The temperature is just barely low enough where if you’re sitting or standing still, you feel the cold. My bare hands are resting on my lap, and they’re starting to turn a frigid shade of red. I could take my pack off and find my gloves, but I don’t.

I don’t want to move.

I’m sitting inches away from the water’s edge. The small waves try their best to crash with might on the small, rocky beach – keep trying, Lake Wissota. It’s windy today, and it blows hard enough to create whitecaps out on the water. The only sounds are the breeze and the wishful waves – maybe someday they could be mighty, like the ocean.

Now, I’m a young man. I get lonely sometimes, and that’s when I wonder how nice it would be to get caught up in one of those romance stories you see in movies. Some guy walks into a retail store or a butcher shop and somehow locks eyes with a smoking beauty, who becomes the love of his life after an awkward pickup line and a clumsy first date.

I watch those movies, and it makes me sad. Wistful, you could say.

Just, not today.

My outdoor adventure on this fine Monday was called Area 178. It’s like, Area 51, if Area 51 was a bunch of rocks piled below a lake dam with some hiking trails. (Come to think of it…us humans are very easily entertained. Huh.) This particular spot has been very special to me for years – I discovered it when I was couch surfing at a rather embarrassing time in my life, the details of which I shall not disclose. The trailhead is right off of Highway 178 – “right off” meaning, if you blink, you’ll miss it.

(Now, do I wish there were a more…mysterious reason for the name Area 178, other than it being right off a busy highway with the same name? Yeah, I really do wish that, but I’m gonna pretend there is something mysterious, because I have an imagination and I KNOW how to use it.)

I decided to take a break from the Ice Age Trail this week. I realized that pushing for the mileage can be a bit isolating sometimes, so I went somewhere familiar, and with more scenery. It had rained hard overnight, and on my morning run it was just letting up, so this hike was cloudy and threatening, but nothing more. Even so, I brought my Carhartt backpack – because it has some level of water resistance, just in case.

The trail starts by giving you a choice – follow the Chippewa River, or meander through dense forest. Whenever I come here, I always follow the river. The narrow trail snakes along the riverbed, and you cross over a few bridges and pass small beaches. As I walked, I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if this place was more remote? You lose some of the magic when you can hear the busy highway in the background. Oh well.

Spring is coming along at this time of year. There’s small bits of green shooting out everywhere. It’s easy on the eyes – in the Midwest, we get so tired of seeing two colors for most of the year – white, because snow, and brown, because everything that’s not snow is dead. But now, blood-red buds are blossoming. Tiny, bright green leaves are poking out of twigs. Blades of grass are stabbing through the well-watered ground. Soft moss is starting to coat the trees and rocks.

I’m not thinking much at this point, about anything. I’m just taking pictures and soaking in the beauty of nature. The thinking comes later. It’s a process.

Finally, I arrive at the best part of Area 178. The rocks.

As previously stated, I’m a young man. So, not only am I a hopeless romantic, I also love climbing things. (That second thing might not be related to age. That one might not ever go away. We might have issues if I’m still jumping on rocks when I’m sixty, but I’m not going to worry about that right now.) Now, when you give me lots of large things to climb? I am like a, what:

• A: Child
• B: Kid in a candy store
• C: Monkey
• D: All of the above

If you guessed “D”, you would be correct.

I start exploring – for the umpteenth time – every square inch of the rocky riverside. The water is as low as I’ve ever seen it, which means you can get places you normally can’t. Otherwise, in order to access those “unreachable places”, the only proper thing to do is go skins and swim for it. And yes, I am speaking from experience. Quite proud of this picture, actually:

At this point, I’m settling in. The process is taking its due course, and now I’m starting to think. The gears are spinning, and my mouth is running – I’m talking to myself, to God, to nobody – this, right here, is why I love solo adventures. When you’re by yourself, surrounded by nothing but miles of God’s green earth, you can access parts of your soul that you’d never reach otherwise.

As I grind away, I’m asking some big questions. Awhile ago, I decided to take a break from some people, and turns out, it was a really good thing. I felt guilty at first, asking myself, am I selfish? But, after a few days, because of this newly built boundary, a few of the padlocks floating around in my brain started opening with a resounding click. And each time I crack one open, I get answers.

For example, Padlock #593,883 opened today, April twenty-first, 2025, and it sounded something like this:

“Did I really do all that…because of a girl?”

You’ve probably never had this experience. You probably just have a friend who’s had this experience. Even so, why is this? Why do feelings and emotions so easily overpower our common sense and what we know to be true?

Why is this thing that we so thoughtlessly call love, so blind?

I find a place to set up my hammock. I have come to believe that hammocks are the best invention of mankind (since chicken bake) and every human being should own one. That should be a law. I collapse into my outdoor chair-slash-bed and grab my journal out of my backpack. I don’t need to write much. Sometimes getting a few simple sentences out on paper really works wonders. I’ll show you an example.

April 21, 2025-

“____ was my closest friend. Even closer than ____. In fact, ____ and I didn’t even get close until I met ____. And then, when ____ and I started to drift apart, I thought it was because ____ got ____. But, after ____ got ____ was when ____ and I had “the talk”, and our friendship basically ended. Somehow, it all circles around ____…”

Like I said before, it’s crazy how feelings and emotions will lead us to do things that make no sense down the road. Did we learn things? Yeah. Did it hurt? Also yeah.

I take a break from the grind and replace my journal with my book. I’m reading through the Chronicles of Narnia for the first time in years – I read all seven books several times when I was a kid. Right now, I’m more than halfway through The Magician’s Nephew. At this point in the story, Queen Jadis has been terrorizing London with a stolen horse and cabby, and Digory and Polly are attempting to return said Queen to the Wood Between the Worlds, except when they do that, they accidentally bring the cabby and the horse (whose name is Strawberry) and Uncle Andrew (who nobody likes at this point of the story) and then they pick the wrong pool and then they arrive in Narnia, which is a world just beginning. I missed these books.

Eventually, it’s too cold to sit in a hammock any longer. I pack everything up and continue the hike. Where I “hammied” (that sounds…questionable, but we’re going to move on) was actually in the middle of the river below the dam. But today, the water is so low that anywhere in the rocky riverbed is easily accessible. So, I cross over the river again on dry ground, keeping a watchful eye on the dam to my far right. This trip would not be fun if I drowned.

The trail follows a high ridge above the riverbed and makes straight for the dam. I can see the lake splashing above the retaining walls, and I’m amazed at the infrastructure – and the boy in me wants to throw something at it. If I hit it in just the right place to see the dam break and watch millions of gallons of water flood the rocks below, that would be so cool…

I have to take a sharp left from the dam and follow a grassy path for about a quarter mile before finally getting level with the surface of the lake. I’m immediately enchanted. I quite enjoy large bodies of water.

The trail crosses a service road and then picks up again in sparse woods by the lakeside. This segment is aptly called “Lake Trail”. Here, I’m far enough away from the Highway 178 for the sounds of the lake to drown out any sound of civilization. The clouds hang low and moody, but the sun and blue sky manage to peek out in some places.

If I were having a bad day, it would have ended here. I’m walking by a lake, on a dirt trail, in the woods, with the wind in my face, my phone on airplane mode, a backpack strapped to my shoulders, and not a soul in sight. I say, “Thank you, Jesus.” And I mean it.

The trail splits off in one area and leads to a tiny, rocky beach. I can’t help myself. I go and sit, Lake Wissota stretched out in front of me.

In that moment, none of it matters. The friend I lost who I journaled about, the loneliness that comes from singleness I’ve felt for so long – everything just…fades. Creation cries out the name of its Creator, and I cry out with it, in my soul.

“By foregoing marriage now, singleness is a way of anticipating [the reality of the new creation] and testifying to its goodness. It’s a way of saying this future reality is so certain that we can live according to it now. If marriage shows us the shape of the Gospel, singleness shows us its sufficiency. It’s a way of declaring to a world obsessed with sexual and romantic intimacy that these things are not ultimate, and that in Christ we possess what is.”

-Sam Alberry