2

Ambulatory Repression.

after walking well past noon (it had been about 2 hours) i started to ditch all of the switchbacks that were zigzagging up the mountain and just shoot straight down the hill. i had good boots so i did just jogged down talus slopes that were loose enough to slow my descent to a slow steady sidewise slide.

after maybe 50 meters it occured to me that if i'd snapped a leg or busted my back out there that i would have been between roads with no cars on them. instead i got picked up by the british hikers.

brits are weird. like americans, they hate the fact that they're so repressed but they cling to it for lack of a better idea. so when other brits start to move into the neighborhood (americans call it "gentrification" which is a telling term in its own tale) they complain. these guys were upset because other brits were moving into the neihborhood. what made it even more weirder was the fact that they were tour guides for walking tours.

they were nice and they bailed me out of a potentially hair situation. but now, after 17 years of hitching, i also know that someone would have, if not they.