Snake Mountain Hike

Julie Hanson
Published on January 2, 2020

Moderate/Easy

We meant
to be
equal
to what
awaited
us, but
one
wore boots
insufficient
to the
task,
another
hadn’t
eaten
lunch, and
in the
end the
guidebook
hadn’t
helped:
if this
truly
was the
old
summit
carriage
trail, why
wasn’t
it on
the map?

More to
the point,
why
did it
divert us,
hot and
hopeless,
into
that swamp,
so that
by the
second
portion
of our
trek
we’d begun

 

to bicker
over
whether
we were
good and
lost, and,
even
if we
weren’t,
how
would we
manage now
to get
presentable
and fed
and find
ourselves
seated
three abreast
at 8
o’clock?

I have
photos
of two
of us
at the
summit,
triumph
in our
fists
and sweat
in our
shirts,
noticing
a hawk
gliding
through the
vista
twelve
hundred
feet
above
the
calculated
sea.

In fact,
our way
down was
without
a slip-up
or a
story,
and in
the end
Christopher
Lloyd
was as
terrific
as
we’d thought
he’d be.
Oh, he
stumbled
once
into the
present
and misspoke
a recent
date, but
otherwise
led
Willy
Loman
flawlessly
into
his own
mistakes.

 

Genre: 
Poetry
Author Bio: 

Julie Hanson is the author of Unbeknownst (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Iowa Poetry Prize winner and finalist for 2012 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Audible and the Evident, which won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize this year and will be published by Ohio University Press in 2020. Her poetry has earned fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Cincinnati Review, and New Ohio Review, and recent publication in Smartish Pace, Under a Warm Green Linden, New Ohio Review, and Plume.

Issue: 
62