Remember when I talked about secret places? Well I'd like to talk about one of them a bit more.

The Olentangy River runs just by my house. There's a stairway in the trees just a handful of steps out the back of my place that leads down the hill to the Olentangy Bike Trail.

Columbus is undeniably a city, albeit a fairly suburban feeling one. Down on the trail though, it feels like I'm in the forest, and part of me feels a lot closer to home. The trail goes north for a couple miles before being disrupted by a main street, and then continues further north through the more affluent areas of town.

Going southward takes you all the way downtown through some really lovely foliage and underneath a few railroad tracks. I used to ride a bike through there with a couple friends on warm days. Felt like an adventure.

I go running on the trail by my house almost every day. I go about a mile and a half up and back. There's something comforting about seeing the same people whenever I go. We often wave to each other despite not knowing each other even a little bit. But I think it helps us, a sorta quiet encouragement between people just trying to be a little better than they were the day before.

I walk with Caitlin there almost every week. We often stop in the wetlands to take stock of the local wildlife. I've always loved wildlife, I even took a bunch of classes in Wildlife Management back at community college and finished the requirements for a certificate in it, though I didn't want to pay the money for something I wasn't going to use.

There's a lot of neat creatures out there.

This goose was a curious thing. During the early spring I noticed them hanging out on the trail. As in just sitting in the middle of the path, not moving away from the many passersby. I would sometimes see them meandering about, and they didn't seem to care if anyone got particularly close as you can see. It struck me that they seemed depressed.

They weren't hurt, they weren't nesting, they didn't hang out with the other geese. I worried for them, but the local Wildlife Center is fucking useless.

I wondered if they'd lost their mate or something. I'd see them eating now and again but they seemed to ignore the other geese.

After seeing them out in the same place like clockwork for two months, they weren't there one day. It coincided with the other geese moving on, so I hope they went with them. I hope they maybe found some friends and went onward to somewhere that gave them what they needed.

So one day while Caitlin and I were passing by, we spotted this guy poking up from the trunk of this tree. They seemed to just be watching everyone passing by. It was a curious thing, we smelled skunk in the area so we figured maybe they were hiding from them.

A couple of weeks later I was passing by on my way to get some dinner before a Beyblade tournament (I do Beyblade for some reason) and I spotted them again in the same spot. We figure they must have a little nest in the trunk of the tree. Seems like a pretty groovy setup.

Every time I pass by now I always turn my head to check if they're there. I haven't seen any sign of them since, but I figure they're probably around since it's a good little spot.

So a few days ago I was running in some fairly hot weather and I nearly trip over this snapping turtle in the path. They're pretty dangerous so I didn't get too close.

Some asshole passing by shouted that it's dead while I was observing it. Unfortunately the trail does attract its share of pricks. The turtle recoiled a bit from my attention. I considered helping them across for a moment since I know where to grab them, but since it was a warm day figured they'd be fine without me hassling them.

Caitlin had just recently gotten a snapping turtle out of the street. This time of year they tend to pop up in inconvenient places. Several years ago on my way back from work one day I was stopped by one crossing the road at a railway crossing but had gone into their shell when my car came up. I got out and shooed them off the road. They were very irate. So was traffic, but I calmly told the other cars that there was a turtle in the road the way Dumbledore would.

Sorry for the Harry Potter reference, will try not to do it again.

Deer are crawling all over the place. They're not too scared of people so I often don't notice them until I am right up at them in the middle of my runs. I usually get the hell scared out of me when they flinch.

So as I mentioned earlier, there are some wetlands down there where OSU does some ecological research. I've seen all kinds of neat things down there.

One of my go-to dates is sneaking into the research areas. There's a couple neat things back there like an apiary. It's not hard to do so when the weather is hot. The pond dries up and you can walk through it. The picture here is of the middle of the pond in the summertime.

We saw a frog who shacked up inside the trunk of a tree once, through a very narrow opening that I'm amazed they fit into. They were probably pretty annoyed with us spying into their space.

All of my closest friends are really into birding, and I've become fond of it a bit myself. I certainly don't know much, and I mostly just take snaps of ducks without alarming them. The bike trail has an amazing variety of various waterbirds.

Caitlin's pointed out a couple families of wood ducks that live in there, but we've never managed to get good pictures of them. They are remarkably skittish, especially the males.

I first discovered the trail back in 2015 through my ex, Katie. She was a fairly outdoorsy person, and I wasn't so much at the time. I'd spent the first two and a half years of my time in Columbus sticking almost exclusively to the OSU campus, but for our first date she took me down to the trail and it felt like she'd manifested a forest in the middle of the city.

We sat by the pond and talked until the sun set. It was a pretty good date.

In late 2017 or so, my bestie and I took a walk down the trail around midnight or so. There's never anyone out there whenever I'm out there that late, but that night as we were crossing a narrow bridge over the river, we saw an oncoming car. It had maybe a foot of space on either side of it.

We stepped aside to let them by and they stopped and asked "Are you guys being safe?" in a loud, sort of confrontational tone. I merely replied "are you?" more as an exclamation.

They offered us a ride and we declined. Don't take rides from strangers kids, especially in the middle of the night, in the middle of a forested park, especially from two idiots who don't seem to have an abundance of braincells.

It's probably my favorite place in the city. I live where I live in part because all my favorite bars are nearby, I'm definitely an Old North Rat at this point, but the real major boon of living in that spot is how much proximity I have to a little slice of paradise that I can meander over to and enjoy anytime I want.