There’s a path in my town that I’ve been driving by for years, that I’ve always wondered about. There’s no trail sign for it. There’s no designated parking lot for it either. But every time I pull up to this one intersection, I can see down this path and it looks like it runs for a mile without any indication that it interferes with anyone’s private property. Some day, I always think to myself when I see it, I gotta check it out.
Well, some day came. On Friday, after spending too much time sitting down all day, I was getting a little antsy as my wife drove us home from Boston. She had seen this situation before and knew just the remedy for what ailed me. It turns out, she was a little curious about what I’d find down that path as well—I wasn’t the only one it had been nagging. So, when we got back into town, she stopped the car at the mysterious trail we’d been eyeballing all these years, and kindly told me to “get out.” Actually, I think she said, “go check it out,” but we hear what we hear.
The start of the trail was as encouraging as it has always looked from the road. Someone’s clearly been mowing the grassy sections near the beginning, and I started to think I had made a wonderful new discovery. After a few minutes, I came upon a single house where there was a little trestle footbridge of sorts, with white railings to boot, and I thought it can’t get any more welcoming than this… Unless, of course, someone created this private footbridge for their own use, and I’m considered a trespasser. I decided to move a little more briskly before anyone was aware of my presence.
This looks great! Wait… a little too great.
But it didn’t get any better. After I cleared the private residence, the trail became grown-in with ivy and a lot of undergrowth obscuring much of the way. I could still tell where the trail was, but the lack of maintenance didn’t give one the warm and fuzzies. It felt like whoever owned the land was trying to encourage things to go back to their pre-trail state. As I approached a pond, I saw another house in the distance and decided it was time to hurry along.
Even though I had never cut through this area before, I knew where I was and had a sense of what road I would pop out on when I finally reached the other side of the path. There’s a long-condemned house where the local teenagers used to drink and hang out—maybe they still do, I don’t know, but I had a feeling I would be seeing it soon enough. What I wasn’t expecting was to come upon an abandoned food delivery truck first. Or maybe it’s an ice cream truck—gasp! Anyone who is familiar with the likes of Stephen King or horror movies in general, knows that abandoned ice cream trucks left in the woods all belong to psychopathic axe murderers. Okay, I’m outta here.
The road on the other side of the trail was in view now, and I jogged through the brush until I was standing on pavement. Phew. From the road I looked back and could now see the condemned property to the left of the woods where I came out. The abandoned truck no doubt belonged to the same people that owned the house. Obviously, nobody was there, so hiking through that portion of the woods would likely not be a problem for anyone, but I no longer felt the need to explore that path ever again. And who knows. Maybe some deranged ice-cream-loving slasher was in fact there, staring at me through the boarded-up windows, just waiting for me to come back and explore his little delivery truck of pain. I didn’t want to stick around and find out.
Nope, when it comes to trails in the more populated, southern parts of New Hampshire, I think I’ll be sticking to the paths that are clearly marked from now on. Lest I want to become someone’s next meal or take some buckshot to the keester from being somewhere I shouldn’t be, I think that’s the safer play. I prefer my hikes to inspire more harmony than dread.
Fair enough? Yeah, I think so too.
