Attic Salt June 28, 2009

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate columnist
• Published: Jun 28, 2009 - Page: 1D

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The long-distance lake hikers and brown water kayakers are back.

With hot weather come hikers with telescoping  walking sticks, humping heavy backpacks around University and City Park lakes.

They’re putting in the miles before heading west to the Rockies or east to the Appalachian Trail where they’ll encounter tilted earth instead of the black asphalt that rings the Baton Rouge lakes.

The city hikes help the walkers adjust to the weight of packs. The long walks  break-in high-tech shoes so flexible you can play basketball in them.

The walks help hikers decide on the weight of socks they’ll take with them. The hikes  help the walkers get used to handling the high-tech hiking sticks.

The hiking poles must be handy on steep, uneven mountain trails. On the paths around City Park Lake, the hikers with their poles look like Norwegians who took a wrong turn in more northern latitudes.

College soldiers running in squads early in the morning as they chant service songs are a fall and winter phenomenon as are the rowing teams moving out of the fog to surprise ducks and walkers. The hikers say summer.

The other afternoon at Baton Rouge Beach, there was a  summer sight — girls on a boating outing.

The girls, who were high- school age, piled out of an SUV as though they’d just driven hundreds of miles to a favorite river instead of from a nearby neighborhood.

The girls worked well together, suggesting they’d learned to work together on school projects. They quickly unloaded inflatable boats and a kayak.

They enjoyed each other’s company immensely as they worked through the choreography of youthful exuberance that one day might be applied to architecture, medicine or the law but for the moment was being lavished on getting rubber boats into University Lake.

It was easy to imagine this scene being repeated on the banks of a white water river. What would the girls do once they launched their bouncy craft?

Would they practice orchestrated rowing to make their boats move in a straight line before experimenting with turning? Would they strike out for the stretch of interstate that crosses City Park Lake to work on endurance?