Finding Bud’s Trail
[Nov. 2004,
Composition]
I stopped dead in my tracks at Amy’s words. “You don’t know where it is?!”
I was incredulous, but wanted to laugh at the same time. My cousins and I love a good joke, and this would be a great story to tell her sister Melissa when we got back to the house. Little did I know that it would turn into a story my cousin Amy and I still talk about years later.
Melissa, Amy, and I had grown up playing in the woods together at our grandma’s house, so it was following tradition when we had decided earlier that afternoon to go for a walk in the woods. The only difficulty had been where to walk, but Amy seemed to have the perfect solution when she remembered their neighbor’s biking trail. Bud had told them that they could bike there any time they wanted, Amy had enthused, and her brother had already been several times. The trail was just across the highway, too, so it would be convenient. Melissa stayed behind to cook supper, but we took their eight-year-old brother Jonathan with us to round out the hiking party. He was a bit wound up, and we knew it would be a good idea to let him burn off some of his energy before suppertime.
Our first stop had been at Bud’s house to ask for his permission to walk on his land. He came to the door in answer to our knock, and I saw that their neighbor was a man in his fifties or sixties: very friendly, but one of the serious, taciturn types. Bud willingly agreed, under the single stipulation that we take his can of insect repellant.
“Do you know how to get there?” he asked just as we were about to leave.
“Oh yes!” Amy had assured him confidently. “It’s right across the road.”
Not until we reached the highway did we discover that “right across the road” was not as straightforward as Amy had assumed.
She glanced uncertainly in both directions before replying to my question. “Well…I thought I knew.”
We were only a short way from her house, where the road met the state highway. It stretched out as far as eye could see in either direction, and cars whizzed past every few seconds. Amy pointed to a dirt lane that met the highway exactly opposite us, saying, “I think it might be down there.”
I eyed the homemade wooden sign by the edge of the lane that
proclaimed “Puppies for
Nevertheless, we took Jonathan’s hand and crossed. On the other side, we were about to start down the lane when Amy remembered the walkie-talkie clipped to her belt. Melissa had the other one, and we had brought it so we could keep in touch during our walk. Now it might save us some confusion and embarrassment.
“Melissa?” Amy called out, pressing the talk button. “Where exactly is Bud’s trail?” Melissa, unfortunately, was no help. She had never actually seen the trail, either.
We decided to continue down the lane, but I was less than
optimistic about our success. With each step, it looked more like the winding
country driveway so familiar to me from years of living in rural
Neither of us exactly relished the thought of going back to Bud’s house and admitting our ignorance, but there seemed no other option if we wanted our walk. Besides, we knew that owning one’s faults is a good a character- building exercise. Back we trudged, and happily, Bud was still outside tinkering in his garage. I don’t know what we would have done if we had been forced to knock; probably gone home and given up the whole idea. Amy and I approached him hesitantly, Jonathan in tow, and explained our plight. Bud didn’t laugh at us, but I almost think I would have felt better if he had. We listened to his detailed directions, bobbing our heads like runaway motorized rocking horses to show that we understood, and then left as quickly as possible. I had a mental image of him shaking his head and muttering as we trooped out of sight.
We now knew to look for a trail entrance marked with a wire hung with milk jugs (to keep out the deer), and for the next three hundred yards we were filled with confidence. Until, that is, a vague uneasiness suddenly settled over us upon reaching the highway once again.
I voiced my thoughts reluctantly. “Did he say to go left or right down the highway?”
We exchanged glances and groaned. Pathetic, but it seemed that both of us had completely missed that part of the directions. Despite this setback, I was convinced that we could still find the trail. After all, the highway only had two directions. If we didn’t find it going one way, all we had to do was turn around and try the other. It was all very logical. How could it fail?
The left seemed more likely according to Amy’s memory, so we started purposefully up the side of the road. Dozens of cars whizzed past as we walked further up the road, but to our disappointment, we didn’t see anything even vaguely resembling a wire with milk jugs. We walked further still, until Amy commented that we must be halfway to town by now. It was about that time that I burst into song, a spontaneous parody the song “Keep Walking” in the VeggieTales video “Josh and the Big Wall,” one both Amy and I knew well.
“It’s plain to see
Your brains are very small
If you think walking,
Will be finding it at all!”
Sadly, Amy didn’t seem to appreciate my attempt at humor. She shot me a look fit to kill and threatened to throw something.
Finally, we both knew it was pointless to walk any farther, so we turned around. Amy was inclined to forget about the walk and just go home, but my mettle was aroused and I was determined to find the sneaky trail if it took another half an hour of walking. We did walk for several minutes in the opposite direction, but still no sign of any wires with or without milk jugs. Finally, Amy persuaded me that it was no use. I couldn’t understand it, but obviously a fallacy lurked somewhere in my careful reasoning. We couldn’t find the trail without help. Even the bare thought of asking Bud yet again was much too embarrassing to mention, so Amy suggested that we simply return the bug spray and tell him that we had had a very nice walk, thank you. It would be no lie: we certainly did have quite a walk; we just wouldn’t specify exactly where.
We approached Bud’s driveway for the third time that afternoon arguing over which of us should recite the planned speech. We needn’t have bothered, however, because Jonathan took care of the matter for us. As soon we came into hearing distance, he blurted, “We still couldn’t find the trail!” The honest candidacy of childhood is an admirable trait, but Amy and I were far from appreciating it just them. Not finding any cracks in the pavement large enough to sink through, we faced Bud with a rather flustered explanation of what had happened. Our sentences fell over each other in an attempt to get out that we had looked and looked up both sides of the road, but couldn’t find it anywhere, and all we really needed to know was whether to go right or left and then we were sure we could find it. Bud still didn’t laugh. To this day, I wonder what he must have been thinking. He only swung himself onto his four-wheeler, indicating that we were to follow him. By this point, he must not have trusted us to follow or remember even the simplest directions. Could we reasonably blame him?
He led us from his driveway back to the highway, and then across
to the lane with the “Puppies for
Amy poked me jokingly in the shoulder, “See, I said it was this way! But would you listen? Noooo. Just goes to prove once again that I’m always right when you don’t listen to me.”
I shrugged defensively. “I know, I know. But you have to admit, it does look like a driveway!”
At this, we rounded the very bend we had stopped just short of on our previous jaunt down the lane. Confronting us, mockingly, were the wire and milk jugs that Amy and I had been searching for during the last half-hour. We ducked under them, gave our sheepish thanks, and watched in relief as Bud drove away. Now we could finally enjoy our walk. The afternoon couldn’t possibly get any more ludicrous, we thought, so our adventures must finally be over.
Were we ever wrong! We had been walking for about five minutes, planning how we could live down our shame by avoiding Bud for the next ten years until he forgot even our names, when we heard the sound of the four-wheeler again and turned to see him coming up the path. He didn’t say so outright, but he had obviously come back to make sure we hadn’t gotten lost on the trail, which was about as straight and clearly defined as a strand of uncooked spaghetti: definitely too complex for our incomparable sense of direction. Bud accompanied us to the end of the trail, and then offered to give Jonathan a ride back with him on the four-wheeler. He probably reasoned that our getting lost was inevitable, and that the best he could do would be to make sure little Jonathan wouldn’t starve to death in the woods with us. At any rate, Jonathan climbed onto the back as eagerly as any eight-year-old boy know I would, and Bud drove ahead toward the house.
When Amy and I reached Bud’s house several minutes later, we were surprised not to find them waiting for us. In fact, they were nowhere in sight. This was great! To top off a splendid afternoon, now we had lost our babysitting charge. It wasn’t that we suspected Bud of kidnapping, simply that Jonathan was a rambunctious little chap and there was no telling where he might be if he wandered off by himself. We speculated hopefully if he might have simply gone home without us, so we trotted down the road toward Amy’s house, trying to think of the least alarming way to ascertain whether he was there.
We stopped at the mailbox and Amy unclipped her walkie-talkie again. “Uhh…did Jonathan just run into the house, by any chance? Oh. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
She clicked the off switch before Melissa could follow with questions that we didn’t care to answer just then. We returned to Bud’s house and plopped despondently down on his front porch steps, waiting for something helpful to happen. To our immense relief, we didn’t have to wait long. Bud soon pulled up with Jonathan safely on the back of the four-wheeler. Bud taken him down the road to see the latest progress in the construction of a neighbor’s house. We thanked Bud sincerely, returned his bug spray, and went back to Amy’s house as quickly as we could manage with any amount of grace. It was the first time in our long friendship that we had ever been glad to see a walk together come to an end.
When we told Melissa our story, we tried not to pass it off as less embarrassing than it had actually been. Nevertheless, when my aunt sent us to exchange some caramel popcorn for a cup of Karo syrup the next evening, Amy and I were decidedly relieved that it was Bud’s wife and not Bud who answered the door. Nearly two years later, we can laugh about our adventures that day; but Amy still glares and makes mortal threats every time I so much as hum the opening bars of “Keep Walking.”