Charles
Johnson
The Double Dipsea is a 15 mile race ran every year by
disgustingly fit people to and from a beach just north of San Francisco. Last Saturday I convinced my family to stop
watching reruns of “The Office” and make an attempt at hiking it. After three miles of uphill through redwood
forest my three siblings (who talked nonstop about video games) and mother
turned back, leaving just my father and me to complete the hike.
This did not surprise me as my father and I are the two
“death-march” (dad’s name for any walk longer than ten miles) enthusiasts in
the family. After lunching on parmesan
cheese rice cakes and half a cliff bar we climbed the ridge of a brown foothill
then descended again into a second damp, shady redwood forest.
My father is in charge of marketing and sales for a software
company so, naturally, he started talking about monkeys. My dad’s point was that: “All humans are just
monkeys who can reason logically.”
Apparently, planning ad campaigns with that assumption makes marketers
very successful.
Since my father is about 75 pounds overweight his feet
started aching by mile ten. His aches
and our conversation brought a recent study to mind. Apparently, the bones of an Orangutan are
three times as dense as human bones today.
But, just a few generations back, human bones were strong like
orangutans today.
I guess Roman soldiers who marched miles every day had nice
dense bones from their rough lifestyle.
One of Caesar’s “forced marches” would make a family “death-march” seem
like a picnic. But hiking for a day and
feeling sore feet really brings me back to the old orangutan-boned man. I remember we once got along quite nicely on
just our own two feet.
