Hiking Is an Ideal Structure for Friendship

A couple years after that, Will joined the group.

Will Smith: Jim invited me to join because he knew that I did a lot of hiking and outdoor things as well.

Read: The nature cure

Rodney Follin: He’s been with us for 15 or more of the 25 years that we’ve been doing this.

Beck: How was the monthly hike inaugurated?

Rodney: We did a number of one-off hikes, and after one of those I remember saying, “We ought to do this every month.” We all laughed and thought that was not doable for folks as busy as we were. I said, “No—let’s put the date on the calendar for next month.”

After that, the dates were established month to month. As soon as we complete one hike, we immediately establish when the next will be. We rotate the organization and planning duties, eeny-meeny-miny-moe style.

That person has complete authority and responsibility to organize the hike, select the location, provide the beer and other refreshments, and make any other side-trip plans. We’ve done breakfast, dinner. We sometimes hit various local watering holes, or we just plop down with a cooler in the woods somewhere. The organizer is responsible for setting up all the logistics, soup to nuts, and is not questioned on the decisions made.

Beck: Why did that rule come to be?

Jim: We did experiment with trying to get our families involved. We tried to do a family hike one month, and then just the guys the second month. It didn’t work. You had seven or eight different personalities, everybody with their own idea. We realized we had to scope this thing down [to just the guys] and just have one person organize each hike.

Beck: Does the organizing power extend to canceling for bad weather?

Jim: Having organized a handful of the most atrocious hikes we’ve ever been on, I pushed the envelope on that. I took us up Short Hill Mountain in Loudoun County in cold, wet weather—and we came back off the mountain with no trail, after dark, not entirely sure where the road was. People did complain about it.

More often, you come up with something that’s fairly pedestrian. Five or six miles in a suburban park. But the whole ritual of getting together, talking and walking, makes even a very ordinary hike fun. I can’t recall times when we really felt like we were let down by our organizer.

Rodney: Even bad weather or more mundane hikes get you that sense of accomplishment. You start at point A and you go to point B, and you get something done. It’s something you can wrap up, check off, and mark on a map. On our 20-year anniversary of doing this, we drew lines on this huge map to show all the places that we had hiked. We’re probably somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 miles hiked over the last 25 years.

Beck: Tell me a bit about Tom and the hikes you had with him before he passed away.