of rock changing, something really big had happened to make such a shift and leave such a permanent mark on the earth.  So it is with our souls.  The loss of my dad, the loss of any parent, makes an indelible mark and we can always find it in time. In a way it becomes a measure of time in our lives.  That's what I was thinking at the end of the journey. I'm not really sure where TB was.  

When I had to clean out my parents' house outside Richmond, I found, I think, all of the photos both sides of my family had ever offered to anyone. My mom just took all of them.  She never had a plan. She just wanted to know she had them.  So of course, my little perfectionist self had to digitize, archive, sort, and label all of them.  Which was the best, and the worst.  But I did find these pictures of Dad when he and his Air Force Academy buddies did the same trek in the late 1960's: 

So I get to know that I literally walked in the footsteps of my father. And when I walked them, he walked with me in a different way.  We walked together. He guided me from where he is now.  And I think he'll keep doing that.  And so I will keep walking too.