I spent my last week of R&R (Rest & Relaxation leave) in Portugal hiking the coast:

Most of the hiking was by the sea, but there were a few inland excursions:

Oh, and I hiked my boots to death:

They disintegrated nearly simultaneously on the last hiking day.  I’ve had these Lowas for 10 years and many, many happy miles.  Miraculously, the duct tape held until we reached the hotel.

I was hiking with an adventure tour company I’d vacationed with in the past.  We had 14 hikers and three guides who rotated driving (2 drivers/day) and hiking (1 guide/day) duties.  Like with previous tours of this type, the itinerary, activities, scenery, lodging, and food were outstanding.  But unlike with previous tours, we didn’t hike as a group.  It was every man for himself on the trail.  I didn’t care for it.

We had some pretty aggressive speed-hikers mixed with some bird-watchers, flower-peepers, photographers, and other medium- and slower-paced hikers.  To my chagrin, the other hikers quickly formed trail cliques and each went at their own speed, without regard for the day’s schedule, the other hikers, or the ability of the guide to keep tabs on us.  As the day wore on, the guide would have to run increasingly faster and farther up and down the trail to count noses as the distance increased between the speedy and slower hikers.  Every now and then I would start to catch up to a group or a guide, and they’d see me, but they’d often go on down the trail without waiting for me to join them. I made it known to the guides and other hikers that I wanted to hike with a group, but I guess they all figured that some other group would pick me up.  None did.

Alas, I ended up hiking alone most of the time.  I’d never been on a group hike where the participants and guides didn’t try to maintain group cohesion and where the members of the group took little to no interest in contributing to the benefit of anybody outside their own small circle.  I was confused most of the time: my fellow travelers were chatty at breakfast and chummy at dinner and polite but unapologetic as they abandoned me on the trail.  So were we friends or weren’t we?  Strangers on the trail and friends everywhere else?  What was going on?

After repeated episodes of being merrily deserted without so much as a backward glance, I couldn’t shake off the creeping feeling that there was something wrong with me.  Why did the group keep breaking up?  Was my desire to stick together realistic or an artifact from my months in a war zone where we all faithfully kept watch on each other?  Wasn’t it unsafe to not have a buddy system in the wilderness (especially when we were hiking in heavy brush on forking trails with low visibility)?  Did I have warped expectations of what this trip should be?  Was I unlikable or pitiable or not cool enough for these people?

It’s too easy to get sucked into that self-questioning shame spiral when you spend many solitary hours and miles on the trail.  Actively hating on yourself pretty much every waking minute takes a lot of energy.  While it’s a terrible way to treat yourself, the good news is that you really can’t keep up that level of paranoia and self-loathing for very long.  Or at least I can’t.  About three and a half days into this odyssey, I concluded that there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with wanting to hike as a group, and the participants who couldn’t be bothered to help make the trip fun and safe for all were selfish.

I got a lot happier when I stopped trying to make a connection with these people who included me one minute and excluded me the next.  I wasn’t mean or spiteful or angry, I just politely but unapologetically disengaged when it was clear I wasn’t getting a satisfactory return on my friendliness investment.  Instead, I read or worked on my computer or popped in my earbuds and listened to my iPod.  Oddly, people who ditched me every day on the trail gave me dirty looks and showed other indications that they did not approve of my failure to socialize.  Seems it was ok by these folks if I was alone because they abandoned me, but it was not ok for me to be alone on my own terms.  There’s a psychology paper in there somewhere.

Anyway, I finished out the week doing my own thing on the hikes and other activities.  I enjoyed the company for what it was in the moment, without any expectations (of them or myself) for what it might be in the next moment.  To my delight, on the last hike of the last day the guide gave the speed-hikers a GPS and sent them on their way, then led the rest of us on a hike as a group.  It was a treat to have the birders and flower-lovers pointing out and identifying what was flying or blooming along our route, and to be able to ask the guide about local landmarks and history.  When the soles of my hiking boots started to separate, it was a fellow hiker’s duct tape that patched them up.  This is what I’d wanted the whole trip.  It felt good.

But I’m no sucker: these people were not my friends and I knew it.  We smiled and hugged and parted ways, and I came back to Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, happy with my break overall, though with a touch of lingering self-doubt about what I’d expected and experienced during the hiking tour.

That self-doubt was squashed in short order.  When I described how I had spent so much time hiking alone, my coworkers were outraged.  When I explained that I seemed to be the only person on the trip who had a problem with the hiking format, and that perhaps it was too needy of me to expect to be among a group with a guide on this trip, these ideas were immediately dismissed as preposterous.  To a man, they all said the same thing: a group hike means hiking with a group, the leader is responsible for keeping the group together, and the group members are responsible to one another.  And you don’t need gung-ho military leave-no-man-behind training to know that you don’t allow somebody to hike alone on the trail: it’s just common sense.

It was such a huge relief for me to hear this; even though I knew it deep down, I really needed to hear it from some other people.  I would never have guessed in a million years I’d have to leave the “real world” and come back to this wild war zone (the nuttiest place I’ve ever been) for a sanity check.  You could knock me over with a feather.

Postscript

Recently at lunch I sat down at a table with four men from my office who were just finishing up.  I told them to go on and not wait for me.  They didn’t budge.  They stayed and chatted and when I finished my lunch we all got up and left together.  Did they stay because they’re gung-ho military leave-no-man-behind (even in the dining hall) guys?  No.  They stayed because sometimes you suffer a little bit of inconvenience for the sake of including others. I love these guys, my wingmen.  It was nothing to them but it meant the world to me that they would wait so we could walk back to the office together.  As a group.

MM