My Hiking Partner Said My Bad Knee Needed Easier Trails—Except There Was Nothing Wrong With My Knee
PART 7
In early November, we tried a seven-mile loop at Red Oak Preserve.
The morning was clear, cold enough for gloves, and the parking lot was almost empty.
Joanne arrived with the camera.
I pretended not to notice.
For the first mile, we moved easily.
At the second, the trail climbed.
Joanne slowed.
I slowed too.
At the top she stopped, not because she was gasping, but because sunlight was coming through bare branches onto a patch of frost.
She lifted the camera.
I waited.
A year earlier, I would have made a joke about our average pace.
That morning I said nothing.
It did not make me generous.
It made me observant.
After the picture, Joanne stayed where she was.
“You ready?” I asked.
“In a minute.”
“Sure.”
She sat on a fallen log.
I remained standing.
Then I sat beside her.
We drank water.
No crisis.
After perhaps five minutes, Joanne said, “I think I’m done.”
“With the break?”
“With the hike.”
I looked at the trail sign. We were two and a half miles from the far loop and less than two back to the car.
“You’re tired?”
“Not really.”
“Something hurt?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
She gave a small laugh.
“You hear yourself, right?”
I did.
I did not like hearing myself through her ears.
“Let me try again. Do you want to turn around?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
We walked back.
I was angry by the time we reached the parking lot.
Not because she had ended the hike.
Because I had rearranged myself around a promise that had apparently disappeared.
At the cars, Joanne opened the back hatch of her Subaru and changed shoes.
I said, “Do you still want the spring ridge?”
She kept working at the laces.
“Joanne.”
“I don’t know.”
“You knew enough to make a twelve-week plan.”
“I made the plan because I thought I was supposed to want it.”
I leaned against my car.
“Supposed to by whom?”
She looked at me.
That answer was obvious enough to hurt.
“Me?”
“Partly.”
“I asked you if you wanted it.”
“And I said yes.”
“So I believed you.”
“I know.”
“Then what are we doing?”
Joanne shut the hatch.
“I don’t know how to say this without making you think everything is changing.”
“Everything is already changing. You invented a medical condition in my leg.”
She flinched.
I regretted the sharpness and still meant the sentence.
She shoved her hands into her coat pockets.
“I don’t want to train back.”
The parking lot seemed very quiet.
“What?”
“I don’t want the spring ridge.”
“Because you don’t think you can do it?”
“No.”
“Because—”
“I can probably do it, Amy.”
I stopped.
She took a breath.
“I don’t want to.”
There it was.
No injury.
No rough few months.
No temporary dip waiting for discipline.
“I like shorter hikes,” she said. “I like stopping. I like taking pictures. I like walking three miles and going for coffee. I like not feeling like the day only counts if I’m exhausted by dinner.”
I stared at her.
“How long?”
“Maybe a year.”
“A year.”
“I kept thinking I’d snap out of it.”
“Why would you need to snap out of liking something?”
“Because you hate that kind of hike.”
“I don’t hate it.”
“You call it a nature stroll.”
“That is a description.”
“You use quotation marks with your voice.”
I almost argued.
Then I remembered every joke I had made about the slow group.
Joanne looked toward the trailhead.
“When we first started hiking, we both needed the hard days. We had divorces. We had houses to figure out. We had weekends that felt too long. Ten miles was good because by the time we got home we were too tired to think.”
That was true.
“I don’t need that now,” she said.
The sentence hurt in a place that had nothing to do with hiking.
“And you thought I did?”
“I thought if I told you I wanted something different, you’d find somebody else.”
“For long hikes?”
“For all of it.”
“That is ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
I opened my mouth.
A memory arrived before the argument did.
Two summers earlier, Joanne had skipped a club weekend because her sister was visiting. I had gone with Priya and three others. When Joanne asked afterward how it was, I had said, “Great, but weird without my hiking wife.”
At the time she had laughed.
I had meant affection.
I could hear something else in it now: the idea that a role belonged to her as long as she kept performing it.
Another memory followed. Joanne once suggested we take separate cars because she wanted to leave early for a family dinner. I had teased her for “breaking up the band.”
Again, funny.
Again, not free.
“I may have made it sound like changing the hiking meant changing us,” I said.
“You did.”
“I did not mean that.”
“I know.”
“Apparently intention is having a difficult month.”
That got a real laugh from her.
Then I opened my mouth again.
Closed it.
Joanne’s eyes were wet, but her voice stayed steady.
“You say Amy and Joanne like it is one word. So does everybody else. I like that. I have liked it for years. I did not know how to be the person who split it.”
“So you made me the reason.”
“Yes.”
“Without asking.”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand how humiliating that was?”
“Yes.”
“I had people checking my knee.”
“I know.”
“I am still angry.”
“You should be.”
I looked away.
The worst part was that her honesty did not produce a clean villain.
She had done something cowardly.
I had also built a friendship in which difference sounded suspiciously like decline.
Both things could be true at the same time, which was less satisfying than rage.
Joanne said, “I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“What happens now?”
I looked at the trail sign.
Three arrows pointed in three directions.
For once, I did not know which one counted as forward.
