It all Comes Back to Toast

    Ron was the father of Josh, one of my old Hebrew school friends. We had been invited to his 60th birthday party a few weeks before, and were now having trouble finding a place to park. Lake Chabot Park was busy; the straight-line road leading off the highway was already packed with cars, the owners of which had decided to walk a mile or two instead of pay the gate fee. After a long while of driving, we saw the turnoff.
    "Where are we parking?" my mother asked me (I'm often given the Mapquest directions despite the fact that I am unable to consult a roadmap should anything not add up).
    "Lake Chabot Bait Shop." I waited for a while for one of my parents to tell me to look it up on the map.
    "Can you look for it on the map?" The map said the Lake Chabot Bait Shop was half a mile ahead of us. We continued driving, and stopped a few hundred meters later. "Where is it?"
    "The map said it was right here."
    "Well, it's not."
    "Clearly, but it's just parking!"
    "You need to learn how to read a map one of these days."

    We ended up parking at a field near a small bridge. We walked over the bridge, which passed across a matchstick-thin creek with foliage eight feet high. At the other end of the bridge was a wide-open area with a playground, a boat-rental shack, and a long path that meandered through the picnic areas. We took the path; passing by a couple drinking wine on a flannel blanket and twenty people stuffed into two tables.  A woman stumbled past, carrying a pie lightly in one hand. I became increasingly frightened as she moved towards us, tensing up to evade her in case she decided to walk into me.

    A family of four piled out of their red minivan and promptly sat down at their table. The mother swiftly brought out the cooler, plates, and cups with practiced efficiency. We looked around; Ron's picnic area was named "Willow". We had walked past "Elm" and "Oak", and were approaching "Beech". Ahead, the path curved in a parabola. At the apex was the boat rental shack. We stopped walking.
    "Are you sure we're going the right way?"
    "I don't know, shouldn't all the picnic areas be on this side of the lake?"
    We stood a bit longer.
    "Why don't we just follow the trail? It'll get us there eventually."
    We started walking again. We passed by the rentals and "Redwood". Finally, after Redwood, I started to glimpse faces that I knew. In the past year, Josh had been growing a beard that made him look ten years older than he actually was.     
    We said hello to everyone and my parents immediately recognized people they knew, and disappeared to talk with them.
    "Hi, Sol."
    "Hi, Josh."
    This was often the extent to which we spoke. We only saw each other at Hebrew school, and weren't particularly interested in anything that the other was. Sometimes we talked about school. I sat alone, and watched Josh talk to one of his family's friends.
    
    There were a distressingly large number of wasps, I noticed. I had seen the green paper prisms and translucent yellow cones hanging off the trees when we walked through the other picnic areas. One particularly tenacious wasp kept buzzing back to my plate to bite chicken off of a bone. There was another trapped in the sushi tray who had set up camp on a California Roll.  There were half a dozen wasps hovering around the trash can. Two wasps crawled across a white slab of fish.

     "Do you want to go for a walk?" My mother  had snuck up on me as I was watching a man help his son roll his bike up the hill.
    "I guess." We walked down the grassy slope and onto the paved trail. We continued silently past the boat rentals. We passed men carrying fishing poles, and bicyclists passed us. There was a small red boat in the center of the lake, near a large island covered in trees. The water reflected the sun into my eyes. My skin started to itch. For over a year, I had been getting some kind of reaction when experiencing change in temperature. "Ughh..." I rolled up my sleeve and looked for the red spots.
    "Are you getting it?"
    "The spots haven't shown up yet." I rolled my sleeve back down and tried to ignore it.

    I  continued scratching the right side of my left hand and ducked as we entered a stretch of path under a canopy of foliage. The asphalt had disappeared a while back without my noticing it. "We're having Lauren and Tom over next week." I looked around. My mother hadn't said anything, and we didn't know anyone named Tom or Lauren.
    "Didn't they get married?"    
    "Yeah, about four months ago." I looked out on the lake. The women in the red boat were talking, and the sound was so unobstructed that it carried all the way over to us, half a mile away.
    "It's that boat," said my mother. "I read something really interesting about sound the other day."
    "The Doppler Effect?"
    "No, that wasn't it."
    "Mm."
    "Isn't that funny, though? It's like they're right next to us."
    "Or down a tunnel." I wonder if they know we can hear them, I thought to myself.
    We had left the picnic tables about half an hour earlier. "Are we going all the way around?"
    "Well, why not?"
    "I'll do it, I was just wondering." We continued walking. We saw a group of people struggling down a steep pile of rocks that reached at least a hundred feet up a hill. A woman, presumably the one who dragged them down the slope, was standing at the bottom and taunting them playfully. We went on, and came to a fork in the road. We looked down the road at the turnoff and saw that it terminated in a small dock. We walked down. I submerged my still-itching hand in the cold water. It left a slimy feeling behind and I regretted it instantly. "The water's nice, isn't it?" my mother splashed some water away from the pier. I nodded.

    "You know what this place reminds me of?" We had entered a shady area with large grey rocks scattered around the path. There was a twisted log that stood out to me.
    "What's that?"
    "Gettysburg."
    It was true. The place was a perfect backdrop for a Civil War film. "That was a great trip," she said. I nodded again. A bike passed us up. The rider had white hair and wore a red biking suit. "That guy looks like Mark," my mother exclaimed, once he was a safe distance away.
    "Not skinny enough," I said.

    We came to another fork. On the right, there was a narrow trail that snaked up into a sparse forest. It looked to be a very long trail back to the picnic tables. On the left, there was an almost-as-narrow bridge that, unlike the bridge we crossed from the parking lot, looked as if it had been airlifted in from sort of paramilitary forest compound. The bridge had cold metal guard rails and, beyond the rails, five-foot-high chain link fences. There was a gate at the entrance to the bridge that looked as if it was open only for the time being. We elected to take the bridge.
The planks had large gaps in between. Not large enough to trip on, but large enough to see through. The creek was, like the creek under the first bridge, thin and shallow.

    "What color do you think I should paint my room?"
    A week before, sitting on my bed, I suddenly decided to take on the task of cleaning out twelve years of accumulated school papers, old CDs, older toys, packaging, plastic bags, and clothes that I had outgrown years ago. Once I had started, I couldn't stop. I was compelled to completely purge my room, not just make it look presentable, as I would have if my parents told me to do it.
    It was a three-day job. I rearranged my entire room. My bed moved to the window, my bookcase moved to the empty spot where my dresser had once stood (it had since moved to the empty space where my bed once stood). I had spent a straight hour scraping stickers and their white residue off of my door. My closet was almost completely emptied out. At least twenty Andronico's bags worth of clutter had been removed. Currently, the walls were a pale yellow and the trim off-white.
    "What color were you thinking of?"
    "I didn't have any in mind, I just want to do it before I go back to school and throw my papers everywhere."
    "I don't know. Do you have any idea?"
    "Eh."    
    At the end of the bridge, there was a steep flight of stairs that seemed more like a ladder. As we reached to top, we saw more 19th century Pennsylvania.

    The canopied area went on for quite a while. Spots of light shone on the ground. To the left of the road, a small slope led down to the lake. Reeds had completely overgrown the shore, and the water could only be seen by peering over. I could hear a frog chirping. The spots of light grew larger and larger, and finally the shadows disappeared completely. The sun was high, and everything had a yellow tinge to it. This place looked completely separate from the green lakeside where we had started. The road was dry and dusty. There were crisp brown grasses to the sides, but otherwise the only scenery was the occasional rock.
    "How long have we been walking?"
    She looked at her watch. "About an hour and a half. Getting tired?"
    "A little."
    "I can see the boat rentals from here."
    "So pretty soon," I said. I was beginning to regret leaving home without my Nalgene, but remembered quickly that the walk had never been planned.
    The trail took us past a metal vehicle-barring gate with a faded sign. There was another trail beyond it. Probably, I realized, the winding trail before the bridge.

    We walked past a pair of fishermen. They were seated in canvas lawn chairs next to an outhouse. On the door, they had hung a small yellow radio that was tuned to an 80's Greatest Hits station. The music was tinny and soft, almost white noise. They had between them a red cooler. I stole a glance at it as we passed. Cold perspiration dripped down the sides and into a dark spot underneath the cooler. The lake had come back into view.

    The road began to slope upward. At first, we hardly noticed it, a little more work to take a step, but it quickly became less of a slight incline and more of a steep hill. I was reminded of the hill leading up to the Lawrence Hall of Science. Our steps slowed as the hill became steep enough that we had to worry about good footing. A bicyclist rode past us with ease. My shoe had become untied. I let it whip around until we reached a spot under a tree. I crouched down and pulled the laces taut.
    "I think that was the guy," said my mother, pointing vaguely up the hill.
    "What?" My fingers slipped.
    "The guy who looks like Mark," she laughed.
    "Huh."
    We continued up the hill. The trees became thicker, but the view of the lake was always unobstructed. The walk became more and more of a struggle. My shoe became untied again. I sat down and began tying again. I found it hard to stand back up.
    "Maybe red."
    "What?"
    "Dark red or brown. I was just thinking about it."
    "Your room?"
    "Yeah."    
    "It'd get pretty hot, wouldn't it? It gets pretty hot in there already."
    "Maybe."
    "Bedrooms are supposed to have cool colors, like blue or green."    
    "I thought brown was kind of cool."    
    "No, it's a warm color."
    I mentally hit myself on the arm. Fifteen years of art classes and you can't remember?

    We reached the top of the hill. There were three trails, all uphill. All leading into forests. All seemingly leading to the same place.
    "We have to turn back," she said.
    "Ugh." I had intended to follow through and go all the way round. I reluctantly turned around. The sun shone in my eyes.
    "Come on, it'll be downhill this time."
    The walk down was only marginally easier. We still had to watch our steps, still had to go slowly. The bicyclist passed us, coasting down the hill.
    We both laughed this time.
    "Look, the worst that'll happen is dad will be late for work. Or," she added, "he'll get worried and we'll be rescued by helicopter." The moment she said it, I thought I saw the sun flicker, as if wide blades swept through the air in front of it.

    By the time we reached the bottom of the hill, I had become so thirsty that I was planning ahead to drinks I would take hours in the future.
    "Do we have iced tea at home?"
    "I think we have iced tea at the tables." I remembered that we didn't.
    We passed the fishermen again. They glanced up at us, doubtless struck by a sense of deja vu. The radio squealed the chorus to a song I'd never heard. The lake was dark, reflecting only the deepest hues of the sunset. We entered the canopied area. It, too, was much darker. I could hear more frogs. At the reed-choked shore, there was a sign that I hadn't seen passing the other direction.
    "No swimming, wading, or contact with the water is permitted". My mother laughed, and I simply shook my head at the ridiculous placement of the sign. An hour and a half from the nearest point of origin, and hidden behind a bush.
    As we walked, I focused on my feet. The arches ached, and so I tried walking more on my toes, then the heels, then the sides. I unfocused my eyes and looked up the road. It reminded me of a trip my family had taken to a salmon spawning ground. A line of bicyclists passed us. To our right, a side path came into view. At the top of a small incline was a bench. We climbed up and sat on the hard surface. There was a small placard on it: "In memory of Mr and Mrs. Thomas Green". She admired the view and I unfocused my eyes at it.

    The trip back seemed much faster. With my vision still blurred, we crossed the bridge. A long line of hikers squeezed past. Two cyclists carried their bikes down the steps. The bridge had seemed much wider the other way. We saw the mountain of rocks. I looked down a path, and recognized the short dock. A group of silhouetted  college students sat in a rough circle, laughing. We heard a shriek, and turned to see a girl being tossed into the lake. One of the others jumped in after her. The water was darker still. No light shone into my face.
    The path was cloudy with dust. We walked past the boat rentals and towards Ron's party.
    
    They looked up briefly as we came trudging up the hill. A few people said "hi". It was as if we had left only half an hour ago. We both sat down. A girl from my sister's bat mitzvah group and her family had arrived. I had no idea the two families were acquainted, much less friendly. As I remembered hours earlier, the iced tea was gone. All the drinks, in fact, were gone. The bottles were stacked up by a trash can. The only liquid remaining was a bottle of lime "flavored" mineral water. The sort of flavor only apparent when smelling instead of tasting. The real taste was bitter and made it tough to swallow. I downed it quickly to be rid of it.
    "We checked up on the trail you took;" said Ron, "it would have taken you six hours to get all the way around". I opened and closed my mouth a distance away, trying to produce moisture. There was a cake; a chocolate sheet that looked fifty-percent icing. I avoided it for as long as I could, but realized I was as hungry as I was parched. The cake was good for half a minute, but the thirst came back worse than before. Two women leaned against a tree by the cooler, enjoying the last two drinks. They, too, were talking about someone's marriage.    
    I heard a harsh rattle. My mother had dipped her cup into the cooler and was leaching out melted ice. The idea had never occurred to me.
    As I drank my fourth cup of water, my parents started making their way through the party and saying goodbye to the people we knew. I shared a glance with Josh.
    "So are you coming to work tonight?" asked my father, as we set off down the trail. I shook my head, and my parents laughed. We stopped at the water fountain at the bottom of the hill. This had never occurred to me either. Wiping my mouth dry, I looked to the right and remembered the fifteen-minute walk over. I groaned and started walking.
"Solly, over here!" I turned. My parents were standing twenty feet away in front of our car.