AK Weller's Blog

I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day at Mesa Verde. It was the middle of the work week, and the park was all but deserted as I set off alone on the Prater Loop trail. The summer day was mild, a slight breeze stirring air that felt unusually cool and wet for southwestern Colorado.

The best part of the scene was me: mid-twenties, in the best shape of my life, properly SPF’d, undaunted by the seven-plus mile hike ahead of me. I was, in short, exactly the sort of foolish, arrogant loner that goes missing in national parks in droves every year, only to turn up months or years later crammed into some crevasse, mingled with old bear droppings, or sprawled behind a rock ten yards from the trailhead.

After about a mile, the total absence of other humans became a source of indistinct worry. Had I missed something? A sign at the trailhead, news of an escaped murderer? I was so utterly and perfectly alone that the boundary between me and nature, already so thin, broke down completely. No sooner had I wondered what exactly I’d do if I came upon an apex predator than I realized the faint paw prints I was following in the sandy soil bore no claw marks. What I’d taken for another hiker’s dog was, more likely, a bobcat or a young puma.

At least it was ahead of me.

But as I continued to trail along in the wake of the cat’s prints, I saw them veer aside into the low, scrubby brush on the right side of the trail and disappear altogether. I was no tracker, but it didn’t take one to know prints that clear in such shifting, well-trod soil had to be recent; they were probably the most recent on this trail after my own boot prints.

For the next forty-five minutes or so, I kept one ear on the trail behind me, wondering if bobcats ever attacked people. I knew pumas would, so I decided whatever was back there was a bobcat. Though my mind and ears played tricks on me, convincing me the little carnivore was never more than a few yards behind, I soon became distracted by the next thing.

High on the eponymous mesa, I could have seen the storm coming before I even left the trailhead; but I hadn’t thought to look. Now it was upon me, crackling in the air and darkening the afternoon sky. As I passed blackened stumps of long-dead cedars, it occurred to me that I was among the tallest objects on the trail. I started walking faster.

I gained the midway point of the sweeping loop, where a straight furrow through the desert brush would lead me on a shortcut back to the trailhead. I sat down to re-lace my hiking boots, have a snack, and be shorter.

As I crumpled my protein bar wrapper up and stuffed it in a side pocket of my backpack, the storm moved away, drifting off over the valley. I decided shortcuts were for sissies and carried on, no longer caring if a bobcat or a puma were stalking me. The vise of fear had mutated into exhilaration, and still there wasn’t one single solitary soul on the trail with me.

I was three-quarters of the way around the loop when I ran out of water. But that’s not the third thing. Being a woman has its advantages, occasionally, and I was carrying more than enough water around in my small but functional adipose tissue deposits to get me back to the extra bottle in my car.

The problem was, I started to feel the call of nature in the most inconvenient way, the way that makes you sort of glad you have an empty Sun Chips bag and some Starbucks napkins in your backpack. Given my isolation, I figured the risk of being seen was low, and I finally stopped at an unlucky bush a stone’s throw from the trail.

As I ginned myself up to commit this horrible act, I heard a telltale rattling behind me. Glancing down at the exact spot over which my bare bottom would have hovered, I saw a young rattlesnake. We stared at one another for a heartbeat, and then I ran for it.

I made great time on the last quarter and did, in fact, make it to the trailhead “in time.”

Don’t hike alone. It’s stupid, and you might die.

– AK

I followed a complete stranger, a boy a little older than my 13 years, into the woods. I didn’t even know his name. I like to think I wouldn’t have gone along unless my big brother were there. I don’t like to think about how the day would have turned out if my brother hadn’t been there.

This kid who neither of us knew from Adam had bumped into us on a hazy summer day in the neighborhood and invited us to his “fort.” My brother and I were immediately curious and didn’t even ask his name before agreeing to follow him to the place.

I can’t believe how lucky we were to grow up in a place surrounded by woods, short-lived though it was. A five-minute walk from our street, through a knot of slightly newer homes, around a bevy of construction sites where still newer homes were rising, and finally to a dense wood brought us to this mysterious fort. The wood was small, tamed, and safe; but to us it was as good as Narnia, an untouched wilderness begging to be explored.

Let’s just call the kid Kevin. He stopped us before a low, scrubby bush growing against the diagonal trunk of a fallen maple. What at first looked like a solid mass of brambles and leaves was revealed to be hollow as Kevin pulled aside some branches. Inside this den were camp chairs, a rough blanket, and a deflated soccer ball. Pure magic.

Kevin, my brother, and I spent an enjoyable afternoon hanging out in his fort. I have absolutely no memory of the details; all I remember is the fort and the fact that after that day, we never saw Kevin again.

My brother and I returned to the spot some time later and found to our horror that the fort was gone. Everything was gone. Trees had been torn down and dragged away, underbrush had been cleared, and the raw Texas dirt was already dotted with rectangles of leveled ground in a pattern vaguely resembling the established suburban neighborhood it is now.

I was too young to understand things like housing and urban sprawl and growing families needing places to live; I certainly never made the connection that my own home might sit on the grave of some other kid’s beloved fort. I was just sad.

In the coming weeks, as construction blossomed and skeletal frames of new homes sprang up, my brother and I struck back the only way we knew how: senseless mischief. Armed with two hefty walking sticks from his Boy Scout days, we invaded the construction zone in broad daylight and stripped the neon ribbons off every construction stake we found. Soon our walking sticks were festooned with green, pink, yellow, and orange ribbons in such abundance that we were probably visible for a mile as we trolled around looking for more.

After a few days, the fun had to end when a contractor chased us away from one construction site in his work truck. Though we hid in some surviving trees and managed to escape after five heart-pounding minutes of trying not to breathe while the infuriated man berated us and demanded that we come out and face justice, we were sufficiently shaken to cease and desist.

I don’t know if our parents ever knew where we got the ribbons that remained tied to the walking sticks for several years, but they certainly never knew the full extent of our nonsense, because I don’t remember getting grounded or punished in any way.

It’s stupid, but I hope the kid who grew up in the house that grew over Kevin’s fort found her own sacred spot and learned to appreciate her childhood the same way we did, with that wonderfully naive assumption that the way things were when you were 13 is exactly the way they should stay, and God help the people who come along to fuck it up.