September 24, 2010
Driving to some appointments in Santa Rosa this morning I breathed deep and took in the beauty that is Sonoma County. The sun was warm, the air clear and the distant hills and ridgelines looked their finest. Driving east on Hwy.12 my eyes were drawn as often they are to the high spine of peaks and ridgelines that frame the vista to the east - Mount St. Helena, Hood Mountain and Sugarloaf ridge, Bennett Peak, Annadel Heights, Mount Taylor, and Sonoma Mountain. For those of us who live in Sonoma County these are familiar geographic features.
Picture pieces of memories of hikes with Tom over that terrain through the years ran through my mind. This wasn’t the first time that I reviewed those aggregate memories, but it was the first time since Tom’s death on Wednesday. I felt the jab of a bittersweet sting in my throat.
Tom and I speculated regularly on what hike through those places would be our next. In recent years Tom’s consistent conditioning practices made him the stronger hiker of the two of us. Owing to our work and life patterns our visits and excursions were less frequent than in decades past. I was intimidated at the prospect of a hike we hadn’t gotten around to completing. It is a long-ass traverse from the rugged backside of Hood Mountain over and down into the Valley of the Moon. We reckoned that winter or mid-spring was the season to do it. The prospect of cooler weather and fewer encounters with rattlesnakes agreed with our sense of caution. Anytime we considered that hike, discretion got the better, saner part of us to select less arduous hikes.
There are a number of vivid experiences and ventures with Tom stored in the old brainpan to savor. But being a greedy guy I’d sure like to have squeezed a few more with Tom into the odometer of our friendship.
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