Forty Minutes in Any Direction

I didn't plan it. That's the part that made it work, I think. It was Thursday morning, post-July Fourth lull, the kind of week where everything feels slightly unscheduled, and I looked up directions to a lake I'd seen listed on a county parks page months ago and never followed up on. Forty minutes. I figured if it was ugly or crowded I'd just drive back.

It wasn't ugly. It was this small, almost-forgotten-looking lake ringed with pines, a parking area with four other cars in it, and a wooden dock that jutted out over water so still it looked like a photograph of itself. I walked to the end of it and sat down and didn't do much of anything for the next two hours. I'd brought a book, you can see it in the second photo, but I mostly just held it. There's a specific kind of tired that a day like that undoes. Not sleep-tired. The other kind.

I keep thinking about something I almost put in a blog post a few weeks ago and then deleted: that the whole reason I started writing any of this down was because I needed somewhere to put things that didn't have a category yet. The lake felt like that. It didn't have a category. It wasn't exercise, it wasn't an errand, it wasn't productive in any way I could defend. It was just, there, and I went to it, and I sat at the end of a dock and watched a heron stand absolutely motionless in the shallows for a full ten minutes.

Drove home with the windows down. Stopped at a gas station for a Gatorade, the orange kind, which I keep telling myself is ironic and keep buying anyway. It's July. The summer feels like it's actually happening now, not just the calendar version of it. That's worth documenting, I think. Even if all I did was sit there.