A Commonplace Glossary, vol. 1

I have never gone hiking in the rain. I imagine walking along the path, pulling up my hood as a drizzle begins, then ducking under a tree when it turns to a downpour. I imagine someone else is there with me; it doesn't matter who. It would be the conversation we had that would matter. I imagine that hidden under a tree in the rain, secrets wouldn't mean as much to anyone.

I decide to play it safe and place my sunglasses on my head and carry the sweatshirt in my left hand. In my other hand, I have a guidebook I don't trust completely. The author's directions are vague in places and sometimes leave out intermediary landmarks. He can be especially unhelpful about difficult turns, when there are many choices and few landmarks to offer guidance. This is hike #16, Cromwell Valley Park with Loch Raven Add-On. I need to avoid the add-on; it adds four miles to the path and I hate out-and-back hikes. Without the add-on, the hike is a neat loop.

Last week, I carried notes on the turns in the text but got stymied when things no longer corresponded to what I had written down. There is an interpretative wildlife trail with thick numbered posts that tell you where to read in a pamphlet that no longer exists, but once you leave that behind, the trail blazes are few and far between. The text said to turn right at a series of metal cables holding up an antenna; there are two sets of these cables close together. This time, I am carrying the text with me.

The parking lot begins in the valley between two hills. I start up the trail, stopping to read the book at every intersection. I climb up onto a ridge; knowing this time exactly how high the top is makes the climb easier, and I dig into it with more gusto. I circle round the edge of the park just as I did last week, turn left at the red #1 post, then at the red #11, then a final left at green #5. And then I climb all the way to the top of Cromwell Valley, following a meandering stream all the way to its source. The ground is still wet from the rain yesterday, but I can walk at the edge of the trail, where there is grass and fallen leaves, to avoid getting my feet muddy.

I reach the top, where I stopped before when I glimpsed the edge of what appeared to be someone's house. I have not seen anyone on these trails either time I have been here. Being alone in the woods is a calming thing so long as you feel you know where you are. I have a terrible sense of direction, to tell the truth, so all I need is to know roughly what direction I'll need to go to get back to the trailhead, and how far it is.

"Head right, cross the stream, and go straight up the hill," the text says. I locate a small cut in the path that leads to a stream crossing I hadn't noticed last week, but there are two hills I could climb next: one that parallels the trail I have just been on, and one that heads perpendicular, in the direction of the cut. I have not seen a blaze in a while now, and none are visible from where I stand.

I decide to go parallel because the incline is softer. The trail turns very muddy here; I waddle up the path, placing my feet against the trail edges where the mud is at least more firm, but I splash myself anyway. After some time I start to see red blazes again: a very good sign. I am on the trail of the text.

I think I located the turn for the add-on; I'm losing sense of the text a little, but I take the fork that turns back towards the start. The path widens and flattens out into a grassy path, almost a fire road but wider, and then I come to the clearing.

It is a wide, almost circular opening, and the grass appears to be mown, judging from how short the grass is and the tractor treads in the ground. There are no flowers here or wildlife. It is in what feels like the center of the park, and definitely at its peak. There is nothing above the clearing but sky, and these were dirt paths I walked to reach here, difficult ones so far as I could tell for anything mechanical to traverse. The clearing appears to be a dead end at first, but when I walk into it I notice a small opening that leads back into the woods. There are no blazes.

I bookmark the location in my phone and name it "UFO Landing Field."

It is Melvil Dewey's fault that I read so much about aliens when I was in middle school; my first destination when I went to the library was the 000 section: Computer Science, Information, and General Works. Next to the books that explained how to write games in assembly language were ones about Betty and Barney Hill, the Mary Celeste and Roanoke Island, ghosts and exorcisms, even disappearing planes in the Bermuda Triangle and its Pacific twin, the Devil's Triangle. Everything unexplained in the world was just one shelf down.

I was a skeptical child, but I could not imagine that all of the photographs could be hoaxes, that not all the abduction stories could be lies. I tried to guess which were true and which weren't, but it didn't matter: I already believed that there was truth in that shelf of the unexplained.

It took me a long time to turn my back on it, to conclude all of it was the modern-day equivalent of fairy tales. Because no matter how much of it I decided was hoaxery and fabrication, there was always one more story, one more possibility, out there.

I think all of us need the world to be wider than we know.

The path past the clearing is covered in dead leaves, and leads sharply downhill. I walk slowly, intent on not losing my footing. Suddenly I realize the world is darker than it should be, even with the trees over my head. Rain is coming. I do not like the idea of it now. I still haven't seen any blazes and though I think I am now on the path I did not take past the stream, the sharper uphill, I'm not completely sure, and rainstorms present a strong penalty for mistakes.

I hear a branch crack and start to fall somewhere behind me and a primal fear catches me briefly -- I can't see where it is, but it sounds heavy. I speed up until I do indeed find the stream again, and follow it downhill. Everything seems a little different than before. The light has changed it. No rain drops yet. At the foot of the stream where it levels out, I turn left at a footbridge I remember from before, when I had abandoned the text and simply decided to follow the trail.

Blazes are everywhere here. I follow them until I reach a clearing where a couple sit on a bench together, looking down on a rolling field. Past that is the road to my car. The sky is clear now. No rain clouds at all. I shyly say hello to the couple and walk to the road. Across the meadow of the valley, people are setting up picnics, stretching out in the sun, going for walks together.