I sat at the top, just by the bank of the creek. An angler's destination, this was. But no one was here, and I wasn't here to fish. In fact, the weather was pretty cloudy, and the once nice day was picking up wind. I didn't care. I was here, enjoying the breeze and the outdoors. Even with the wind, the weather was the mildest it had been in a while. It was the novelty of a random drive early in the spring, like waking up out of hibernation. I was enjoying every minute of the reborn spirit of spring, while winter was blowing its last breath.

     Winter tends to a damper the spirit of a good, long drive for me. Sure, you could embark on extreme drives then: let's see how long we can drive on the ice with no gas in the tank and break out the sleeping bags calibrated to twenty below. Any drive can seem like an extreme drive then. Ice, snow, and huge drifts blocking visibility will do that. Road travel is more a point A to point B thing: I need to get to the store. I need gas in the car. So when the winter finally melts down enough to go on a drive, I'm ready to go. No particular destination is necessary. Just let's go.

     Many surprise drives have resulted from this impulse. After limiting my travels to local stops of necessity for so long, fifty miles of wandering seems like a breakout. It's best not to really plan these things, I've found, and just let myself go where the road seems to beckon.

     This particular time, we meandered our way north up NY 28. This highway runs you though a lot of resort areas like Phoenicia in the Catskills up to Old Forge in the Adirondacks, with Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, in the middle. Once you get past Cooperstown with all of its resorts and tourist attractions, it's fairly placid until you get to Mohawk in Herkimer county. You pass by small towns and Canadarago Lake, and with a nearly straight road, it's a great way just to enjoy a road. Except for tourist season in the summer, which wasn't now.


     Mohawk is a town just outside of the city of Utica, along with the adjacent town of Ilion. It's a busy area, not much aligned with the image of pastoral upstate New York. Pretty much any direction would take you through traffic, but heading south through Ilion on NY 51 gave the best chance of a smooth ride. You still had to drive through Ilion, which looked like it used to be a quiet town until Utica started spreading itself out. Buildings several stories tall dotted the road, looking like a town that had spread as far as it was allowed to go and now had to start building up like a Lego set. Clouds were beginning to roll in, as though some storm of cleansing was about to come upon the ill-fated village.

     It wasn't too long before the industrialized area disappeared and NY 51 became a road course. Sharp curves greeted as constantly. There were nothing but trees everywhere, rising up on some type of gorge, which I later discovered to be the Ilion Gorge. A creek accompanied the road on its twists and turns. Occasionally, you could see the creek through the trees. With the recent snowmelt, it looked like a rapids. And with the clouds becoming blacker, the whitewater seemed to grow even more.


     We eventually found a fishing access spot, which often doubles as a park along the road. There was a fairly smooth parking lot, which isn't always a given in these kinds of places. Graffiti-laden boulders served as decoration. Sometimes, I wondered what other people did when they came to these places. The rocks anticipated this question by telling me their recent history, making it louder than the eons that had brought them to this place.


     The water sounded its own rock concert as it yelled its way past us, heading towards its madness south of us to its personal destiny. I don't know where it was going in such a rush. Ironically, standing on its banks, at that moment, man was slower than nature. Which showed how much the chameleon nature played, and how much that humanity could recreate itself, as well as everything around them. How much of the creeks travels were of its own choosing? How much of it had been altered because of the road we drove on, or the city several miles away?


     Most of the landscape matched the clouds. There was gray everywhere, the leftover darkness of winter everywhere. The only green was the occasional pine tree, the only sign of vibrancy was the wind and the river rushing by. Looking in front, or either direction, there was no sign of life, no indication that mankind had an interstate a few miles of here that could take you to either coast in a matter of days. The creek didn't care, nor did the wind. They had their own direction to take.

     As we headed to our vehicle, another car pulled in, as though it had been waiting on line for us to finish our turn at observation. The sign at the entrance announced that this was Steele Creek, maintained by Troop 8 in memory of Dave Cave. The imprint of humanity: used to build, used to create. The wind blew on the decorated stones, slowly eroding man's handiwork. We continued twisting and turning down the road, the creek meandering with us on a short way. Then it was gone, but our road continued. The road had led us to its surprise for the day, and now went into slumber as we made our way back to civilization.