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.
───
