The Hannah Trail

I padded across the hall to the living room with my hands clasped behind my back. It wasn't often that my dad would turn down my request for a quad ride, but I figured it best to look as charming as possible for added effect. Dad was sitting on our beige velour couch, patterned with burnt orange florals and a rustic mill scene complete with waterwheel. I believe he was watching TV, though I don't remember much of what my dad used to watch on TV. Dad normally just indulged us in our request for endless cartoons, or in my case, the same cartoon played on an endless loop. I approached the arm of the couch in true six-year-old fashion: with a clear lack of acknowledgement of personal space.

"Daaa-aaaad?" I sung with a goofy grin, mere inches from Dad's face.

"What?"

"Can we go for a quad ride?"

Dad angled his head back to look at the clock. I desperately wished I could tell time, and that I knew which were optimal quadding times so I knew when to ask. Dad then looked across the living room at Mom, who was just sitting down to complete some master's course work. She had just set my baby sister in her swing beside the computer desk, and despite the dial-up modem screeching and squawking, the baby had already dozed off for a nap.

"Yeah, alright," his gruff voice strained as he stood and stretched, "better ask if Sarah wants to come too."

I rushed from the living room to our shared bedroom with my orders. My middle sister Sarah was sitting on the bottom bunk with her beanie babies in an impressive row. She inspected them with an importance that can only be conveyed by a four year old inspecting beanie babies. I paused to admire them, particularly the ones she had conned me into trading away.

"Sarah, wanna come for a quad ride?"

Sarah barreled past me and out the back door before I had finished asking the question. She called out as she ran across the back deck, "I WANNA DO THE SARAH TRAIL FIRST!" and then clambered up on to the seat of the quad, staring straight ahead. I followed close behind, claiming my spot on the rack behind the seat, and watched the back door. Dad slipped his baseball cap on with one hand and pulled the door shut behind him with the other as he stepped off the back deck. He sat between Sarah and I on the seat of the quad and turned the key.

"Ready?"

"Yep!" we replied in unison. Dad pressed the start button and eased on the throttle. I gripped the bar behind me as we began soaring across the pasture to the trails. I closed my eyes and imagined we were flying. It always felt like we were flying. I opened my eyes as I heard the engine slowing, and saw we were approaching the entrance to the trails in the extensive stands of pine and birch trees stretching across the pasture. Though at six I certainly adored being lost within the worlds of my favorite cartoons and books, those grasses and trees held a magical world of all my own within them, and that magic was in large part created by my dad's trail system.

As requested, we first ambled down the Sarah trail. The summer sunlight was replaced by a cool and fragrant shade under the cover of the birch leaves, and Dad slowed the quad to a stop in the same spot as always: just beyond the entrance, the Sarah trail held a bit of a different piece of our childhood. Sarah and I both hopped off of the quad and walked to the clearing, stopping in front of a large dried out birch branch stuck deep into the dirt. This was where Dad had buried Zora, my first and favorite dog. Zora had died the previous summer, and it wasn't pretty. I had come home that evening and got out of the car to call her, but she didn't come. I still remember how my heart sank when Dad had to tell me she had died suddenly that day.

"But I buried her in a place where you can see her and talk to her any time you want," Dad choked, "I can show you tomorrow."

The memory rang through my head as I ran my hand along the soft earth, almost as if I was petting her velvety fur again. At six, I did not understand what it must have felt like creating a makeshift grave for his beloved pet in hopes of making the loss less traumatic for his daughters, but I understood that Dad somehow took one of the most significant losses in our lives and weaved it into magic. That spot on the trail was not sad, it was not even a grave, it was just another special place in our magical world that belonged to us and only us, where this loss was turned into eternal comfort.

We made our way back to the quad and resumed our journey down the trail. Dad maneuvered around each bump and curve effortlessly, though not without hitting the ones that gave us a good jostle and made us laugh. We looped back and briefly re-emerged into the sunlight before taking cover once more on another trail; mine. I felt a sense of pride and almost even stewardship over my trail. My posture straightened as I looked left to right, surveying the land and making sure all was well. We approached the top of "Frumble Hill", another of our favorite landmarks in the wood, and began sailing down the steep drop to the bottom. Sarah squealed with delight, and I giggled from the butterflies in my stomach.

We named the hill after Mr. Frumble from Richard Scarry's "Busytown" books; Mr. Frumble was a pig who always lost his hat, and who from a "touch and listen" style book, we learned always yelled, "My hat! My hat!" when said hat flew away. On a particularly gusty day, a ride down the hill had resulted in Dad's hat flying right off with the wind, which we as little girls found particularly hilarious, especially when Dad jokingly yelled, "My hat! My hat!" in his best impersonation of the book. It was another memory embedded within the soil of the trails, another to flash through as we travelled. I leaned forward and quietly reminded Dad of the hill's namesake as we approached the creek bank.

"My hat!" I said to him just above the roar of the engine. Dad chuckled, even though he'd heard me say it about one hundred times before. The sun shone on the creek ahead, and the cattails stood tall and proud around the edge. In the winter when the creek was frozen we could proceed through the cattails and onto the ice. At the other end of the pasture, we could use our canoe in the summer to go paddling around the beaver dams and duck's nests. On that particular day, we simply turned around and climbed our way back up Frumble Hill.

I scanned the trail once more as we made our way back to the entrance in the pasture, when I saw a flash of bright orange near a birch stump left behind by one of the beavers' construction ventures.

"Dad, stop!" I yelled with urgency. "There's something weird over there!"

Dad immediately shut off the quad and peered at me over his shoulder.

"What do you mean weird?"

"I saw some kind of orange thing!" I said as I clammered off the back of the quad. Dad was squinting as he followed behind me, and Sarah dawdled behind him. I paused in front of the beautiful glowing guest on the floor of the woods and looked up at Dad, awaiting his explanation. Dad walked a few steps closer before his eyes softened from a squint and his lips turned upward into a smile.

“Oh wow!” Dad said with extra parental enthusiasm. “That’s a tiger lily!” Sarah and I both gasped at this incredible discovery. We had never seen a wildflower before, let alone one so beautiful and exotic looking.

“A tiger Lily!” Sarah reached out to feel the stem and leaves. “Can we take it to show mom?”

Dad paused. “We could…” he pondered aloud for our benefit, “but then it wouldn’t be here anymore.” Just like that, our discovery had become another plot point on the map of our magical world, and just like the other stops, it could never be moved. To pick the flower and show it to our mom would be to temporarily hold the magic in our hands, but to steal the magic from the woods forever. The beauty of the Hannah trail was not only given to it by the memories we filled it with, but by being the sole vessel for those memories: the things that made it beautiful belonged to the trail itself, and we were just lucky enough for Dad to have shown us how to enjoy and enrich the beauty without taking it for ourselves.

That first tiger lily would be one of the many that would bloom on the Hannah, Sarah, and later named Rachel trail in the next few years before we left the farm.

•••

Past the graduation tassel dangling from my rear view mirror and through my dirty windshield, I scanned the tree line for the entrance to the Hannah trail. Nothing. The gaps in between the trees where the quad tires once gently traced and retraced were completely filled in with nine years of new growth. It was as if we had never been there at all. Part of me was saddened that the magic was gone, and part of me revelled in the fact that my dad’s trail system only now existed in our memories with Dad, never to be altered or destroyed. I squinted in one last attempt to find any remnants of the magic we had left behind. My gaze softened and clouded with tears when I saw a friendly flash of orange among the grasses.