Hiking each week is easy, relative to writing about the hike. Hence the great delay.

We drove to River Falls to pick up an old friend of Adam’s, a fellow Buddhist, and he took us on a hike in the dense and mostly deciduous woods that hug the banks of the Kinnickinnic River. The woods are, as woods go, unremarkable. But that name! The rhythmic clack of it: Kinnickinnic, Kinnickinnic, Kinnickinnic. Like a train.

The walk itself was trying, for the kids and I. The trail was hilly. It spilled downhill to the muddy banks of the river, which smelled cool and sparkled in dappled sunlight, then wound back up into the still, humid green of the forest. And the it did that again.

Adam and his friend strode  ahead. The kids grew weary, and so did I. The trail was narrow, and the woods were close, and it was all quite sticky. But we were good humored enough about it. We came to a clearing at the top of one hill, and the path opened up to a park. As we rounded a corner, Adam was hugging his friend, smiling, and saying how glad he was of something or another. I didn’t want to eavesdrop. But the hug and the gladness both being achieved, I took that as a signal to loop back to the car.

We dropped Adam’s friend back at his house, and had lunch at a small diner in downtown River Falls. We learned that truly, one man’s taco salad is another man’s nachos. Sated, we drove on to Menomonie, Wisconsin. (another good name) One of my oldest friends, Sarah, lives there with her family, in an idyllic farmhouse on a bucolic piece of land that that backs up to a river. We celebrated her son Rowan’s tenth birthday, and he opened our gift to him, which was cake tips and pastry bags, and we ate Sarah’s amazing food, and cheesecake, and went for a short walk down the road with the dogs. We left the kids with them, they were having a summer visit for a few days, leaving Adam and I to drive alone, westward in the fading light. Spent, we listened to poetry and spoke little.