The only way I can do it, without a nearby rock, is to shake my hips in a manner that they forbid at high school proms.

The word seems to be getting passed down the trail that trouble is afoot. This man in the long beard knows I am THAT reporter. He was sitting here by the pay phone in Tuolumne Meadows while I talked to my editor.

He heard me say I understood I was not to leave Darrell and not hike alone etc. etc. etc.

(I let a bear can lid get away from me, causing an underscoring of my lack of wilderness skills.)

So I'm not suprised when the man says, " 'Cause I'm thinking about writing an article called, 'What kind of idiots aren't safe in the wilderness.' "

He's sitting in front of a payphone a few feet from a snackbar. So it's not like he's foraging in the forest or anything. But he says it with a bit of a twinkle, so I just sit down at the picnic table and join him.

This was written while out on the trail, but published after returning to Fresno.

"So you've never tried anything new? Never not done well at anything?" I ask. "Do you think all this beauty only belongs to people who know how to read a topo map and grow a long beard?"

He laughs. He tells me to enjoy my journey.

I am feeling optimistic as I leave. I was very careful to say I would stay with Darrell, I didn't say anything about Dudley Doright. I have every intention of getting back to that payphone, putting in some blogs. Taking a shower and getting, yes, a Diet Coke, before shimmying back into that pack. Dudley can just march on.

But I have been foiled. When I get back to camp. Jim, Emily and Darrell are waiting for me.

Jim has told Darrell that from here on out it turns into real wilderness. No more Wilderness-lite. We'll soon be in territory you can only get to by backpacking a couple of days. Darrell doesn't want to go any farther unless we stick with Jim and Emily.

I don't blame him. He's not exactly nature-boy. (At least not at this point. In a matter of days, he'll be scaling mountains and chasing bears.) He is someone who has only been car camping. Once.

Dudley/Jim dictates that we leave from the trailhead in two hours. They are already packed up. They go off to shower and shop, leaving me with the pack that I cannot pack.

I SO want a shower. And to buy some food. And call a friend. So I try and try. But it's not working. I see a nearby Boy Scout. I offer him $10 to pack my pack. But he's 14 and never been backpacking before. Frank Purcell, from Huntington Beach, overhears and comes over to help. He's been backpacking the Sierra every summer for 32 years. But more key to this undertaking is that back in his youth, he used to deliver furniture.

"Packing a pack is like packing a truck full of furniture," he says.

It still takes him a half hour and he doesn't think I should use his work as a schematic.

I barely have time to run into the store, grab three packages of trail mix and catch the bus to the trailhead.

No shower. No shopping. No Diet Coke. Worst of all, no writing.

And now, no way out until Agnew Meadow.

As we start out, I feel more like I'm herded than hiking. I'm dejected and lonely and thinking about the people who say I shouldn't be out here. And how my very purpose of being out here -- to write about it -- is slipping away.

But with every step I still feel better. I know it can seem kind of precious to talk about trees and rocks speaking. You can't really get by with it unless you're John Muir or Rogers and Hammerstein. But nevertheless, there's something in the air. The Sierra is whispering to me: "Oh, ignore them. Look around. You're welcome here."

I flash back to the Desiderata, a philosophical statement that used to be on a poster by my dorm room, so I just happened to read it every day even though I thought it was a bit trite. I had no idea until this moment decades later that I had memorized it:

"Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness ... You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here."

Ahead of me is a man with a red bandanna wrapped around his head . He's smiling at me. It's McCray from the sports store in Yosemite village. He helped me with my pack four days ago. I can't believe it. He had said he was going mountain climbing and would see me on the trail outside of Tuolumne, but that seemed so many days and miles away to be realistic.

He's a friendly face. McCray can climb mountains and pack his own backpack, but he's on my side. He seems to think it's amusing and right that I'm trying this. I've only met him once. But I hug him like a long lost friend. I walk back with him until we run into my trio of herders. He teaches me the names of some wildflowers.

About a mile later, I meet Marnos and Jerry. It's like the trail is a cookie and there have been a few chocolate chips scattered throughout to keep me going. I meet them because of the way Marnos says hello.

You see, there are different kinds of smiles on the trail. There's the standard smile/nod hello/pass. and then there's the "Well, there you are! Who are you, fellow traveler?" smile. Marnos has one of those.

She's from New York and makes even hiking clothes look stylish with her big sunglasses and colorful bug hat. They're hiking this section of the JMT to get a taste of it before they try the whole thing.

On their honeymoon in New Zealand they picked up a hitchhiker who wanted to shoot a documentary on the JMT and they've been intrigued ever since. New Yorkers in New Zealand meet someone who sends them to JMT in California.

They tell me they ran into a Pacific Crest Trail hiker. The JMT is part of the bigger PCT that runs from Mexico to Canada.

"He came over the pass smoking a cigarette! " Marnos says. "We watched him leave in a puff of smoke. He was a 90-pound Jerry Garcia."

I want to stay. Make them some of my best friends. But Dudley has now passed with a pointed, "Hadn't you better hurry up?" look. So I reluctantly move on.

After a while I hear someone running up the hill behind me: "Diana! Diana!"

It's Marnos. "Here, you're going to need this," she says, stuffing a stylish mosquito net head cover into my pack. Well, at least as stylish as mosquito head covers can be. It's cuter than the black one from the hunting department of a sporting good store in Fresno.