I was almost halfway around the reservoir before I remember the last time Zanzi and I had attempted this feat. In the shadows of my memory, I could not recall if the full trek had been completed or if Zanzi had completed it herself beforehand and I had chickened out as I stood at the edge of the reservoir and calculated the distance against my strength. I was not in very good shape back then.

I had planned the trek online, observing the short one mile paths that crisscrossed across the map and piling them together into a fixed set of miles. This distance resembled the successful hike that I had attempted on New Years Day, again a hike whose rock formations reminded me of something that Zanzi had told me about or shown to me, but I could not put my finger on the time or place of. So, I set out in our car, one with a park sticker on it, and set about walked the course around the reservoir.

At the mouth of the park, there is a lot in which great stone whale tails are posted. These obscure pieces of ergonomic/modern art, reminds one quickly of the relative proximity of the yacht club. After all, who needs whale tails for a campground? Further, who needs a yacht club in a landlocked state? I parked, locked the car and headed out.

I followed a bike path, which went out onto the lake. It took me into a muddy thicket, where I fought the mud like sand and wobbled, crunching branches and the few remaining dead leaves on the path. I had recently been reading a book about search and rescue dogs called “Scent of the Missing” and I thought about how easy I could be found if my body ever when missing in the wilderness (hopefully alive).

Just as I was contemplating these morbid thoughts, I ran into a boy in the thicket. In hopes of not alarming him, I told him good morning, which put him on guard, but did not surprise him too much. He was pulling and piling sticks in a fashion that most likely made a lot of sense to him and his brother. His brother I came upon a bit more unaware since he mistook me for the former. They both waved to me and I continued on into the forest.

As I exited, I was alarmed to find my path, padded out my previous pedestrians, went out across the reservoir and the frozen ice. Some part of me reeled against going out onto it. Whether it was an ancient PSA or that early scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, I cannot be entirely sure, but as I looked out onto the ice, I found consolation for my fears.

Out on the ice, like so many potatoes bound up with fishing line, I saw that the ice fisherman had come to make the most of the weather. I stepped out confidently into the tracks that had gone before me. The ice fisherman closest to me stood up, alarmed for a moment, waving at me frantically, but as the footsteps of my forbearers proved true, he sat down and we both went about our way.

The set of paths I went through were all gnarled and soft. I tried not to step off the path and further attempted to keep my feet from being completely covered in mud, but neither could have truly been honored to any kind of satisfactory degree. I continued through the mud, keeping an eye of the frozen reservoir to my left.

After a short while, I came upon a bench. It said something to the effect of, “One must never judge oneself based on where they are, but instead on where they are going.”

I fought deeper and deeper into the wood, only to hear the pop, pop, pop of rifles. I recalled there being a firing range nearby. I kept an eye out on the horizon, but while their noise pervaded the area, I could not see them anywhere. I continued on, pushing on underneath the peppering of pop, pop, pops. I followed what looked like the trail that reminded me a field spaniel, easy and swaying with long grasses to catch up in the tail of it.

Two little old men with a little old man dog were walking along a paved path and they waved to me as I passed them. As I came to the rest stop, I began to see the signs. The firing range was across the road and they faced away from me.

I crossed a small bridge and in so doing, came around a rather ragged looking group of travelers.

“Oh thank goodness, someone else. We aren’t completely lost,” the woman in the back exclaimed.

Onward I went until I ran across a path I could not cross, not because of any natural or civic blockage, but because the whole path was built up with horse jumps. I climbed to the top of one, musing about the rigorous scramble it would take to climb over them and decided it would be best to just go around.

I’m not sure how much longer it was before I started to grow tired of the rocky outlooks and the thickets of sticks and leaves, when, I started to wonder at my judgment in trudging through this great quantity of muck, but it was about this time that I caught wind of that old memory, that time we, Zanzi and I, had attempted this path before and I had balked and asked to go back. I could tell that I was most of the way around now and my wristwatch was telling me that I was just short of the 10,000 steps that had become my goal since I got the fitness device for Christmas. Today, I would not balk. I decided, and the ambivalence that whispered against the edges of my mind quieted into stony resolve.

I went on through the thickets and the mud, on across the beach, on underneath the specter of the arch that belonged to the dam and instead of finding a scramble of rocks as I had chanced to remember, I found a long easy path that stretched across the foot of the great dam that loomed overhead. I was a weekend warrior on my own rainbow road and as I walked, I saw the great whale tails on horizon, my Valhalla. There, before me, the yacht club, closed for winter, the funny little trails past well-appointed picnic benches and home, a great silver car called home.

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