The Offending Park- photo by the author-Laelia Watt
The weather cleared enough after a few weeks of cold that I decided to take a brief stroll before heading to the grocery store. There is a park at the bottom of a hill in town with a pleasant path that follows a creek and a small loop that provides a 15 minute, flat, scenic view. I wasn’t looking for anything strenuous, just some time in nature to calm my mind and get some fresh air in my lungs.
I set out from the parking lot, down the hill to the first bridge over the creek. Deep in thought, I felt myself relaxing as I viewed the bare trees leaning overhead and the still wintery water dark and cool below the bridge. I walked in the grass of a flat lawn on the other side, and felt my favorite gray sneakers with little silver stars on them squish into the ground. I stopped, looked around and remembered, “Oh, yeah, I forgot. It rained a few days this week.” Determined to get in a brief walk, I spotted some drier patches of earth and hopped on those until I made it to the second bridge.
There, I read the long poem written with black Sharpie on the wood railing and I watched the water fall from the pond over a small ledge into the creek. I needed this time outside after being cooped up for a few days with my own thoughts. Almost twenty years before, as a confused 20-year-old, when I stayed with my sister and brother-in-law for five months, they lived in a house only a few blocks from this park. I appreciated the towering trees and the unpaved inner path of the park as a place of respite during a time when I was reevaluating my life path. I can’t really say I felt less confused at almost 40, but I felt more content with myself at least and more at peace with the unknown.
The fact that I still had to go grocery shopping halted my reverie and I walked off the bridge to the path again, admiring the wide trunks of the old trees. I came to a large puddle and was able to walk around it, then another one, then a third and fourth. I navigated each one carefully by stepping up along the embankment of a hill, making sure my shoes didn’t get coated with mud. It wasn’t until the fifth, even bigger puddle that engulfed the entire width of the path that I stopped to reevaluate my journey. This was a lot more arduous than I had expected and I was already getting tired. I thought to myself, “Maybe I should turn back? I am only 1/3 of the way around the path. Maybe it would be better to backtrack.” Then I thought of all the puddles I had already navigated and the wet, grassy field with mud patches and I made the decision to keep moving forward. “Surely it will get better further on.”
It did not.
It got so much worse. The path, normally dry gravel, was prone to flooding since it sat at the bottom of a tall embankment right before a creek. When it rained, of course the water flowed down the hill towards the creek and settled along the way on the walking path in between the two. At this point, I had to climb the embankment, hands and feet gripping downed tree trunks and branches so I didn’t fall down the hill into the veritable ponds on the walking path. The “puddles” were now solid mud and 3 inches of water along the entirety of my route. After almost falling a few times, I regretted my decision to keep going, but now I was even further into the forest. I was so mad, almost to tears, that my little stroll turned into such an exhausting endeavor.
If it had been a dry path, I would have been done walking by that point and in the car on my way to the grocery store, but now I was still only halfway around the loop. If the past 100ft were any indication of how slow the next quarter mile would be, I wasn’t going to leave the park until dark. Fed up, I realized my biggest hurdle was the shoes I was wearing. They weren’t new and were fine for taking walks in parks if it was dry, but I didn’t want to ruin them. The weather was warmer than it had been, but it was still forty degrees. At this point, I was so fed up, I was willing to brave the cold and save my shoes if it meant walking faster out of this hellish pathway.
Shoes and socks in hand, I placed my feet in the icy cold water and mud. I let out a muffled scream mixed groan from both discomfort and sheer anger at this ridiculous situation I found myself in and started walking as fast as I could straight through the middle of the path. After 40 minutes of trying to avoid the water, it felt freeing to plow through it, cold be damned. I ignored the pain and focused on not slipping in the mud. I passed a couple who wore tall, waterproof hiking boots. They walked hand in hand and stared at me as I grumbled past. Damn their good sense and togetherness.
I stomped my way through mud up to my ankles, almost slipping a couple times. I hoped my toes would survive the cold, but I was relieved to be moving faster at last. I stomped my way over yet another bridge, onto some hard pebbles, past some Canada Geese that didn’t even bother hissing at me since I probably looked madder than them. I stomped my way up a steep grassy hill to the paved path by the road and stomped past a runner who stared at my muddy bare feet as I grumbled my way back to the car.
As I cleaned my legs off with napkins I happened to have in my purse, realized in horror that my phone was not in my coat pocket! Before the path had descended into chaos, I was happily taking photos of the creek. I almost cried again out of exhaustion and the thought of my phone sinking deep into a muddy puddle along the path somewhere. I had lipstick red rain boots in the trunk of my car…if only I had thought of them before the walk…so I put on my rain boots and took off in the direction of the same path I had just finished. I retraced my steps, this time armed with a fuming anger that propelled my rain booted feet in a resolute manner across wet field and forest. I tried not to cry thinking of having to do the entire path all over again. After the second bridge, I remembered I had started to climb the embankment to avoid puddles and slipped in the branches at one point. Maybe I dropped it there!
To my utter relief, I spotted my purple phone case laying on the hill by a small tree trunk I had grabbed. It was sitting on a dry pile of leaves, elevated on the hill away from the puddles. It’s only a phone, but finding it undamaged saved me so much headache, time, and money required to replace it. I turned around and walked back to the car, thankful it was finally over. My 15 minute pleasant walk had turned into nearly an hour-long exercise in frustration, cold and tears.
As I drove to the grocery story, I found myself thinking there might be a lesson in my experience somewhere, but the discouragement was too fresh in my mind to think straight.
These were some lessons I considered:
- Check the weather, or remember the potential effects of recent weather, before walking on unpaved nature paths
- If you think at some point, “Maybe this path is not the way to go right now, I should turn around.” Listen to yourself and turn around.
- Anger is helpful for pushing through physical discomfort.
- Even if you normally make good decisions in life, you are not perfect and will make dumb errors in judgment. As long as they don’t result in your death, at least you can learn from them or turn the experience into an essay.
- In the midst of my misery, I found myself feeling jealous of the couple wearing sensible shoes and walking holding hands so they would not fall in the mud. Maybe two is better than one.
In the end, I was thankful the ordeal was over, and it was only a town park, not a forest in the middle of nowhere. I was thankful for finding my phone intact, for having rain boots in the car, for my favorite shoes to not be ruined, and most of all that I did not get frost-bite from walking barefoot in cold, muddy water.
I haven’t been back to the park since that day and it has been almost a year. The experience was too upsetting to feel like the nature path could lower my stress like it used to, but I hope to try again soon. This time I’ll make sure it hasn’t rained recently.
FRAGILE HUMAN 