On the fifth day of our camping trip we took a hike in the redwoods. This particular hike had a special paper map for kids which Mabel, ten years old at the time, loved. You walked up the side of a steep wooded ravine and back down, stopping at many stops along the way to look at a particular tree, sit on a particular bench, notice a particular plant, and so forth. As always in the redwoods, it was beautiful. The forest was lush and soaring, full of majestic vistas and towering trees. It’s both an honor and a delight to walk into a redwood grove, any redwood grove, every single time.
But one of my very favorite bits of this walk was entirely different. It came right at the beginning, when, in order to get us out of the campsite and onto the hiking trail proper, the route needed to transport us to the other side of a highway. This being an official hike for kids, it wasn’t going to have us dash across the road, the way you so often do in rural settings.
Instead, following the map, the trail went alongside a creek, and underneath a concrete overpass bridge for the road. The clearance where you walked under the bridge was between four and five feet high—so kids could walk comfortably, but the adults with them had to duck the whole way. You felt like maybe you weren’t supposed to be there, even though you absolutely were supposed to be there. The underside of the bridge was pale green with algae and the creek, bordered by wide gravel banks, was so shallow it looked brown.
And something about this hidden, unlovely landscape just made my heart sing. Yes!
My little heart sang out: This! I want more of this! The soaring natural beauty, sure, of course. But, also the weird secret places. The dirty places. The curious places. The places only big enough for the children to fit properly into. The places you’re not sure you’re supposed to be. The places with the boring 1930s WPA concrete architecture and the gray gravel banks and the two-inch-deep brown water.
I crave the mundane mystery of it. It speaks to something very deep within me. The hidden and the weird and the dull. The underpass is my church as surely, if not even more surely, than the redwood grove next-door.