T W Neal - Open Road: A Midlife Memoir of Travel and the National Parks

Change only happens, especially in midlife, when we are uncomfortable or want something badly enough; and I had reached that tipping point. My heart rate hadnt calmed since the rangers station where wed checked inwere we really doing this?

I sat on the sidewalk near the Keoneheehee (Sliding Sands) Trailhead, waiting beside our full backpacks, at the summit of Haleakal National Park on Maui. At ten thousand feet of elevation, the air was thin, cold, and unfamiliarly bracing. I dug a parka out of my pack and put it on.

Just yesterday Id been in the chiropractors office for the lower back pain generated by our training hikes. I had a bad hip from years of toting babies back in my twenties, ankles prone to sprains from running in my thirties, and a lower back injury from doing capoeira in my forties. Now, at almost fifty, I was thirty pounds overweight.

My husband, Mike, wasnt in much better shape. In addition to being eleven years older, hed recently undergone multiple surgeries, and hed lost most of his colon to a severe bout of diverticulitis that had almost made me a widow. His new titanium shoulder was about to be carrying a forty-pound pack for strenuous miles, and his arthritic knees, recently shot full of cortisone, would be strained by the deep sand leading down into the depths.

We were about to launch ourselves into a No Service zone. No one would be able to help or communicate with us, and few even knew we were attempting a strenuous, three-day hike in the crater.

I surveyed the area around me to distract my anxious thoughts.

The astronomy observation buildings that crowned Haleakals summit clustered nearby like a hen surrounded by round white eggs. Off in the distance to my right the ocean glimmered, a hammered bluish mirror. Popcorn puffs of cloud raced by below, casting shadows across the waters surface.

To my left, the crater itself swooped downa vast swath of rusty, tiny cinders in shades of umber and burnt sienna. Cinder cones deep in the great bowl below looked like peaks churned up during childs play in a giants bathtub. A chilly wind whipped up from the long gray sand path and smacked my cheeks.

Mike finally returned, panting from the effort of walking part of the way uphill from where hed been dropped off from parking our truck at the trailhead where wed exit in a few days. Even without the packs, the ten-thousand-foot elevation was having an effect. You ready? he asked.

As Ill never be. An old joke. Wed been married close to thirty years, long enough to have many of those.

Getting the backpack on was daunting. I couldnt lift it. I eventually set the big metal frame on a large boulder, sidled back into it, and hoisted it up, leaning over to secure the belt. Hopefully the thirty pounds of extra weight resting on my tricky hip was a good thing.

Let me see if I can strap yours onto mine. Mike hovered, adjusting my shoulder straps and testing the weight by lifting it from behind. If push comes to shove, I can carry them both.

He was worried about my recent chiropractor visit, though neither of us mentioned it. Carrying my pack also had a precedent: way back when we were first engaged, we'd hiked in Yosemites Tuolumne Meadows. Flush with first love and in the prime of his considerable strength at thirty-one years old, hed carried both our packs when I got tired.

Id loved him for that back then, and I loved him for his concern right now; but I was tired of being a wimp. Id decided that had to change. I got this.

I pushed out in front of him and set off down the trail.

The truth was simple: If I think about this adventure any longer, Ill chicken out.

Little poufs of grayish cinder sand rose beneath my boots as I crunched downhill into the crater, avoiding looking anywhere but directly ahead. The trail, while fairly wide, plunged hundreds of feet off to one side in a slippery scree of rough cinder.

Mike soon caught up to me with his much longer legs.

I mentally reviewed todays plan: go down a total of four miles on the Sliding Sands trail to the caldera floor, then two more miles across the craters floor to the Park Service cabin called Kapalaoa Cabin (the Whales Tooth.) Wed spend the first night there, then hike the roughly four miles across the crater floor to the Hlua cabin, spend another night, then hike out another four miles the next day up the infamous Switchbacks (Halemauu) Trail to exit.

We can do it, I muttered, though I had a persistent pain in my hip and my toes were being slowly crushed by the tightness of too-thick socks and my forward-leaning weight with thirty extra pounds on my back as we headed downhill through deep sand.

We moved slowly but steadily, stopping occasionally to take a vista photo or a shot of the velvety pincushions of gray green silverswords dotting the colorful expanse of boulder-strewn lava. These gems of Haleakal live only in this barren and remote setting; the unusual plants vary in size from that of a teacup to a barrel. Silverswords grow in a rosette pouf of velvety, pointed succulent leaves that resemble a sea urchin, and they looked lovely against the harsh, unbroken cinder soil. Each plant may grow from five to twenty years before flowering in a great spire and dying.