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Transitions

By Katharine Niles

Well, Chris and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Grand Canyon. Did Chris hike, as I hoped he would in my last column? No, not there. He fell in love with his babysitter instead, and I, I hiked with some different kids.

For four years now, I have been part of a college freshman honors cluster called the Integrated Learning Program. With the theme of sustainability guiding us, we teach kids geology, ecology, human heritage and freshman English composition. The peak experience of all this is to go to the Canyon, where we examine all of these topics and then spend one day hiking. Three hikes are offered: all the way down to the bottom and back in one day (something the Park Service loathes to suggest); a six-mile hike to Dripping Springs at the west end of the developed canyon area; and a rim hike for those with truly bad knees or other issues. This year, for the second time, I did the long hike. I did it with nine students and another colleague. And I decided I am done hiking with students, away from my husband and kid. I think I am growing up.

It's not that I had a bad time. How can anyone not love seeing two condors (numbers 6 and 7; if you see them say hi), eons of geological time, rocky bands of light and the luscious Colorado River? With the air temperature at 85 degrees or so in the bottom of the Canyon, that river felt awfully good to jump into. It ran a clear green this time, too, not its usual muddy brown, which added to all the beauty. But the entire time my nose was out of joint. Why was this not the be-all and end-all anymore? It just didn't feel cool, even though some voice in me - that has been driving me for years - rants that most people would give their right arm (sorry, J.W. Powell) to do what I do for a living.

The weekend before I took a different hike. This is where Chris fulfilled the promise of the last "With the Kids column. As a family, we explored above timberline for two and a half hours. We risked drinking from a mountain stream, ate lunch, peed on bushes and slid through remnant batches of the season's first snowfall. We took photos. This felt more right to me, more on-target, than my Canyon hike. I missed Chris the whole time I was on it; I missed my husband. Furthermore, none of us would be so insane as to hike 17 miles down one vertical mile and back up another in one day. We would go on far more civilized excursions, exposing Chris to more and more, without damaging any of our egos or calf muscles.

Still, I've felt insecure about this newfound position of mine. So I talked to two other women my age. Both said the same thing: They liked doing things with students; they like doing outdoor experiential education. But their single, carefree days were over, and spiritually speaking, they would much prefer to be with their significant others and/or own children.

No doubt all of us will continue to take students on hikes. But next year, at least, I will be on sabbatical from the Canyon, and though my son is sad at this prospect it provides an opportunity for us to experience it, or somewhere else that weekend, as a family. As it is now, we have been a fragmented unit, with Mom as Teacher, Chris happy as a clam with his babysitter, and Jonathan at home holding down the fort. I haven't liked this arrangement much at all.

So it is I have learned how having kids makes you grow up, too: However painfully, I have left behind an unencumbered, Outside Magazine view of outdoor experience, and emerged instead into, well, a "With the Kids" column view. And, oddly enough, this is making Chris into a better hiker and outdoors-boy, and our family into a more cohesive whole.

Katharine Niles, a teacher at Fort Lewis College, lives in Durango with a dog, husband and first-grade son, Chris. Niles recently won the Editor's Choice Prize: Fiction for her novel, The Basket Maker (Grey Core Press), at the sixth annual Book of the Year Awards at BookExpo America, the largest book publishing event in the United States.