An Out-of-the-Way Place

This is an essay about a walk I took on December 16th, 2025.

I’m going to tell you up front, this is a story where nothing happens. It isn’t about anything and it isn’t going anywhere. It’s just something I wanted to write.

I went for a walk a few days ago. This is a habit I’ve been getting into lately, just going on walks in the evening, to nowhere in particular, for no particular reason. I don’t know what took me so long, to be honest. I used to have problems with arthritis that made walking any significant distance a grueling ordeal, but it’s been almost a decade since I got diagnosed and prescribed effective medication, and now it’s not nearly such a problem anymore. Maybe I just didn’t want to admit there was no reason for me to be a shut-in anymore. In any case, it’s a wonderfully grounding activity. It reminds you that yes, actually, you are alive, and there is a world that you live in, and that it’s a vast place in which much is happening, of which you are only a very small part, no more or less essential than any other. For some people I imagine this might be disconcerting. Personally, having had to come to terms with the limitations of the flesh a long time ago, I find it reassuring. Anyway, on this walk I decided to climb partway up the ridge which my home sits a few blocks from the foot of, and then strike out south, along a fairly busy road which cuts across it at a gentle grade, before leveling out at the top and carrying on out of the city, into the farms and mossy woodlands which surround it. This was the first time I’d chosen to walk up this particular road, for the simple reason that I prefer to chart a loop, and I wasn’t really sure if that would be possible here – there were plenty of roads, I knew, leading further upwards, further away from where I started, but I had no idea where the closest was that might lead back down.

I ended up walking maybe three-quarters of a mile, to a bridge over a deep, jagged gorge, before deciding I should try to find a way back. I knew where the river at its bottom, which, in the darkness, I could hear rushing fast and icy but not see at all, cuts through town down below, and it was far enough that pushing onwards risked growing my prospective loop to a larger circumference than I really wanted to trek. As much as my health has improved since I was a teenager, the reality is still that I don’t have anywhere near the youthful resiliency of most people my age. I crossed the bridge and wandered into a snowy little churchyard perched on the edge of the gorge, hoping it might afford a better view of the gorge (it did not), before deciding I should go back and try to find a way down on its near side. It just seemed like the better play. Maybe if I had kept going another block I would have found exactly the sort of street I was looking for, but I didn’t. I could also have simply pulled out my phone and opened a map, but this, I feel, is missing the point. Instead, I just crossed back over and I turned down the next street I could, which proved to be steep little avenue that let out into a haphazardly plotted parking area behind some apartments. This fed out into another side street, running diagonally to the pour of asphalt I was crossing, which I saw delineated one border of a small residential cul-de-sac. I saw, also, that it appeared to continue beyond the place at which it intersected with the road leading into said cul-de-sac, and that where it led the ground fell away, and there was a small gap in the trees. Here, I thought, might be what I was looking for.

As I approached, two things occurred, almost simultaneously: I perceived that, yes, the road did not end, but instead dipped sharply downwards into inky-dark woods, and the call I had been on with my friend up until that point on the walk dropped abruptly. This latter event wasn’t really that strange (I’ve lost count of the number of times she has suddenly, mid-conversation, realized her phone’s battery is in the single digits; you probably know someone like this as well), but the timing was, nevertheless, undeniably a bit unnerving. In the new silence, I was suddenly aware that I had wandered to a fairly out-of-the-way area, where it was very quiet and I was very alone, no passing cars, no people on the street or moving behind shop windows, and that I was now heading down a road which appeared to lead into total isolation. It is one of the more curious characteristics of small cities, such as the one I currently live in, how quickly and unexpectedly one can find oneself in a place which does not feel like a city at all, does not even feel like it is anywhere near a city.

I did not stop to consider these things, at the time. I was of course aware that something had changed, that the walk had suddenly taken on an entirely different atmosphere. But I really did want to find some other way back than the way I had come – and anyways, a road like this is enticing to me, so narrow, so drenched in darkness, and dropping so steeply you can hardly tell it’s there until you’re right on to of it. The experience of walking on a road like this was one I wished to know, and so I pressed onwards. I passed a yellow swing gate that hadn’t been closed, it looked like, in a very long time. Beyond it, the light from the streetlights behind me quickly faded into almost nothing, and there were none to be seen up ahead. I moved cautiously; the road really was abnormally steep, and it was too dark to tell for sure what might be a patch of ice. Around me there was only the sound of my own scraping footsteps, of the rushing water, still near, only growing louder, of cars passing on the road I had left behind me and on another somewhere distantly ahead, very distantly, echoing across the gorge, and of the wind whistling now and again in the branches of the barren trees. I tried for a few feet to make my way in the darkness, before doing the obvious, sensible thing and turning on my phone’s light. I’m not sure why I hesitated at all – perhaps because admitting the necessity of the measure was implicitly admitting, as well, that what I was doing no longer really fit the parameters of a casual after-dinner stroll, or perhaps because I simply didn’t want to draw attention to myself. In any case, the light seemed strangely feeble to me, more so than I was accustomed to, like something about the place was somehow smothering it. At one point, I raised the light up to try to look around, and it reflected off… something, a sheet of metal maybe, in the back window of a house I hadn’t realized was there until just then. After that, I kept it pointed at the ground.

I say “after that,” but there really isn’t much more to tell. I kept walking a little further – it turned out there was no ice on the road, luckily, just some damp patches. It had curved sharply towards the gorge, and I started to think it might be an access road of some sort. I could see it curved again further on and kept going the direction it had begun in, presumably linking up with the house I had seen at some point, but it seemed increasingly unlikely it was actually going to lead where I was trying to go. Registering this, I stopped and looked around. In the daytime, in the summer, I imagined it was probably quite a picturesque spot, but at night, in the winter, it felt eerie and forgotten, secluded in a bad way. The thought occurred to me, as well, that there could easily be someone sleeping rough in an out-of-the-way spot like this – I wasn’t really worried about being jumped (well, maybe a little; I am no more immune to bourgeois afflictions than you are), but I was aware of how threatening I might seem to them, if there was anyone there, a young guy in dark clothing walking alone in a place no one would really be expected to have any wholesome business being this time of evening, and I wouldn’t want to be the cause of any lost sleep, or worse. The overriding feeling, to put it simply, was that I was in a place I should not be – not at this time of day, at least, at this time of year. It wasn’t an urgent feeling, I wasn’t scared, there was no fight-or-flight impulse; I just simply felt I shouldn’t be here, that it would be foolish to try to go any further, and that lingering certainly wouldn’t do me any good. And so I didn’t. I turned around, and I climbed back up the road I had just walked down. On my way out, I stopped and took a picture of the gate I had passed through:

Do you see anything strange in this picture? Something at the edge of the flash’s reach, maybe, or hidden in the trees right beside me? I don’t either, but every time I look at it, I find myself expecting that I will. There are, of course, many myths, legends, superstitions, etc., around gates out in nature, especially ones which are essentially symbolic, like this one is for a pedestrian like me. I find myself wondering what would have happened if it had been closed. Probably, I would have assumed it was private property (which, maybe it was – that would explain a number of things), and not gone down there at all. And then I would still have nothing to tell you about, but it would be a nothing which would not even be worth telling, unlike this one.

Maybe this goes without saying, but I ended up walking home more or less exactly the way that I came.