from 7:34AM to 12:08PM: 14 miles

I did my first 14-mile walk in a long time today (3.07mph). The last time I walked such a distance was probably 1991, when I and my brother David did the perimeter of the Brienzersee, a lake to the east of the aptly named Interlaken, Switzerland.* At that time, David and I did a two-day hike which took us up into the mountains before we actually began following the lake's perimeter; we did about 13-15 miles the first day of the hike.

Today's hike featured my very first "Hey! Fuck you!" yelled out the window of a car by a high schooler, right around 7:40AM, the beginning of the hike. I feel weirdly blessed, almost as though I'd been crapped on by a bird (aren't bird droppings jokingly referred to as blessings from above?).

I've met a few interesting characters during my daily walks; one gentleman, walking with his wife, sported a cowboy hat and was puffing on a cigar (no joke), all while dressed in athletic clothes. Now that's how you work out! I also crossed paths with a very lanky older gentleman, a jogger, who wheezed past me in a way that reminded me a bit of General Grievous. I've also met one friendly lady who likes talking to her dog, which appears to be a collie that's gone through some sort of shrinking process. What's the proper term for a pygmy collie?

One thing I've had to re-learn since coming back from South Korea is that, contrary to the Korean stereotype, not all Americans will say hello to you on the bike path. Most will, it's true, and perhaps that's enough for the stereotype to exist ("Americans say hello to people they don't know!"). But over the past seven days of walking, I've encountered a healthy minority of people who won't acknowledge my presence. Not that I'm much of a greeter myself: I normally just nod, and if my interlocutor offers a spoken greeting-- a "Good morning!" or "Beautiful day!", for example-- my reply is generally a terse, "Morning."

My daily walk is also a meditation on impermanence: every day, I wade through piles of the dead-- dead tent caterpillars, that is. These are usually bad news for local trees, and I think many people on the trail are aware of this: when I pass through a dense patch of woods, I see piles of little corpses, often dried, all flattened as if by bike tires or footwear. Here's a pic of the little critters I found online (I'll be putting up my own pics of these guys later on):

Writer Khalil Gibran, writing in the 1800s, wrote of children:

Your children are not your children:
they are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.

This is no less true of the beasties that populate our world: they, too, represent life's urge to continue itself. Tent caterpillars are no less children of ultimate reality than we are. Alas, we all compete for the same space, which means death necessarily enters the picture: birds eat the caterpillars, people squash them, heat cooks them on the bike path. That's life. Reality is always moving, always making room for something else. We live in the Great Churning, if I may wax Hindu for a moment.

Such are the thoughts I think as I lumber along the bike path.

And now it's time for lunch, for the Kevin must eat. That's right: more death.

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*Interlaken, as its name implies, sits between two lakes: Lac Thun (or the Thunersee) to the west, and Lac Brienz (or the Brienzersee) to the east. I've hiked the Brienzersee's perimeter twice and have never attempted the larger Lac Thun.


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