Song of the Open Trail

My second hike on the Monon was a kind of rebirth. Until Sunday I had not hiked the trail since summer last year. We're still in the throes of a heat wave so that even at eight the sun's rays still sting. In the sylvan shade however (and much of the trail from 96th Street to the Carmel City Center north of Carmel Drive is shade), one walks in comfort. The greenways of Indianapolis are one of her secret treasures that few people experience. That's a pity because walking the trails I seem to leave the city behind and enter into another world, a simpler world where cars and motors are not evident. It's an egalitarian world. Without their vehicles, their business clothes, people are just people on the trail, each one relying on sheer body strength to journey through the byways. Bikes are the most advanced machinery on the trail and by the rules of the trail they have to yield to those on foot. Even motorists where the trail crosses the street in Indianapolis, most stop to let the trail denizens pass. To be one of these temporary citizens of the trail is to feel a privileged person, someone who has rediscovered the simple pleasures of walking the earth on one's own power.

The landscape changes as I walk from one segment of the trail to the next. Between Broadripple and 74th Street, I cross the White River on modern steel bridges, walk past cafés, then the art center and blind school, past the backyards of modest dwellings. Carmel has really done a super job with her segments of the trail. There the trail goes into lighted tunnels and on hill-like overpasses for breathtaking views of the growing city of Carmel. I walk past businesses but with a different relationship to them. Walking without my wallet I am no longer a consumer. The world, both natural and man-made, is just there to enjoy. It truly is the joy and freedom of the trail in the midst of the cities, a foretaste even of a different way of being.