September 11 and Hiking
I think we can all remember where we were when we heard the news. I was getting ready for class on one of the first days of my freshman year when my dorm room phone rang. My mom told me to get to a TV or turn on the radio. What I saw has stayed with me and will stay with me forever. Carnage, fire, death. The accumulation of which did something to my little 18 year old brain. It scarred it, as I’m sure it did most Americans and citizens of the world. And I was nowhere near the attacks nor did I know anyone (at the time) directly involved, but for the first time in my life I felt scared and vulnerable in a very real way.
As the day wore on I went on I went to class and discussed the days events with fellow students. We didn’t know what was going on. We had no idea that this day, this seemlingly normal and bright September Tuesday would be a day the world would remember and memoralize for the next millinia at least. It was surreal, and it made me feel so alone.
In the middle of the day, as I walked through a sea of TVs with blaring new coverage, I had seen all I could. One channel felt it was their journalistic duty to show horrifying images of people leaping out of the towers and plunging to the ground. The wreckage of humanity was overwhelming.
So I did the one thing that lent me solace in the past. I headed for the mountains (fore-going my last class) and set off on a dusty , leaf-covered trail.
There’s a line in “Lord Of the Rings” that flooded my thoughts as I hiked through the hills. At the end of “Two Towers” Frodo and Sam are at their rope’s end. They’ve been through fire and fury and in the midst of another setback Frodo collapses to the ground and despairs, “oh, Sam, what’s they’re worth fighting for”, to which Sam replies, “That there is some good left in the world Mr. Frodo.” That was the one calming thought I could find after all the human destruction I had seen on TV that day. There was good left in the world. There was some last lingering thread of morality, of humanity somewhere.
And as I wandered those moutain trails, I found that goodness. It’s was just there. In the trees. In the wind. I had found my something good left in the world. Now every year I hike on that day and remember the good.