I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
~John Burroughs
I stared at the trailhead knowing exactly what I wanted from my hike before I embarked. I wanted a beautiful challenge, the sort of hiking experience that was brutal on the muscles yet breathtaking in its beauty. I needed steep elevations winding through forested area so canopied by trees that it changed the light of the blazing summer sun. I needed a cold creek to temper the Texas heat, for the humidity to drape itself over me. I needed to sweat out the sadness, worry, stress-eating, secret crying, and sleepless nights that come with mothering a child who is on the autism spectrum.
“Why don’t you take a long break for yourself and go on a real hike, like the Appalachian Trail or camp at Big Bend?” a friend asked me when I told her about my plan.
“Because that’s not how motherhood works,” I said.
I needed a quick dose of peace, a trail that could be hiked in the few hours my son spent in his new autism therapy clinic 16 miles up the road. It was less romantic than sleeping beneath the stars, but healing for both of us would have to be done in smaller increments.
It had been two years since I last hiked the River Place Nature Trail, but it remained my favorite in Austin, a city full of beautiful nature preserves. I considered hiking all of them on my son’s therapy days, feeling productive by covering the most territory, but healing doesn’t work that way. I needed to be nurtured by the familiar, to walk the same paths each time and get lost in the sort of meditative trance that comes with repetition. Only this trail, an oasis protected and maintained by volunteers from the surrounding neighborhood, would do. Perhaps the love the trail received from its caretakers would soothe me, too.
I knew we couldn’t undo the autism, and there are so many beautiful things about his unusual mind that we wouldn’t want to. His autism affords him a near-photographic memory, a love of math I cannot comprehend, and an ability to create art with advanced perspective. We do, however, want a life for him with fewer stresses or dangers caused by autism triggers and sensory overstimulation. Like all parents, we want our child to have a life filled with love, independence and self-created happiness.
I looked back down the street and said, “I love you,” sending the words out over the wind to my boy on this important day. While he took his first steps toward a different life, I moved forward and took the first steps toward mine.
The first hike was brutal and beautiful. Accidentally, I took the longest part of the trail. It boasted the highest elevation change in the Austin area — 1,700 feet in just a few miles. I needed breaks, several of them. Despite the heat and my dangerously high heart rate from the climb, I felt relief by wading in a stream so clear and cold that I was certain it had been consecrated. I half-expected a vision of a saint to appear.
Instead, I saw a cardinal. It perched for a moment on a large rock facing me, its deep red color a complement to the rich greens that surrounded us. I looked up and saw its partner on a branch, less red but still beautiful. Cardinals are rather common in Austin, but the birds still felt like little guardians along the path, rooting me on as I persevered. They are said to symbolize wisdom and living life with confidence and grace. They were the sort of cheerleaders I needed.
As I approached the end of my hike, I noticed the smooth and heavy rocking chairs that awaited hikers at the end of their journeys. I drank my last drops of water as I allowed the heavy motion of the rocking chairs to soothe my tired body. A breeze picked up from the nearby pond, cooling me off as I rocked back and forth, the trail nurturing me to the very end. Then I took a deep breath and went to pick up my son.
He looked forward to his therapy sessions each week, evolving in a way that gave him visible confidence and happiness. My slivers of time in this tiny sanctuary did the same for me. It wasn’t a grandiose journey, but it was ours. At the end of each day, my boy ran toward me, undeterred by my sweat and disheveled hair, with smiles and hugs and some new project to show me. I always waited with my arms open, ready to embrace him with love, joy and the newfound sensation of hope.
— Tanya Estes —