I appreciate the number of comments I have received in my personal email about my new blog site. Thank you. I think I have now enabled individual blogs to have comments added if you so choose. This post deals with the title of my blog - Folding On. "Folding on" is a term my good friend Drew and I adopted from a blues song and is now a backpacking term. Although it can be used in any setting in life when you need to push hard or just need an inspiration to take the next step. The story of Folding On goes like this: It was May of 1999, I was working and living in Evansville, IN and my bud in Columbia, MO. We planned a backpacking trip across the Island of Puerto Rico and thru the Caribbean Natl Rain Forest. The night before we flew out we met in St. Louis and hit a small bar in the area of Soulard.
Molly's was the name of the establishment and the main room must not have been much larger than 16x80ft. But that night there were three elderly black men who had come to play some blues. One of their songs was titled "Fold Fold On". "You just gotta Fold--Fold On.." Like the fourth quarter of a tight game, these guys gave this song all they had. Awesome is a word that doesn't seem quite right to describe it, but I guess that will work.
Fast forward several days: We had checked out San Juan and took a bus outside the city to the Atlantic Coast. My idea all along was to hike N-S across the island, starting at the Atlantic and ending at the Caribbean Sea. Much of the 40 mile hike was thru the Caribbean Natl Rain Forest, the only tropical rain forest in the U.S. Forest System. Save for the heat, it was a beautiful backpack most the way, that included swimming in a crystal clear river and finding a wild raspberry patch. About 2/3 the way thru we reached some area of the trail that had yet to be repaired from Hurricane Hugo ten years prior. The jungle was so thick that we tried not to get much more than five feet apart so we wouldn't lose on another. I am saying it might have well been night as dark as it was in this place. But we "folded on" and on and on....and we dipped our feet in the sea the next day. We saw a much different side of Puerto Rico on the south, but that is a tale for another time.
Sometimes life gives a person challenges and tribulations. You just have to Fold -- Fold On!
Habakkuk breaks it down real well in the final verse of his oracle. "The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights."
Fold on today brother and sister.
