Forrest Gump original motion picture score.
Today was a training hike at Oak Mtn. It was on the north trailhead that started around 7am and I finished at 12. The air was very humid and a drizzling haze remained over us all day. It was like being in the smokey mountains, without the cold. Every so often a mist of rain would hang over us a few minutes then stop, but I never saw the sun in those 5 hours. A couple of hours into it, we came up on the yellow/white trail that went up a mountain... not a hill. A mountain. It was my first encounter with this trail and mountain. At the bottom of it, you could look up and see the hikers ahead of you and they were like ants following each other up the trail. I say ants because that's how small they looked to me standing at the bottom. It was tough. Apart from the Chimney Top trail in Gatlinburg, it was probably the hardest physical obstical I have ever attempted. I got to the top and looked around and it was just a haze. The over-looks were useless. It was like being in the middle of a cloud. At the top, the trail I had to walk was a fairly nice, flat trail with some parts almost like you were walking on the ridgeline, drop-offs on both sides. It was cool, but it was missing something.
Kristi's favorite music to play when we would drive thru the Smokey Mtn State Park, or thru Cade's Cove, was the Forrest Gump original motion picture score. Not the soundtrack with all of the recognizable music, but the orchestra that played during pivotal scenes of the movie. She loved it because she said it was like being in a movie, not that movie, but just in general. The beautiful scenery of the trees, the huge boulders, and the white water rolling over the rocks, combined with the music from that movie, went so well together. That's what was missing.
So I checked for a signal on my phone, put in an earbud, and searched for that score. After about 3 notes into the first track, I was crying my eyes out... on the trail. Luckily, the mountain we had just climbed thinned out the pack and created some distance between the hikers, so I saw no one in front or behind me. Yes, I checked. The images that came back to me were too overwhelming. I listened for about 30 min or so, and it just owned me. I could see her sitting in the passenger seat with that "Yep, I'm in gatlinburg!" smile on her face and pointing at different things along the way for me to look at. She loved that place and she loved nature and hiking and it's so damn unfair that I'm doing any of this now without her. She would have loved every minute of it, even the ridiculously high mountain I had to climb, and my complaining on how high it was. I'm sure there's a metaphorical quip as to why all of this happened today but right now, after crying most of the way home from the park, I can't seem to put my finger on it. Yeah, losing her is my mountain to climb and yeah, I'll make it to the top, but with that one, I don't want to. I don't want to get "past her" and reach that summit and I refuse to do so any time soon.
It's been an emotional day. Please don't try to downplay any of this to try to make me feel better. It won't. In fact, it will just piss me off. This hiking should not be happening without her beside me, but I'm going to continue regardless of how I feel about it. My kids need me to do this. I need me to do this. And most importantly, she wanted me to do it.
Right now, after walking 27,000+ steps, 9.7 miles on the trail, and 5 hours straight of going up and down mountains, my hips feeling like they could pop out of their sockets at any minute and my feet having seen much better days, I'm now in the hottub for the foreseeable future. A full day of walking at Disney has nothing on this trail. If you go to Gatlinburg anytime soon and decide to drive thru the state park, find the Forrest Gump score and see what you think. I'm not sure I'll be able to do it again, at least not with people around.
https://youtu.be/L4tetTHHPEQ. -track 1
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