My Hiking Partner Said My Bad Knee Needed Easier Trails—Except There Was Nothing Wrong With My Knee

PART 1

I knew something was wrong when the trip leader looked at my knees before she looked at my face.

It was Friday afternoon at Pine Ridge Lodge, the kind of place that believed plaid upholstery could solve any decorating problem. Twenty-three members of the Midstate Weekend Hikers were crowded around a long table while rain ticked against the windows and Benita Cruz handed out route maps for Saturday.

I had driven three hours for the fall weekend with my friend Joanne Mercer, who was across the room tightening the laces on a pair of boots she had owned since the second Obama administration.

Benita smiled when I reached the front of the line.

“Amy. Good. I put you on the lake loop with Joanne.”

I looked at the colored route cards in her hand. Blue was lake loop. Yellow was the moderate falls trail. Red was the ridge route I had checked on the registration form two months earlier.

“I signed up for the ridge,” I said.

Benita’s smile changed from ordinary to careful.

“I know. I thought the lake loop might be a better call this weekend.”

“Because of the rain?”

“The ridge should dry by morning.”

“Then why?”

She lowered her voice. “How is your knee?”

“My what?”

Behind me, somebody laughed at something by the coffee station. Joanne looked over, saw me talking to Benita, and lifted one hand.

Benita glanced at the line forming behind me. “We can talk after orientation.”

“No, we can talk now. What is wrong with my knee?”

“I’m not saying anything is wrong.”

“You just reassigned me because of it.”

A man I knew from two spring hikes stepped around us to get a yellow card. Benita waited until he moved away.

“Joanne said it had been flaring again.”

For a second I thought she had mixed me up with someone else.

“My knee does not flare.”

Benita’s eyebrows rose.

“I don’t even know what that means in relation to my knee.”

“I may have misunderstood.”

“Did Joanne say my knee?”

“Yes.”

I looked across the room again.

Joanne had stopped tying her boots.

At fifty-four, I had collected a normal assortment of complaints about my body. My left shoulder objected to sleeping on hotel pillows. My feet required better shoes than they had at thirty. I could no longer spend an entire Saturday painting a bedroom ceiling and then pretend Sunday would be pleasant.

My knees, however, were fine.

More than fine, actually. Hiking was the one form of exercise I had kept through my divorce, two job changes, both of my children leaving home, and the year I briefly believed hot yoga might be a personality.

Joanne and I had started walking together eleven years earlier, when we were both newly single and both tired of people suggesting wine tastings as a substitute for having plans. We began with county-park loops, worked up to ten-mile day hikes, and eventually became the women in the club who arrived early, carried extra blister tape, and made jokes about the “slow group” while secretly appreciating that the slow group usually knew where the good bakeries were.

The jokes had always felt harmless.

Standing in front of Benita, I was suddenly less sure what was harmless.

“Did Joanne tell you this today?” I asked.

“No. In the route notes last week.”

“What route notes?”

Benita folded the remaining cards against her chest.

“We ask trip leaders to flag anything that affects pace or route placement. Joanne emailed me because you two registered together.”

“And she said I had a bad knee.”

“She said you’d been having trouble with it and might not want to make a big thing out of changing groups.”

A strange little heat moved up my neck.

That sentence sounded enough like me to be plausible. I did hate making a production out of accommodations. I hated being fussed over more.

That did not make it true.

Benita said, “If your knee is fine, take the ridge card.”

I took the red one.

Then I put it back.

Not because I wanted the lake loop. Because I did not want to turn route assignment into a public demonstration of my cartilage.

“I want to understand what happened first.”

“Of course.”

Across the room, Joanne stood.

“Amy?” she called. “Everything okay?”

I looked at her.

For eleven years, I had known the expressions Joanne used when she had forgotten a birthday, when she was trying not to laugh, when she wanted me to order dessert so she could have two bites without calling it dessert.

The expression she wore now was none of those.

It was the face of someone who already knew the answer to the question I had not asked yet.

I folded the blue trail map in half and walked toward her.

“Apparently,” I said, “we need to talk about my knee.”

Joanne went still.

I did not need Benita to tell me who had supplied the story.