Forwell Creek Storm Management Area (Between Lexingon and Weber)

I found myself in this corner of Waterloo because I had to get my computer looked at and the service provider had just moved to Columbia and King.

Still breathing deeply to rid the smell of epoxy from the still-being-renovated store from my lungs, and wanting to get a second quote from another provider south on King, I shifted my plans to bike through North Campus and instead turned east to head down Forwell Creek trail.

First I admired the outdoor greenhouse at Canadian Tire. How lovely the little impromptu landscapes made up by rows of plants for sale, some tall, some small. It reminded me of visiting the greenhouse at the Experimental Farm in Ottawa as a child. A completely human created forest.

As I continued east on Forwell Creek Road, I speculated on such questions as "Could I be truly fulfilled in a technology dominated future where all nature was virtual?" and "Could we really actually be living in a computer simulation?" and "Wow that would be some really intense coding!" to "How we long to know, and how little we do know about the origin and purpose of matter, from the expanding galaxy to this pine tree."

My next thought was: What a gorgeous place this is, no matter how it came to be or why.

When I first moved here and lived on Austin Drive, Forwell Creek was my first discovery and first love. Looking south over the eastern storm water pond, from the lonely road that looks down on it from above, I felt I was seeing a little Eden. At that time there were no houses to the east, just wild land. Soon of course came the razed fields (how it hurt my heart) and then the hosues - but this tiny wilderness lives on as lushly and enchantingly as ever, albeit slightly more constrainted from the perimeter.

Today though I decided to re-explore the west side area. I've been down that less well-used trail before - never to the end (which would, I imagine, come out at Lexington and Marsland - and I've been a little ways in on that side too, but there were too many snails available for crushing to make that experience anything other than upsetting and karmically damaging). Coming from the north, I usually stop at what feels like a half way point, where the hill comes down a little, and where for a long time there was a lone chair under a tree, awaiting a contemplator. Typically I stop because I feel so very far from any other person and I feel a probably reasonable anxiety of stranger danger.

(Sidenote: Agoraphobics, well, at least me, have an interesting relationship to stranger danger. On the one hand, it is, of course, stressful (for the possible assault) and irritating (for the limitations it imposes when wandering in wild places alone). On the other hand, there is nothing more relieving than a rational fear for giving you permission to turn around when you're forcing yourself forward against agoraphobic tendencies. But I digress.)

The landscape had become so lush and full of June that I couldn't find the trail. The last few times I'd explored here, it had been fall, when there is less abundance and more empty calm spaces. After a few moments of searching, I found it, a little fainter than it once was, but navigable. It felt slightly risky, as though it could disapear at any moment into a sea of laughing, anonymous grass.

As the trail turned from an eastern orientation along the edge of the pond towards the south and into the forest and field, it opened into a sheltered space of sumacs to the west and the pond beyond, and pines to the left and the long hill down to the creek to the east. The sumacs framed the pond, a latticework of dark across a canvas of light, and colour - colour was everywhere. Small birds were flying through the lattice.

Sometimes you are surprised by such unexpected wild beauty in unexpected spaces, and it make you delight for the ten thousand landscapes to be discovered right in your own little corner of the earth.

I continued to follow the path and it became became clearer, dirt now instead of flat grass. It started moving downhill. The mosquitoes were substantial.

(Another thing agoraphobics appreciate - mosquitoes. A reasonable reason not to sit and feel the feels, but to keep moving!)

I came to a fork in the path. The western branch, fainter, went up the hill into grassy sunshine. The eastern, down into woody gloom. I chose west, since I'd been east before.

The path dropped and dropped futher down the hill into the dim, damp piney woods.

Next I came to a ancient spreading willow and remembered the night in first year univeresity that S and I got in a fight at the McDonad's drive through on Columbia and King, after coming back from the Revolution Nightclub. The fight was me being young and stupid, the kind of young and stupid where so much love is given to you that the only thing you know to do with it is fling it back with complaints. After we fought, he ran into the night and I went home to cry dramatically with my roommate. Later he came back and we made up. He told me he'd been sitting in a large tree near the creek, listening to the water, and he brought me a stone. It was the only time he'd ever been truly mad at me. The forest and the water had let him forgive. I thought, as I passed the willow, that this must be his forgiving tree.

I was now deep in.

I began to feel the tinges of stranger danger anxiety - too far alone, too far alone. I kept going, I couldn't stop, curiousity pushed me joyfully and expansively.What is around this next corner, down this next hill?

I saw ahead a clearing filled with clothing and bottles and broken off tree limbs angled over living trees.

My first thought was this was a perfect location for rough sleeping in the sense of it being very private, probably very safe, and very pretty.

My second thought was that this was where I definitely needed to turn around.

I tend not to approach urban encampments unless they are very close to a main path. This one looked abandoned, but I wasn't very close to it. My a-brain was like, YEAH, sweet! Let's turn around (because it always likes that feeling). But my rational brain was like, yeah, you really should.

I turned around, vowing one day to return with a companion and follow this entire trail.

Back at the fork I still felt the enthusiasm for exploration so I turned west.

I was rewarded by a most enchanting clearing.

I think this is where the chair once sat, too.

And then above that, a view up a hill.

The way the clearing was scooped into a little sunlit valley among tall trees and bushes, out of the side of a tall slope, was so unusual to me and striking.

The mosquitoes were also really enjoying the space, and me in it. So I turned to head back after one last loving look.

On my return to the fork, I realized: this path is not great. It is clear enough, but not really clear. This is the kind of path that your archetypical mother voice tells you to be careful on and not get lost.

I experienced a moment of panic. It was not a clear path. Yes, I could SEE it, but it wasn't totally clear, and I couldn't see in my head exactly what it looked like ahead, because everything was so overgrown and unfamiliar.

Then a thought came:

Truth the path.

I only need to be able to see it a few feet ahead, and follow, and since I know I followed it in, I know it will reveal itself to me, in time.

I know there is a path here, and now I need to trust it.

I followed.

This was a new kind thought for me, a new path in my brain. Still just flattened grass, but visible and navigable.

Let go of your map, and your fear that your map will fail you, and trust the signs on the ground.

The panic didn't fully recede.  The path was still not very clear, with so many twists and turns. I thought (as I alway do in urban parks) "Well, you can hear traffic, won't get lost if you move towards it." Except I couldn't hear it that well. And this was a very strange landscape to me, hills and valleys and areas I hadn't even looked at on Google Maps and creeks and ponds barring staight lines in any direction. So suddenly, it felt like getting lost was a possibility. Would it be possible to wander for days literally almost in view of the Canadian Tire? Maybe! I could imagine it!

Panic again, and then the thought: Trust the path. Truth the path.

Let go of the map and trust the path.

I continued on. I could only see a few steps ahead, because of the twists and turns. At every turn, I thought, I don't remember what comes next! What if this is where the path disapears and I go stark raving mad, lost in the wilds? Become a naked, hairy feral adult living off Forwell Creek minnows and berries, always searching for the elusive Lexington road and all it offers for my renewed membership in human civilization?

Or worse, what if I have a panic attack?

Trust the path, trust the path.

And. Amazingly. The. Path. Kept. Being. There.

As I always knew it was, as it always had been.

With great relief, I finally reach the edge of the pond, and the view through the sumac, which signified re-entry into the known world. I spent a few moments admiring the view, and then followed a more clear branch of the entry path out onto the road a little further east from where I'd entered. There was my bike, reassuringly locked to a post. I unlocked it, feeling like a mountaineer descended from Everest, while a middle aged couple, the woman sporting a maple leaf tattoo on her ankle to match her red tshirt, walked by on a pleasant afternoon stroll.

Trust the path.