Hiking With Masks

There’s always some urgent, instinctive thrill, hiking along the edge of the continent. A subliminal understanding of just how much of the planet extends out from those cliffs. I think that’s why, when we’re feeling really shriveled up, we run for the Headlands.

For the past eleven months, mostly, we had been tethered to the apartment. There were ventures outside: Some longer, like our drives up through Oregon to finally emerge in Kerstin’s hometown on the muddy valley where the Cascades empty into Puget Sound. And some quicker, like the trips to the grocery store, gloved and masked and terrified. Cautiously steering our karts around the other stony silent – and wary – shoppers.

But always tethered to the apartment, like in a heavy diving suit, a tube piping clean oxygen into our bell-shaped copper hats. The only safe air we could trust.

So, when we tumbled out of the car and onto the trails crisscrossing the Marin Headlands, we felt somewhat dizzy, breathing through black cloth this untested atmosphere and teetering over the end of the Western World.

We scrambled over the batteries at the Nike missile site. Always masked. Encased in our protective suits. Kerstin yelped when I jumped from the ruined gun emplacements into the iceplant. Then she jumped too. Still wearing her black face covering.

We must have hiked 9 or 10 miles that day. It was a warm, clear Saturday early in 2021. We had lived through nearly a year of the pandemic. Huddled together inside. And so we burst out. Skittering down to Rodeo Beach, past the lagoon and up onto Wolf Ridge, climbing the steep rocky trail to Hill 88 and then down into Gerbode Valley. But only fearfully, with absurd caution.

You may have forgotten, it may have gone cloudy in your memory, but in February 2021 we were not yet vaccinated (the doctors and nurses were, our parents would be soon) and people were hiking and running outside in masks. For months.

For months, we would put masks on to go for a run or a hike. First, there were the weeks when they told us not to mask, then we had to mask everywhere. There were no exceptions for outdoor activities. An invisible death, that fills your lungs, that flows from your nose and your mouth and kills your family. If you breathe on them. Breathe near them.

Who even knew if the masks work? They seemed to offer some feeling of protection and we cleaved to that. Later, they would tell us cloth masks were worse than nothing. Only the scratchy medical masks worked, even if they didn’t fit as well.

So, I have these pictures with Kerstin, alone on a mountaintop, an ocean to our right, the city miles away, the Golden Gate hidden behind some hills. No one else around. And our faces are wrapped in these Mortal Kombat masks.

From those hills, the sky is big, but the sea is bigger. The Pacific stretches endlessly out beneath you, soft and peaceful and cold and thundering. Crashing silently against slick boulders, carrying tiny ships out past the horizon.

Our real life became a Terry Gilliam movie for three years. What could we do, but return to the earth, run for the horizon, try to escape, chafe at the tether yet never let it snap. We went together. We stood on those cliffs, the vertigo swept over us. More months and then years passed. More cautious hikes. Somehow we made it.