There was a point within the first ten minutes of Nick’s and my hike up Lookout Mountain Monday morning where I honest to shit thought I was going to die. This is mostly because I am dismally out of shape and unaccustomed to coaxing my body to do much more than stand, sit, and — if I’m lucky — writhe a little every day. Suddenly I was using obscure leg muscles to propel myself up trails littered with rocks and trailing leafy vines, and it felt a bit like the entire universe was pulsing inside my brain with every thud of my very flabbergasted heart. I was a smidge embarrassed at how much a mild trail kicked my ass, but by the second leg, which was undeniably more laid-back and leisurely, I got hiking. And I had regained my breath enough to be able to crack wise when Nick squealed like a little girl when he nearly ran face first into a giant spider web.
We reached the waterfall we’d been striving to see, and I’ll be damned if the thing wasn’t bone dry thanks to Chattanooga’s lack of seasonally appropriate rainfall. Would it be accurate to call the deluge that then ensued ironic? I don’t know. That word has basically lost all meaning for me because I can never use it correctly. The point is, it began raining like a motherfucker while we were sitting leisurely stop the big rocks, basking in the afterglow of a long and somewhat hard-won walk. We traipsed the three or four miles back to the car in the downpour, both of us soaked clean through, me secretly grateful for the rain because it masked both my sweat and my heavy breathing. I would be lying if I said the endorphins didn’t do wonders for me all day.
So yeah. Hiking. Cool shit.
The rest of my brief but lovely trip to the ‘Noog involved indie rock shows and good food and ridiculous jukebox choices, overly enthusiastic panhandlers, tappas, drunken goopy text messages to the manfriend, hazy vistas, frizzy hair, army cots, and cheap, frozen booze. And drunken walks through Nick’s very hip, very cute neighborhood of St. Elmo. The more I visit Chattanooga, the more I really like it. They are doing good stuff over there in the bends and hills of Tennessee and I’m always happy to go back.
