If you start walking down the trail, you’ll pass a small stump, not more than 8 inches around. It’s from a birch or an oak or something. Not a pine. I know that bark from a mile away. Once you pass it, the woods will engulf you shortly thereafter. A cool place in the summer, 5 degrees cooler from the shade, but somehow thicker, bleak and dead in the winter, scratchy sticks of bare branches, a mat of wet decaying leaves, soft and silent under each step. 

If you press on the trail turns south, not in direction but in elevation. Dropping in reverse rise over run. Dropping, dropping towards the creek. What makes it a creek instead of

a river you wonder? Is it flow rate? Depth?  Both?  Neither? You’ll get to the bottom and have no choice but to go left. So you do. 

Flat and sandy, no rocks like the mountains. A grit formed from Arkansas clay, thinned but the same trip followed by the same southern river for years. At least that’s what you assume. You can’t really know. Can anyone?

When you’re out here you wonder ridiculous notions. The whole “if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there, does it make a sound.” You land on “of course” because, logic. You meander along the bank and keep moving forward. Each trip, deeper. Each time thinking you’ll round the corner and be blown away by a spectacular view. A new discovery. It never comes and so, each time you go just a little further. 

You realize that there’s way further to go, because there’s a path. A trail. It has to have an end or a culmination, but after a while you land once more, but this time in the mundaneness of it. Whatever you were looking for isn’t here. No Robert Frost moments. Dead leaves. Dirty ground. A song from 20 years ago. You think back to 1980 and how then, songs from the 60’s were from a long time ago. Though 69-80 is only 11 years. Your current list of frequent plays has songs 25 years plus on it and they seem the same age as when you listened. You realize this is how your parents must have felt when Classic Rock stations came out. The stratification of musical genres splitting like the sandy eddies in the creek on your right. Gurgling. Bringing you back. 

You look up into the sun and push on. 

Just a little further. 

#hugsandhi5s