Hiking Metaphors

My dad was a multi-sport athlete in high school and college, and he looked every bit of it throughout my childhood. Once, when I was a kid, I watched him hit a home run in the top of the inning of a rec league softball game, and then in the bottom of the same inning, leap over the fence to rob a guy of a homer. The guys on his team gave him shit about his cutoff sweatpants and soccer cleats— but they sure as hell weren’t throwing runners out at home from deep left field like he was or scoring from second on a single.

Since the pandemic, I haven’t felt all that comfortable going to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner like I used to, so instead, my dad and I have taken to going for hikes on Sunday morning. No matter how the conversation begins, before too long, we’re arguing about policy and politics. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool Libertarian who firmly believes that the government doesn’t do anything well and that it’s the root of most, if not all, problems our society faces.

I don’t agree. So we argue.

It’s more accurate to say that we debate. Minimum wage, foreign affairs, trade and markets, education- it’s all fair game. We never actually get anywhere, though every once in a while, each of us concedes a point and we’ll explore that for a while. He’s a really bright guy who studied economics in college, and has a Master’s degree in Business and Economics. Of course, he came of age during the Reagan Revolution and Milton Friedman, so his answer to everything is “Let the free market decide.”

My response is usually, “That would be great— if the market was actually free.”

To his credit, he has conceded that point— that the market isn’t free due to a number of policies, incentives, and kickbacks. That’s usually where the discussion ends, too. No matter how many times I ask him, “So if the free market isn’t free, what do we do instead?”

Yesterday, we hiked up the backside of Hogsback Ridge, a local trailhead. If the front side of Hogsback is a stairmaster disguised as a mountain, the backside is even worse. It’s shorter, but a hell of a lot steeper. It’s my practice to let my dad determine where we go on our little jaunts and at what pace. He’s still plenty strong, and is more than happy to endure, but he’s carrying an extra thirty pounds these days, and we weren’t more than a couple of steep steps up the ridge before his arguments became punctuated with his huffing and puffing. He kept going, but he had his hands on his hips. I stayed behind him for a while, still talking and making points, but it wasn’t too long before I, whether out of impatience or wanting, as all young men do, to show their fathers what they’re capable of, went the rest of the way up at my own pace. Even then, I’ll admit that I was worried about showing off and making him feel badly, so I went at 75%.

I enjoyed the view at the top for a few minutes before my dad got there.

Once he’d caught his breath, we started down the front side of the ridge and he made the “Let the free market decide” argument. Yes, but the market isn’t free, as we’ve said. I threw my hands up in the air. So what do we do instead?

It really surprised me when he threw his own hands in the air and said, “Who said I want to do anything?”

Maybe it’s because I was so surprised— and even infuriated— by his answer that I said, “And that’s fine, but, and I say this with all the respect in the world, I think I speak for my generation when I say, ‘Then get the hell out of the way!’”

He laughed, and while he was laughing, I was wondering whether the metaphor ought to be that the extra weight he’s carrying is the cynicism that comes from seeing several decades of well-intended governmental policy play out or just my flying past him up the hill.

I still can’t decide.