Hiking partners come and go. The one who went most recently never actually set one perennially slipper-shod foot on a dirt trail with me. By the time we crossed paths, Claire Vereczky Malis' age and weight made the journey from parking lot to the Acorn office (where we worked for years as colleagues on the night shift) seem of an epic distance. Sometimes she carried a cane-and that's all she ever did with it, carry the handle hooked over one plump forearm. Her swollen feet lent her a gait that would never be confused with a runway model's, but she didn't need any cane. It had been recommended after a dizzy spell and came into most use waved as a good-natured warning at the then-night shift's canine component, a mongrel named Zoe, who'd sidle close to Claire's lap when a microwave dinner was brought into play.

Claire died at 83 on Aug. 27, lingering a few weeks after suffering a burst blood vessel in her brain. Frantically I rewound my answering machine to listen to her last dispatch before the incident, to hear her habitual invitation to phone her to grouse and/ or laugh about work and to tell her what I'd seen in my explorations in the mountains and canyons.

Or to hear her tell me she'd driven from her apartment in Pomona's Emerson Village complex to the pharmacy but en route detoured to pick up the senior special at McDonald's then parked her Olds near a lovely community park "so green and with so many crape myrtles blooming I'm going to bring my camera next time and mail you a picture! And the rose garden at Emerson! Unbelievable!" And she did, because she knew how I loved the outdoors, and gardens both cultivated and wild. She actually sang her last message to me, thanking me in this way for a favor I'd done her. It was the most minor favor. Yet Claire belted out her song of thanks worthy of an old-time Broadway chanteuse. I'm not sure winning the Nobel Prize would have had as much meaning to me as hearing her song.

Our friendship was predicated on simple things. Claire listened to me. I listened to her. Claire made me laugh. I made her laugh. There was only one inequality between us: she prayed for me and comforted me when I was troubled. When Zoe of the night shift died, only Claire's embrace could bring an end to the piercing ache. When Claire lay in her hospital bed following emergency brain surgery, there was nothing I could do for her, to help her, to restore her, to save her.

I learned of Claire's passing the night after her death. The next morning I drove out to the top of Yerba Buena Road in the mountains high above the Malibu coast, parked my truck on the roadside and just started walking. It was over 100 degrees and the asphalt radiated searing heat. This is one of the most remotefeeling stretches of road in the western region of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. A deep windstirred hush prevails. That day marine haze obscured the lofty panorama of the Pacific, yet Santa Cruz Island appeared as a blue-black ellipsis floating above the gray mass.

As the rutted two-lane blacktop spirals down towards the ranger station at Circle X Ranch, rarely are the pinnacles of Boney Mountain out of sight. At a certain angle, in a certain play of light, the upthrust sandstone fingers cropping out of the mountainside's vegetation appeared to be crossed, as if there was a big fib I wasn't in on.

I recorded these things as I did the immensity of sycamore leaves on a tree whose limbs leaned low over the Grotto trail I ultimately followed at Circle X Ranch, as well as the dizzying views to now dry but very steep waterfalls, the muffled calling of a pair of owls perched in a dense canopy of oak, and the tap dancer's cadence to a cyclist's custom shoes as he walked his bicycle through the Circle X parking lot.

Of these things I took note because often Claire would open our telephone conversations with, "Where did you go today, tootie-pie? What did you see?" It was an old habit, hard to break, this stockpiling of images and sounds for Claire, whose tone would be filled with marvel even as she'd shudder and say,"

Only three miles uphill! Not me, honey-chile, not even the slimmer model version of me!"

She never hiked a step with me yet was always with me.

Having learned of her passing I called Claire's good friend Mimi Jaffe of Thousand Oaks, who said,

"Don't worry, dear. She's up there by the right hand of God."

I'm not a person who was raised with a background in the tenets of any religion. I can only trust Mimi when she assures me that's a good place to be, and surrender myself to a fantastical daydream, where Claire's found a slot at a celestial newspaper, maybe correcting typos in editions of St. Peter's Press at a desk scented by a bushel of Emerson Village's loveliest roses, with our old four-legged workmate Zoe curled sweetly about her chubby slippered feet.