Community

 A lot of trust must exist in communal living. 

And so we enter the drying room at the trekkers hut. The benches, the hooks, are stuffed with boots, jackets, pants, gloves. Everything worn and exposed to the rain that day is hanging in the drying room. 

Upon seeing the menagerie, every hiker is plagued with the same fears. Will I be able to find my clothes? What if someone takes my jacket, or even worse, my boots? To be stranded without either would put oneself in peril. What you own and wear in the deep wilderness is critical. 

This morning a young girl burst into our room. “Did someone take my jacket? It’s missing. It’s a North Face jacket and it’s black.” Her rumbled nerves and near-anger were about to burst.

I remembered grabbing a black North Face jacket off a hook. I thought it was mine and I told her so. But I pulled the jacket from the bottom of the small pile I would soon be dressing from. 

“Is there anything in the pockets that you could identify as yours?” I asked. 

“Yes,” she said, “there are probably hair clips.”

I reached into the pocket and found a miniature hair clip. It certainly wasn’t mine and certainly was hers. I handed it over immediately, “It’s yours. I’m so sorry.” 

 But where was mine?

Mandi helped me search and within seconds I found mine. It was hanging only ten hooks away in the same corner of the room.

My mistake had caused the worst fear in a fellow trekker. I started to cry. 

It happened a second time, but it wasn’t me. George, one of our group’s trekkers, laced up his boots and stepped outside. A nervous looking gentleman in slippers chased him and yelled, “You’re wearing my boots!”

He proved it by the mark on his toe. George slipped out of the boots and hoped no one had taken his. They were the same exact boot and only differed by a half-size. George later admitted that the fit had felt a little off but had attributed it to wet boots the previous night. 

It’s a shame this happens, for we learned the solution when we started preschool. 

Preschool requires lunchboxes, backpacks, and shoes to be labled with a permanent, black magic marker, all in bold letters. Upon entering the trekker’s hut, the same should be required. A lot of last minute panic would be alleviated.

It used to be that luggage coming off the airport carousel was black. Ours was both black, then dark blue, so Tony tied different colored ribbons around our handles. After this obvious little piece of ingenuity, we never took the wrong bag nor was ours taken. On my most recent arrival in Chicago, I noticed that luggage is now more colorful and varied than the rows of candy in a candy shop. 

The only  black bag was mine with a gold ribbon laced through the handle. 

Trekkers must adapt sooner than later.