A Hike in the Woods Can Be Torture

By Bob Wire, 8-29-10

It’s summer in Montana (as it seems to be in most of the U.S.), so we go outside. I spend the winter huddled in front of the TV, watching NFL and Jeopardy. Then when the snow melts I take all that bottled up aggression and trivial knowledge into the Great Outdoors and get right with Old Man Mother Nature.

Now that the kids are old enough to carry their own crap, we go on hikes. Or as I call them, trudges. Personally, I never could see the appeal of walking for miles through the woods unless there was something interesting at the end of the trail. Like a bar. But now that I’m a dad, my perspective has changed and I see nature through the eyes of a child and blah blah blibbidy blah…

So we drove to the trailhead up a canyon in the Bitterroot Valley, south of Missoula. At the end of the trail, supposedly, was a small mountain lake. No bar. We got out of the car, and were gathering our daypacks and jugs of wine and Gameboys, when my boy Rusty cried out, “Dad! I killed a hummingbird!” I walked over to where he was standing, looking at a small bloody something on his forearm.

“That ain’t no hummingbird, boy, that’s a horsefly.”

We all looked at each other. “HORSEFLIES!! AAAAAAAA!!!”

We ran around in circles, frantically swatting these huge biting flies as they would swoop in, grab a chunk of flesh, and slowly fly off like a C-130 transport with eyes. They were huge. I swatted a couple of them hard enough to raise a welt on my own flesh, and they just kind of shook themselves off (“yabbida yabbida yabbida”) and flew away. We climbed back in the car, rolled up the windows, and sprayed on a buttload of bug repellant. I wanted to turn on the A/C, but a horsefly had flown off with the keys.

Eventually, another car full of fresh meat pulled in, and the flies left us. We quickly started up the trail on our Bataan Death March, and within 200 yards, I was bent over, hands on my knees, gasping for breath. “Man,” I said to my wife. “I can’t get enough oxygen! Must be the altitude. How high are we here?”

She consulted her map. “About 150 feet higher than our back yard.”

“Oh. Wow. Seems higher,” I panted, taking another bite of my king-size Snickers.

Knowing that most small mountain lakes are chock-full of gullible trout, I carried a small spinning rod the whole way. It wasn’t much of a hassle, really, except when the hook would catch on a tree as I walked past, and the reel would whine like I had a fish on. It always caused my pucker string to momentarily tighten up from reflex. Another mistake was wearing the net on the back of my vest. It was attached by an elastic cord, so it would get caught on a branch, and thwack me right between the shoulder blades, causing me to unleash a string of profanities that echoed through the forest, frightening the small woodland creatures.

We also brought our dog, Houdini. He’s a chunky Dachshund cross, with very short legs and a low center of gravity. He actually got high-centered a couple of times on the trail, and we had to help him regain traction. Houdini flies into a rage at the discovery of any other living being showing up in our general vicinity, as if he shouldn’t have to share the planet with anyone else. So his constant barking and chasing kept away all but the youngest and stupidest of wildlife.

We finally reached the lake (“You sure it’s only 2-1/2 miles? Feels more like 8.”) at about the same time we ran out of water. In spite of all the Mark Trail comics and Daniel Boone movies you’ve seen, you can’t drink the water out of a mountain stream without boiling it or treating it with iodine first. It’s got a little parasite in it that will turn your guts into a squirming pile of linguini, and you’ll be rocketing Moolatte out your exhaust pipe faster than you can say “Kaopectate.” So we gulped the last of our water, stripped off our clothes, and jumped into the lake buck naked. Cold? Oh, man, my nuts went so far up one of ‘em got caught in my throat. But it was such a hot day, it felt great. And I have to say, in all honesty, I thought this would make for a pretty cool memory for the kids. (“And then I saw my mom and dad naked, and he’s hung like a pimple”).

Once all the bug spray washed off, creating a beautiful, rainbow-sheen slick on the surface of the formerly pristine mountain lake (which by the way does not contain even a single trout), the mosquitoes and horseflies descended upon all our tender, pale flesh like they were Ben, Hoss and Little Joe, and Hop Sing had just banged the dinner triangle. We threw on our clothes and ran back down the trail, making the return trip in just under 20 minutes.

As we neared the trailhead, we came across a man and a woman heading up the trail, complaining about the mosquitoes. “They’re pretty bad up there,” I warned them. “I’ve got some bug spray, if you want.” The woman accepted my offer, and sprayed herself down. The man, however, declined, possibly out of some misguided desire to seem macho. I shook my head. “You’ll be sorry,” I told him.

As we got into the car, I could hear him up the trail, saying, “Hey, look at that—a hummingbird just landed on my arm!”

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