swamped

We ran into a couple, middle-aged, sweaty, on the path that encircled what-I-will-persist-in-calling-a-bog but that others might-call-a-pond in Assiniboine Forest over the weekend.

They looked at me with hopeful desperation, as if I was the first human being they'd seen in hours.

"What's this way?" the woman asked.

"More park..." I said, because while Assiniboine Forest is large and full of meandering paths, none are so long that you can't walk ten or twenty minutes and hit its edges, finding yourself on the curb of a recognizable thoroughfare.

And then I just looked at them.

They focused on M next, who they somehow sensed would be more sympathetic.

And he gave them directions out of the park, which is what they really wanted.

As they tromped away, their sneakers hardly dirty, the man looked back at me.

"It's really muddy back there. Really muddy."

As if paths in parks have no right to meander or be muddy, as if beavers in bogs have no right to build dams that cause the water to swallow the edges of the path, as if frogs have no right to leap in and out of the cloven deer and dog prints, bike treads, and sneaker grooves on the path and startle them.

As if the wet summer we'd just had, with its twilight mosquitoes, the mid-night crackle of thunderstorms, the downed and drowned trees all over town, was a surprise.

I wanted to tell them to take a few hours and get lost.

But that would be the swamp thing in me talking...