One Friday afternoon this spring, Thea, Simon and I came home from a hike we’d done, this one much farther from home than our other isolated adventures. The whole day had been a weird mix of magical and mundane. It had been misty with humidity, the air cool but oppressive. The path we walked followed along a river with many small waterfalls (Thea counted seventeen, though I’m not sure all of those individually qualified as waterfalls) but there was also trash littered along the path. On the hikes we’d done near our house, we’d only once encountered another person and it had been easy to steer wide, stepping briefly off the trail and into the woods to give her room to pass, and so we hadn’t been hiking with masks. Mine was in the car and I hadn’t even brought the kids’. But at this park, everyone we saw--a group of women in the parking lot, a family fishing, a solitary man hiking with his dog--were masked and I felt embarrassed and inconsiderate for not doing the same.
Haunted Lakes
Haunted Lakes
Haunted Lakes
One Friday afternoon this spring, Thea, Simon and I came home from a hike we’d done, this one much farther from home than our other isolated adventures. The whole day had been a weird mix of magical and mundane. It had been misty with humidity, the air cool but oppressive. The path we walked followed along a river with many small waterfalls (Thea counted seventeen, though I’m not sure all of those individually qualified as waterfalls) but there was also trash littered along the path. On the hikes we’d done near our house, we’d only once encountered another person and it had been easy to steer wide, stepping briefly off the trail and into the woods to give her room to pass, and so we hadn’t been hiking with masks. Mine was in the car and I hadn’t even brought the kids’. But at this park, everyone we saw--a group of women in the parking lot, a family fishing, a solitary man hiking with his dog--were masked and I felt embarrassed and inconsiderate for not doing the same.