What to do on your birthday when disappearing is not an option

Cutting up at my birthday gathering before retreating to the cabin to celebrate in solitude. The best of both worlds. (Photo courtesy Kevin Clark.)

Last week’s column. I took poetic license on the giveaway part for the column that was published in the Ashland paper and elsewhere. Actually, I put out all the framed photos I had at the house and invited guests to take one home, which they did.

What do you want to do for your birthday? That’s one of those questions that makes you cringe. Especially as you grow older.

Going out somewhere to eat is the standard response. But where? Certainly not to your favorite Mexican restaurant where the waiter slaps a sombrero onto your head, the entire staff converges on your table, and they sing Happy Birthday in Spanish. Or something that sounds like Happy Birthday in Spanish. It’s probably an expletive-laden song making fun of gringos.

So what do I want to do on my birthday? Being left alone would do for starters. Fat chance.

Or asking to be placed on an icefloe and shoved out onto Lake Erie. Although certain members of my family would gleefully honor that request.

So, when asked earlier this month what I wanted to do for my birthday, I retreated to the cabin to weigh my options. I sat on the screened porch gazing into the sunlit forest. Bright yellow leaves rained down in spasms with each gust of wind. Then the answer came to me. What do I want to do for my birthday? Be here.

I knew I wasn’t going to get off that easy.

I had to come up with something involving other people. And probably something that didn’t involve paint guns, tasers, or renting a dunk tank and stocking it with piranhas. So I settled for an intimate gathering of close friends around a firepit. For entertainment, I thought we might try a little pumpkin-carving or some other marginally dangerous activity.

Afterward, if things went smoothly and no one ended up in the ER, I could slip away and retreat to the cabin for the evening.

Part of the compromise agreement was that no one would bring gifts. Which was my idea.

I’ve reached a point in my life when I’m trying to get rid of stuff. The last thing I wanted was more stuff.

So, I thought, if my friends really wanted me to have a happy birthday, they’d do me a favor and take some of my stuff with them when they left.

So they arrived for the firepit gathering to find what appeared to be a garage sale in progress.

I made up some altruistic-sounding nonsense about realizing that immortality could only be achieved by giving little pieces of myself, mementos of having lived 70-some years. And that they should cart off these tokens of my existence and make them theirs.

I realized that some of them would see through this and say, “Thanks but no thanks.”

So I gave them an out.

“If you don’t take anything with you, I won’t be devastated,” I said. “Just mildly butt-hurt.”

Most of them were kind enough to take at least some token of my 70-plus years of living.

I expect that, someday, I’ll come across this stuff while making my rounds of the thrift stores. Which is where I got most of it from in the first place.

Finding that one forever friend in the great outdoors

The Spillway basin at Findley State Park where my friend Roger nearly drowned. All I could think of as he floundered in the water was how we were going to get his bicycle home if he drowned.

This originally was published as one of my outdoors columns in the Ashland Times-Gazette and elsewhere.

WELLINGTON — Not all my memories of Findley State Park are good ones. One such memory came at a moment in life when I began to realize that not all my “forever friends” were forever.

In a previous column I reminisced about weekend trips to Findley State Park with my friends Willard and Roger. We were in our mid-teens at the time and we’d ride our clunky old one-speed bicycles from the West Side of Cleveland to Findley Lake to fish and camp.

I mentioned in the column that, on a recent visit, I hiked the trails and did some canoeing. I also camped there, something I hadn’t done in 55 years. After pitching my tent, I wasted no time hitting the water. I paddled my solo canoe into a strong headwind from the campground to the spillway.

Before I go any further, a little background is in order. First, about the park and the lake. Then about my friendship with Willard and Roger.

In the 1940s, Judge Guy B. Findley donated more than 800 acres of farmland south of Wellington to the state to be converted into permanent public forest. In 1950, the Division of Forestry transferred the land to the Division of Parks and Recreation and it became Findley State Park. In the mid 1950s, an earthen dam was built, creating a 292-acre lake.

I met Willard and his brother Roger when we were in middle school. We hit it off because, unlike our urbanized classmates at Wilbur Wright Junior High, we had a deep appreciation for outdoors adventure. It was a short walk from our West Side neighborhood to Lindale Reservoir, which once provided water for steam locomotives. For us, it provided many a carefree afternoon of fishing. In later years, it provided a place to drink beer and avoid the Lindale Police. When they weren’t busy running speed traps on Memphis Avenue and later on I-71. (That section of the interstate hadn’t been completed yet.)

It wasn’t until one of our trips to Findley State Park that I realized Roger couldn’t swim. While we were fishing from the spillway, Roger lost his footing on the green slime that coated the concrete and slipped into the water. Suddenly, he was floundering in the spillway basin and yelling, “Help, I can’t swim!”

Fortunately for Roger, Willard had the presence of mind to extend a fishing rod to him. Roger grabbed the tip of the pole and Willard pulled him to safety.

I’m afraid I wasn’t much help. I stood there dumbfounded, thinking, “Oh great, if he drowns how are we going to get his bicycle home?”

It was then that I realized Roger and I weren’t all that close.

Willard and I remained best friends into young adulthood. We had outgrown Lindale Reservoir and our West Side neighborhood. Now mobile teenagers, we chased adventure on the open road in Willard’s ’56 Ford and later his Morris Minor.

When we were without wheels, we hitchhiked. Shortly after graduating from high school, we hitched to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. It was during that long road trip that I realized there were times when I didn’t want to be around Willard. Nothing about him in particular. Just a feeling that, no matter how close, “forever friends” aren’t forever.

Perhaps some people go through life never experiencing that. Or not admitting it. When we’re young, we choose our friends by virtue of proximity, and not necessarily because of compatibility.

One of life’s lessons, learned in the great outdoors — one friend I’ve never grown tired of.

Revisiting an old haunt – 55 years after the fact

Return to Findley State Park – Part One

An angler hits the water early at Findley Lake. Seen while I was writing this column from the shore in 32-degree weather.

WELLINGTON — In keeping with the spirit — or spirits — of the season, Findley State Park is now officially haunted. You’re welcome.

It’s been more than a half-century since I’d camped there. On a whim, I decided it was time to haunt the place. I arrived around noon Sunday to find Findley State Park festooned with Halloween décor. That wasn’t a “thing” when I first camped here in the mid 1960s.

Back then, I didn’t arrive by motor vehicle; I came with my friends Willard and Roger by bicycle from the West Side of Cleveland. Not your fancy 10-speed bikes. These were heavy, one-speed bicycles with coaster brakes and wide tires.

Back then, Ohio 10 was a two-lane blacktop, not the controlled-access freeway it is today. It was dotted with crossroads gas stations and bars where blood flowed in proportion to the liquor they served.

We set out from Cleveland in the middle of the night on a Memorial Day weekend. As I recall, the idea was to be on the road when there was less traffic. Which turned out to be the case. Except the only people out that time of night were truckers and drunks out bar hopping.

One of the latter thought it would be amusing to run us off the road. To him, the sight of bicycles, three adolescent boys, and their fully laden packs tumbling into a roadside ditch must have seemed hilarious.

About five miles down the road we spotted his car parked outside a roadhouse. No one was around so Willard, who was a pretty good mechanic, fixed his car for him. It was safe to say he wouldn’t be running anyone else off the road that night. Not unless he had the foresight to carry two spare tires.

Our weekend bicycle trips to Findley State Park became a regular thing for a few years. Until we got old enough to drive and have girlfriends.

Fast-forward to 2022 — a whole bunch of cars, a few wives, children and grandchildren later. I arrived Sunday to find a different Findley State Park. Back then, it was just that — a park. You went there, put up a tent, and enjoyed nature.

Today’s campers demand more. A lot more. They need concrete campsites so they can park their obscenely huge RVs. They expect things like Halloween-themed weekends with decorations from one end of the park to the other — all 800-plus acres of it. Campers and the park staff spend hundreds of dollars to haunt the place. And here I was, willing to do it for free.

In some ways, Findley and other state parks are better than ever. They now cater to a new breed of outdoors enthusiast. Findley State Park now offers miles of trails for hikers and mountain bikers, disc golf courses, kayak launches and flush toilets.

I spent Sunday afternoon and evening paddling and hiking — covering more than 10 miles in all.

While hiking the park’s labyrinth of trails, I came across two young men who had paused to rest at an outdoor chapel in the woods near the campground entrance. I thought maybe they had gotten lost and were praying for divine directions.

“We just stopped to rest,” one of the cyclists explained.

When I told them I was from Mohican Country — which boasts world-class mountain biking trails — they dropped to their knees and genuflected.

Actually, it wasn’t quite like that, but they clearly were in awe of our mountain biking trails. However, they weren’t apologetic about Findley’s relatively flat terrain. One of the men pointed out that the course was laid out to be challenging, nonetheless. He also said it was forgiving enough that his 70-year-old father could ride it.

I also chanced upon three kayakers — four counting their dog. They were finishing an afternoon paddle on the 92-acre lake. Like the cyclists, they were locals who used the park frequently. Weekly in fact and generally in larger numbers.

One of the paddlers told me that next weekend would probably be their last for the season.

“We’ll be out here in costume,” he said.

It might be worth haunting Findley State Park again just to see that.