My Place at Home

Going home for spring break means three things—warm peach kugel, a seventy-five pound torpedo of a yellow lab, and the reservoir.  

As much as I enjoy my weekly time in my garden, each time I visit I can’t help longing for my natural place in my home town: The Oak Ridge Reservoir.  You see, I did not always enjoy my time outdoors as much as I do now, and the reservoir is where it all began.  Sure, I participated in Girl Scout as a child; I went on all the camping trips and made birdfeeders out of pinecones and peanut butter.  But the reservoir is different, it is the nature hidden in my own neighborhood that evaded my interest as a child.  There is nothing all that special in its building blocks.  It has all the typical animals found roaming the yards of my small hometown in northwest New Jersey—the deer that flee at the smallest crack of a branch, curious frogs that leave everything covered in slime, and probably some bears that are as skilled at staying away from me as I am from them.  Yet every time I swung over the metal barrier only successful in keeping large vehicles out, I was presented with a quiet, new are to explore. 

Even though any of its many entrances are no more than a fifteen minute walk from my house, I was not introduced to the reservoir until a few months before my 18^th birthday.  On an unusually warm day in late March my boyfriend, Matt, parked as close to the metal barrier as he could maneuver his old Saturn and introduced me to his childhood playground.  This still snow covered trail, he explained, was a surprise intended to cheer me up after a stressful week at school. 

Before this point, I did not hike.  The boots I wore that day, purchased in seventh grade for the class camping trip to Stokes Forrest, still needed to be broken in.  For the next week my mother exclaimed continual surprise that I had trekked through mud and snow for the better part of an afternoon.  She was even more surprised when I began hiking on a semi-regular basis, most commonly along the trails of the reservoir.

My place at home looks very similar to the place I left behind at school over spring break.  Like the garden, a good portion of the reservoir remains untraveled, its ice-particle snow reaching near the bottom of my knees.  Like the garden, most of the trees and plants lay dormant.  But, if you look hard enough, you can still see some signs of green.  Some signs that most everything will soon return with color and warmth.  

As Matt led my roommate and me around the reservoir this past week, he recounted for her a number of tales from his childhood in these woods; tales very similar to those I heard each time he led me through the trails.  His own personal folklore, Matt shaped each tale in time for a number of land maker.  And along the way we came across history of other travelers, a history we can only hypothesize about.   

Some more self-explanatory….

….than others

This tangle of trails intercepting a basin of water is so seeped in folklore.  The tales I learned from Matt along with stories I may never have the opportunity to learn.  But the tales I learned are different from those my roommate heard and different still from those you might be told should you ever come across my reservoir.  And that’s what so great about folktales, the oral tradition.  The same story can be told countless ways based on when we tell it, who we are with, how long it’s been since the tale originated. 

And that’s what The Oak Ridge Reservoir is to me: the place where I first became aware of the countless folktales to be discovered and created in the natural world.