A month ago I wrapped up a project to hike all 80 miles of pathways in Forest Park, the jewel in the leafy crown that is Portland, Oregon’s canopy of trees. A week ago, on a five-mile ramble along trails I’d logged in late summer, something suddenly struck home. I felt a marked difference in how I experienced the place than the previous time.
It wasn’t just that the air was cooler and the evening light now slanting from the south, nor that trees on the ridgeline creaked in an autumn wind from the east familiar to those living near the Columbia River Gorge. My relationship with the park had also changed. The trails were no longer part of a goal to be reached in diligently charted segments stretching from an urban arboretum setting near the Oregon Zoo to the farthest reaches where a herd of wild elk convenes in winter. I was more relaxed as I walked now, more inclined to stoop and study a trundling black ground beetle.
It had been a worthy accomplishment, I reflected, as I left the beetle to its business. In 2008 I had covered the 30-mile Wildwood Trail and numerous linking paths, but I had missed out on many areas hardly anyone sees—and a few I’d rather not see again. Answering the All Trails Challenge offered by the Forest Park Conservancy acquainted me with all eleven watersheds in the park, including one with the charming name of Rocking Chair Creek. I am at ease with the park in a deeper way now, able to anticipate where the footing will be slick and the trillium will bloom come spring. The process of planning and recording the 110 miles it took to account for those 80 miles of trail left me more familiar with the lay of the land and with the life that is there.
And yet, I’m glad once again to relate to Forest Park simply as a beloved terrain rather than a task site. Heading upward toward the access trailhead on Saltzman Road, it occurred to me there might be a corollary between this insight and how I conduct other relationships. Head-down in a project with others is an exhilarating and sometimes exasperating place to be. One naturally gets to know both the work at hand and the people sharing the experience, but eventually the show closes, the project is delivered, the conference wraps up. What then?
It is hard to establish genuine friendship without taking the time to know another person in multiple contexts—as a person with a partner, a family, a circle of community, a secretly held desire. The work or volunteer goals we reach together, and the joys, frustrations or conflicts we encounter in the process, are all bonding elements. Still, the people we keep seeing when there’s no deadline to meet or carpool to coordinate are those with whom relationship has become instrumental, an end in itself. Valuable and life-enhancing as conversations along the goal-oriented way may be, taking the time to connect when there is nothing on the agenda beyond friendship is sweet indeed.
