45: "A Walk in the Woods"

45 

“A Walk in the Woods”

Redford, Nolte, and Old Age         

“Today’s a courtesy day,” I said to Penny, implying that the merciful law of divine synchronicity was working in my favor as I picked up a perfectly useable pen on the pavement by my feet as I stepped out of Bewell (that’s what our license plate reads and what we call our new Honda Civic LX, a synchronicity story in itself which I wrote about in another musing), because we just “happened” to find a parking spot directly in front of the theatre, and with my free pen I knew that the omniscient guiding force of life was telling me to take notes on the movie we were about to watch across the street in the Uptown Theatre in Barrie last Sunday.

The movie we were going to watch was “A Walk in the Woods,” starring two tried and true veteran actors—Robert Redford and Nick Nolte; and although it was based on the travel writer Bill Bryson’s book by the same title of his actual walk on the Appalachian Trail with his old friend Stephen Katz, both in their mid-forties, the movie version was about two men in their seventies (Redford, who plays Bryson is 79; and Nolte, who plays Katz is 74), so the movie takes on a completely different turn as the two aging men take stock of their life as they’re forced to confront the physical limitations of their body and inevitable mortality.

I hadn’t read Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods, but I did read his book In A Sunburned Country a number of years ago when I had a real yen to go to Australia. In fact, I had even thought of immigrating to Australia at one time, but apparently that wasn’t written in my sacred contract and I stayed in Canada to fulfill my destiny; but I do remember that Bryson had an odd sense of humor, which I loved—and which, I’m happy to say, came through in the movie version as Nolte plays the unkempt raunchy “loser” to Redford’s well-ordered successful life and deliciously ironic, but pedantically dry wit.

Penny and I loved the movie, but on our drive home after we did some grocery shopping to pick up our Thanksgiving turkey at Food Basics (we went to the Sunday matinee and did not go out for dinner after the movie, which we usually do, because we had a chicken stew simmering in the slow cooker), Penny said something that inspired the thought for today’s spiritual musing: “I enjoyed the movie, but there was something sad about it.”

And I agreed, because it was obvious to me that Bryson and Katz were taking the measure of their life as they faced the physical challenges of walking the Appalachian Trail at their advanced age, especially Katz who was so overweight and out of shape that it was painful watching him negotiate every step with the heavy packsack on his back, and it was a foregone conclusion that they would never complete the 2,200 mile trek.

It was fun watching them try, though; and as much as Bryson tried to make his story about the walk itself, one couldn’t help but become aware of mortality closing in on them—almost as though Bill Bryson and his friend Stephen Katz had morphed into the aging actors Redford and Nolte—another example proving one of my pet theories that the role chooses the actor and not the actor the role, because the septuagenarian thespians were called by the Hollywood script of A Walk in the Woods to take account of their life to see if they measured up. But measure up to what?

The movie left Penny with a feeling of sadness, because she felt sorry for the aging men struggling on the Appalachian Trail, especially when they clumsily fell off the trail onto the ledge overlooking the steep gorge and water below (reminiscent of Redford’s role with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but it wasn’t so much their inability to negotiate the trail at their advanced age that made Penny sad, it was the feeling of regret that Bryson and Katz felt that their life could have added up to more than it had as they stared into the face of their own mortality sitting on the ledge overlooking the gorge below.

But luckily two young strapping hikers saved them from their peril, and Bryson and Katz felt very thankful for the life they still had left to live; and they decided to end their walk and go back to their normal life, and gratitude for what we have became the saving grace of a movie whose underlying theme could have made it very tragic.

“I’d give it a 7 out of 10,” Penny said.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” I said; but I couldn’t shake the idea that came to me in the theatre before the movie started as I listened to a man and woman sitting behind us talking; an idea for a short story called “Tourette’s.”

I took my new pen that life had provided me out of my pocket and asked Penny if she had a piece of paper in her purse. She gave me her address book and I jotted down the idea for my story that had just come to me, which basically went like this: Penny and I are comfortably seated in the reclining leather chairs (which we were when watching “A Walk in the Woods”), when suddenly the woman behind us starts spouting foul obscenities.

Shocked, Penny looks at me; but I stand up and look at the man sitting with the woman who had just spouted the foul obscenities, and I say to him, “Tourette’s?”

Embarrassed, but relieved, he replies, “Yes.”

And then I say, “Have she ever considered past-life regression therapy?”

They both look at me with a blank expression on their face, and I add that they should look into it. “This could be something from a past lifetime. You’ve got nothing to lose,” and I turned around and sat down again because the movie was just starting.

And that, to be very honest, is why I feel I was given the pen that I found on the road as I stepped out of our car last Sunday afternoon; because as I watched Bryson/Redford and Katz/Nolte taking stock of their life as they walked the Appalachian Trail, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for how impoverished their perspective was when it was confined to one solitary life; but that’s an irony I can only share in my fiction, and in today’s spiritual musing. I jotted my story idea down in Penny’s address book, and then sat back to watch the movie. 

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