justifying all the things I keep in my pockets
justifying all the things I keep in my pockets

justifying all the things I keep in my pockets

We were camp­ing at Alice Lake one time, and the Girl’s friend–we’ll say Cressida–had come with us. We were hik­ing the Four Lakes trail, and I had my small back­pack with the bag of hik­ing needs, you know, trail mix, water, my copy of Trees and Plants of Coastal Brit­ish Columbia, stuff like that. Some­how we got onto hav­ing use­ful things in our pock­ets, too. I don’t remem­ber what all there was, but each of us had some­thing that might be con­strued as “use­ful on a hike.” So like, some­body had a Swiss Army Knife, which is obvi­ously use­ful. I had lip balm, again, clear pur­pose… A paper­clip! Excel­lent for hold­ing samples of leaves, or in a pinch hanging some­thing off your back­pack. That sort of thing. Then Cressida says, “I have… a gui­tar pick.” And we laughed, and tried to come up with cre­at­ive uses for a gui­tar pick on a hike. Then… we roun­ded a corner. Who should be com­ing toward us but a young couple, one of whom was play­ing a ukulele. And Cressida said, “Hey! Do you need a gui­tar pick?” And the fella said, “Sure!” And that was how, out of all the use­ful things we had with us on our hike, the gui­tar pick was the only one that actu­ally was used.