I took a hike Sunday afternoon at Versailles State Park.
That sentence doesn’t sound like much by itself. People hike at state parks all the time. They walk a few miles, look at the trees, maybe complain about a hill or two, and then go home.
But some places are never just places.
Annie, her mother, and I walked 3.54 miles through the woods. Some parts were familiar. A lot of them were not. That’s one of the strange things about going back to a place you knew well as a kid. It is both exactly the same and not the same at all.
The trees are bigger. The trails seem different. The hills may or may not have gotten steeper. At least that’s the story I’m going with.
But every once in a while, you come around a bend or see a shelter house or a road or a patch of woods, and something clicks. Suddenly you’re not 52 anymore. You’re 10, or 13, or 16. You can smell a campfire. You can hear bicycle tires on gravel. You can see kids running around after dark with no particular plan and no adult too worried about it.
Versailles State Park was a big part of my childhood.
We didn’t take a lot of big family trips. There was one to Disney World when I was a toddler, and another to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge when I was in my early teens.
But we camped.
A lot.
Every Memorial Day weekend. Every Fourth of July weekend. Every Labor Day weekend. And usually several other times throughout the summer.
Back then, my mom would send in reservations early in the year for the weekends we wanted. If we didn’t get a spot that way, my dad would take the trailer down a night early and try to grab one of the first-come, first-served sites before the campground filled up.
It wasn’t fancy. That was kind of the point.
It was affordable family fun. And I loved it.
Being an only child, camping gave me something I didn’t always have at home: other kids everywhere. Kids to hike with. Kids to ride bikes with. Kids to swim and fish with. Kids to hang around the playground equipment with at night while we all tried to act cooler and more grown up than we were.
And yes, that included the awkward business of trying to talk to girls.
I was probably terrible at it. Actually, there’s no “probably” about it.
But that was part of summer, too.
So were the campfires.
At night, the kids would eventually drift back toward the adults, where the lawn chairs were pulled into a circle and somebody was usually poking at the fire. I liked listening to the grown-ups tell stories. Some were funny. Some were probably exaggerated. Some were not meant for kids, which of course made them even more interesting.
And every now and then, somebody would bring out a guitar.
There were a couple of adults in our circle of friends and relatives who could play and sing. They’d do country songs that were current or recent at the time — Randy Travis, The Judds, Ricky Skaggs, and other 1980s country stars.
At that age, I was pretty sure these family friends were only one lucky break away from becoming major international superstars themselves.
All they needed was for the right person to hear them around a Versailles State Park campfire.
Looking back, that may have been one of the first places I really understood the power of music. Not as something polished and perfect coming through a radio speaker, but as something people used to make a summer night feel a little more alive.
Versailles State Park has that kind of magic.
And we’re lucky to have it in Southeastern Indiana.
It is Indiana’s second-largest state park. It has a 230-acre lake, miles of trails, camping, fishing, swimming, boating, horse trails, mountain bike trails, and a history tied to the Civilian Conservation Corps and even Morgan’s Raiders during the Civil War.
Those are good facts, and they matter.
But they don’t really explain why the place means something.
The facts tell you what’s there.
The memories tell you why it matters.
Sunday’s hike reminded me of that.
We probably should have started a little earlier. The sky was already making threats by the time we were working our way back toward the car. Then, with about 15 minutes left in the hike, the skies opened up.
And I mean opened up.
We got soaked to the bone.
There’s a certain point in a rainstorm where you stop trying to avoid getting wet because there’s no dry left to preserve. Your shirt is wet. Your shorts are wet. Your shoes are wet. Your hair is wet. Your soul may also be wet.
At that point, you just keep walking.
And honestly, there was something pretty funny about it. Not at first, maybe. But soon enough.
That’s another thing about memories. The uncomfortable parts often improve with time. Sometimes they improve almost immediately, especially when you know there’s food waiting at the end.
After the hike, we made a stop at the Versailles Dairy Queen, a place I visited many times as a kid. I got a butterscotch Dilly Bar, which tasted exactly like it needed to taste after 3.54 miles and one unexpected soaking.
Then we went to Gold Star, where a couple of habanero cheese coneys really hit the spot.
That may not be the meal a fitness expert would recommend after a hike through the woods.
But I’m not writing a fitness column.
I’m writing about memory, and comfort, and the way a place can follow you around for most of your life.
When I got back to the car after the hike, I was especially grateful that someone had thought to bring a change of socks.
Thanks, Annie.
A person is so much more comfortable when his feet are dry. Ever notice that?
That sounds like a small thing, but maybe small things are the whole point.
A dry pair of socks. A Dilly Bar. A campfire song. A dad hauling the trailer down a night early so the family could get a campsite. A mom making reservations months ahead of time. Kids riding bikes until dark. Adults telling stories around a fire. A state park that somehow holds all of it.
I went to Versailles State Park Sunday for a hike.
But I also went back to a place where my family spent a lot of good years.
I walked some trails I remembered and some I didn’t. I got rained on. I ate food I probably didn’t earn, but definitely enjoyed. I thought about summers that felt endless at the time and now seem like they went by in about five minutes.
That’s what good places do.
They wait for you.
And when you finally come back, they remind you who you were, who was there with you, and how lucky you were to have had those days in the first place.