This morning Mom lolligagged around until long after dawn, looking at her phone and her lapbox. I thought she must be looking for a really terrific place to explore. I couldn’t wait!
When she parked the car I thought, ‘This can’t be it!’ It looked just like the Wetlands that Smell Like a Fart. But we’d driven too far for it to be My Fart. Maybe for people running in someone else’s fart stink is exciting? But this fart sucked. There were mean signs everywhere that said, “NO DOGS.” Yeah. I get it, dude. Even the Tardis was broken. “Mom, didn’t you research this?” “No. I was paying bills.” “Well Bills stinks. He couldn’t even take down his racist signs before we got here? You paid him for this?!” If I could use the internet myself, life would be so much better. “You like redwoods, right?” Mom asked. “Let’s go to Oakland.” “Mom, I don’t want to get shot!” “Oh be quiet. Millionairs live in the Oakland hills.”
So we drove just as far again as it had taken to get there, but we weren’t home. We were on a windy mountain road. “Look, Mom! A parking lot!” I said. Mom turned the car so fast that if I were a cartoon I would have splatted against the side of the car.
We got out in a little glade and just started running. We had no idea how long the trail would go, or what it would look like. “How are we going to find our way back?” I asked. “Let’s just take the biggest path every time we see a fork, and see when it ends.”
We went through overgrown singletrack, expansive views of nothing but land, mud, poison oak, tree covered trails… There was nothing I could see different about the trail from our trails at home, but none of the four-legged runners I saw wore leashes. What was this place?!
We never knew when the trail was going to end, and at every end, we found another trail. Finally we came around a bend and saw that there was nothing but green hills one after another until the end of the world. “Mom, it’s kind of hot out here. Can we turn around?”
Oscar the Explorer, but not too much.
留言