On the Shore of Lake Bonneville

 On the first day I went out walking, the day I walked up to the Capitol, I kept going up the hill, because the sunlight was good, and wound up hiking all the way up the snow-glossed mud trails that went up into City Creek Canyon, which encompasses a natural area and a park as the subdivision houses of the city reach up into the foothill mountains. 

I had not known about this park, so discovering it by serendipity was a pure delight. There was plenty of sun left in the day, so I knew I had time enough to enjoy the leisure of exploring it, and also get back to the hotel before late afternoon shadows grew too chilly. My shoes were not the ones I would have chosen for that kind of hike, so I had to be ginger in my steps at times where the trail followed the contours of the slope. Later I found through the signs along the trail that it was part of a network of trails that followed the contour of the ancient Lake Bonneville. Perfect!

There is perhaps nothing more satisfying to me that discovering such a trail that I can follow through some woods for. a short distance, that takes me to some other trailhead at the far end, that I don't know anything about at the time I enter the trail.

It is a primeval re-discovery of the same spontaneous discovery from when I was seven years old, or even younger--the path into the woods that comes out who-knows-where on the other side. Each one seemed a portal to some mystery that feels as real as anything one reads in a childhood detective story.

As an adult, I know that on the other end of the path, the world is the same world as the one that I just exited, when I started on the trail.  I don't anticipate that the other trailhead will disgorge into some hidden exciting world I didn't know about before.

Yet I have long since known that if I allow myself this spontaneity of discovery, allowing my feet to take me where they will, that I will inevitably encounter something along the path itself which will be obviously the reason I was supposed to follow the path that day. Not uncommonly, it will be something that will stick with me for the rest of my life, and give me recall of the whole adventure. It will be something about which  I might think of as the point of the following the trail that day, even though I could not have known about it in advance.

What did I discover that day in Salt Lake City, that would seem so much the point of the whole experience? .I could name several tangible things I encountered along the way as candidates, but what struck me as the point was the consciousness of what I just wrote, in the words I used to express them here.