Trail Guide - Alex Lake

It’s kind of redundant to call a forest a place where people die. You can assume at least one person has died in every forest with a span larger than 2 acres, because that’s just the nature of them. I don’t think I need to spell out the fact that anything you can’t see the other side of, anything you have to enter without a clear, well-defined exit, is just an opportunity for you to exercise just how little critical thinking skills matter once you’re thick into the maw of something that engulfs the eyeline, overwhelms the senses with its utter totality.

When you add a town that just barely escapes the trees’ reaches in some places, a reliance on survival and economy and, god, at the very least firewood to keep a body warm, nobody can prevent a little escapade into those woods. It’s encouraged, it’s needed. Shit, at some point, it kind of becomes a right, doesn’t it? A field of wheat unharvested, a cave spring that’s never seen the light of day, a wild, covered land sitting unturned and unpossessed. It’s like a beauty begging to not be seen, like an invitation for you to just see what it can provide for you.

But forests fuck you up, but not really since it’s you, actually, doing most if not all of the fucking up, because as soon as your brain gets the chance, it gets lazy. Trees, leaves, dirt, it thinks, yeah yeah, categorized and filed sufficiently into a cabinet of background noise that, honestly, barely sufficiently registers when growing up in a place like this.

Your brain forgoes any sense of an instinctual compass it has in favor of sending your feet digging back and back into circular paths, eyes seeing but never really truly discerning the difference between this trunk and the next, because doesn’t every fucking white oak look the same except for that one you maybe passed a few minutes ago with the three crude notches slashed into its bark?

Once you hit that point, the questioning of your surroundings, you’ve officially become Lost. What that means, in an official capacity, is that your barebones hike through the trees to do drugs or for alone time or for birdwatching or deerhunting or human fucking becomes a six hour recovery mission from a group of volunteers that, if they find you, give you a shock blanket and maybe ten minutes of fawning before they’re hauling you back to town calling you a fucking idiot most of the way. That’s really what they mean when they refer to hometown pride, by the way.

This forest, slightly more than other, grander, larger, thicker forests that blanket western New York, doesn’t seem to want to let people go. It will, otherwise what’s even the point of having a county-designated search and rescue team with shiny, emblazoned vests and flashlights with a luminosity just shy of the fucking sun. But the starlings call out for you, layers of mimicked voices warping through the tunnel of your ears that search for something, anything to lend a sense of stability when you know you’re not standing where you once stood, but, if that’s the case, where are you standing now?

So it’s easy to hear, to turn aimless bird whistles into a hey, over here, hey, over here. You never want to listen, if that’s not obvious already, because I can guarantee there’s no solace nor long term safety in a creature that I’ve personally seen adopt the speech pattern of a picnicking companion just to steal a single fucking strawberry. They’re not mean, per se, but cruel as a byproduct of their own personal goals that don’t typically coincide with that of a desperately lost traveler.

Above all, you don’t want to listen because even when you think you see one of those little things flitting through the branches, beating their oily green wings and cocking their heads this way and that, you can never be sure it’s really them speaking to you. Because of this, we strictly enforce our rule of no odd-numbered pairings when (engaging) on this tour, as the chance for vulnerability and the subsequent falling victim to avian and timber trickery is just too high when there’s not a one to account for another.

So parents, please ensure you bring a companion for your lone child to embark on this tour of our town’s beautiful forest, and take careful note of the neon markers that guide your path.

Now, I will remind you once more and for a final time, please do not wander off to feed any animals you may encounter on this trail. While they are hungry, the trees are doubly so.