Snake Proof Boots

Thomas and I drove to Reimer’s Ranch on Boxing Day. We’d spent the previous evening (some holiday celebrating Jesus Christ’s birth I think) at my father’s house so it wasn’t terribly far away. I hadn’t seen the area since summer, when it had become the preferred swimming hole after most of the greenbelt evaporated. It’s much colder now and parts are under construction. They’re putting in a crushed granite path (thumbs down). Rock climbing is still reasonably popular but the beach where I swam in August, which was only sparsely populated at the time, is now completely deserted. The current paths are less than clear and always look as though they’re about to dead-end. We started walking on a cliff above the river, then descended to the beach and returned along the lower path, passing the rock climbers and emerging at the steep beginnings of a small creek flowing toward the river. It was the first time in my life I’ve successfully returned to a starting point using a different path. Once, in a state park near Big Sur (California) a friend and I got horribly lost trying to take an alternate route back. In the end, we were forced to abandon multiple false hopes of shortcuts and had to retrace our steps exactly to find our way back to the parking lot. Boxing Day was simpler. We exited the park well before sunset, always best since the drive back to the main road is a winding, one-lane, gravel affair peppered with blinding hills. Reimer’s Ranch is full of fossil formations, something I’d never noticed from my mostly-underwater summer vantage point. It’s too cold for snakes now. They’re hibernating somewhere in their little snake holes. But they’ll be back in great numbers in Spring for snake mating season. It’s all in the order of things.