Norman Rockwell should have been there to sketch their memorable faces. They were wrinkled and unapologetically tired but sprinkled with the irony of trying to be festive in this, the last time they would gather. Someone in a harmless flight of conviviality called it a celebration. But it wasn’t exactly that.

They had hiked together for years, some of them for decades, members of the Minneapolis Hiking Club organized 90 years ago by one of the venerated heroes of the environmental and land preservation movement in America, Theodore Wirth.

At one time their club membership numbered into the high hundreds, packed with young and middle aged men and women who sought a healthy outdoor and social experience. The idea of group hiking in America was relatively fresh then in fact, so was was hiking itself as a reasonable promoter of health, adventure and an appreciation for the gifts of nature.

The club wasn’t intended as a dating service, but not surprisingly it also discovered that attraction. In time the hiking club expanded its curiosity beyond the t rails and shorelines of Minneapolis and St. Paul to the lake country and forests of Minnesota to the Appalachian Trail, the mountains of America and then the British Isles, Mexico, Nova Scotia and Switzerland. But by the late 20th Century the membership had declined irreversibly . The arrival of multi-service fitness emporiums, cycling millipedes and the accelerating speed and diversities of life made the idea of a hiking club– especially one largely populated by graying seniors folks, well down the list of potential thrills for younger people interested in fitness, goals and social engagement.

Faced with its dwindling numbers and the actuarial charts, the Minneapolis Hiking Club voted with regret to disband this year. Older folks, they reasoned, still had a better handle on reality than some of the swifter generations. They held they their final gathering a few days ago in one of the dining rooms of the Town and Country Club in St.Paul, itself rather historic as the first major golf course built west of Chicago back into the 19th century. The round dining tables were more than adequate to accommodate the 67 members who attended. One of the women was introduced the genuine veteran, 99 years old. The talk was hospitable and wistful, washed with memories but touched with a kind of whimsical recognition of the unfairness of time.

I was invited to be the speaker. The reasoning was that a man who climbed mountains and trekked and cycled and skied in his earlier years and still does it in moderation, should have something in common with their lives in the outdoors. I did and addressed them honestly as “my fellow octogenarians.” But what I wanted to do most of all was to hug them and thank them, for being who they were, for carrying so long the ideal of sharing the innocence and grace of a woodland trail with those who had become part of their lives.

My message was less than profound, but it grew partly out of my own life of sharing the trail and the recognition that sometimes the most enduring gift we receive early in life is the gift of curiosity. Out of curiosity comes discovery. And one of the discoveries for these people once active but now considerably less spry—not too old to dream but a little too old to tangle with windy hills –was the one enduring realization: that when we sift out all of our experience, what emerges as the ultimate parts of our lives are not the successes or the excitements or the struggles but the relationships in our lives. So these old hikers had decided that the allure of the trail might be expendable. The friendships they built were not expendable. So at the end they sang their Happy Trails theme song. The party was over, but the bond remained.

At the doorway one of them, a little younger, was trying to organize a short hike as a kind of commemorative. She’d rounded up a half dozen takers and then invited me to join them. One last hike as a valedictory. I thanked her, looked at my watch and said I felt awful about it but I had another appointment in the next hour. She started to turn away; and I changed my mind, grabbed a pair of tennis shoes from my car and joined the hike. We walked through an old residential district of St. Paul , through boulevards smothered with gold and vermillion leaves and then to an overlook of the Mississippi with a stunning view of Minneapolis’ downtown towers. And finally there was a quirky little tower in St. Paul’s Prospect Park with a witches hat for a capstone. And there the fairy tale ended, one last walk in the fall.
The hiking club may have yielded to reality. The idea its men and women embraced is alive and lasting.

About Jim Klobuchar, Ecumen "Changing Aging" contributor: In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota’s senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.