Strong Words, Softly Spoken

Last week I had made plans with our neighbors to take our dogs out to Moss Rock Preserve and hike a bit on Saturday. Well, plans changed and they had to cancel, but I asked Alex if he’d still be up for going out there with me. So Alex & I, along with our friends Ben & Nadia, took our dog and my mom’s dog out Saturday. It was a gorgeous day. The PERFECT day for hiking and we were doing great and having a good time. And then…we got lost.

I think our biggest mistake was that we didn’t really pay attention to where we were or look for signs. We made the initial trek in and up to the rocks and then, instead of continuing to follow the trail we had come in on, we wandered up to the top of the rocks and found some unknown trail and then just picked a direction. And that’s pretty much what we did from there on out. It felt like I was back in FL playing “which way do we go?” with my roommate Patricia. I think I’ve discussed this before, but she & I would be bored and neither of us could make a decision as to what to do to save our life, so we’d simply get in the car and one of us would shout right or left when we got to a dead end and then whereever we ended up would be our entertainment for the day. This was a little like that…only with less civilization.

By the time we realized we were actually very lost it was about 1:10pm. Nadia, who is a massage therapist, had a client scheduled at 2:00pm. Fantastic. So we kept walking. Then, we heard the most amazing sound ever. CARS. Traffic…on a nearby road. Since our options were turn around and try to find our way back through the wilderness or head toward the sound of traffic, well…traffic it was. This involved a little rock climbing (with 2 dogs, mind you) and a few ant bites but finally we come up out of the woods and find ourselves on a road…in the middle of nowhere.

Interestingly enough, someone had posted makeshift signs on a telephone pole with mileage indicators written in black marker. We realize that we’re exactly 1 mile away from our car and Nadia has accepted that she isn’t going to make her appointment. So now we’re faced with whether we walk along the highway or go back down into the trails and try to find our way back. While we’re all just standing around, Nadia attempts to hitchhike. We’re all laughing about it because it’s funny that nobody is stopping…and then sure enough this nice old man in a truck stops and backs up and allows us to crawl in the back of his truck bed.

Now, this is not something I condone nor is it at all anything that I would normally do. My mom taught me from a very early age not to get in a car with strangers (even though my own mother hitchhiked with me and 2 of my friends to my 5th birthday party after we ran out of gas on the way to Showbiz Pizza…but that’s a story for another day and time). But since I didn’t want to walk a mile on the highway with 2 dogs, I climbed in and the nice man dropped us right off at our cars and Nadia was able to make her appointment after all.

The whole time we were out there I kept reciting Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” over and over in my head. You know…”Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth,” and so on a so forth. It’s one of only 2 poems I know by heart. I kept thinking of it because we’d come to these forked paths and someone would say which way we should go and we ended up on the smallest, barely even there path winding under branches and over big logs and through thorny weeds. In our case, the road less traveled was probably not our best choice. But it certainly was beautiful and exciting.