Saturday afternoon, hot and muggy as it was, I decided to veer off my way home from Half Price Books on the West Side down Spring Mill Road to check out Holliday Park. I found a trail listing for the park in my $1 copy of hikes in Indiana and had planned to check it out some early morning and take pictures of the river where the trails ended. The park was a favorite decades ago when I would take out-of-town visitors to see the "ruins," a weird collection of walls and columns that at one time spouted water. There was no water on the unusual fountain when I first visited the park in the 1970s. I would enter by the south gate and park close to the ruins. I think I took pictures of the fountain although goodness knows where those pictures are now. I never explored the rest of the park.
Saturday there was some kind of gathering of African-American families at the park. I didn't want to intrude into their activities so walked toward the nature center. It was closed. Behind it was a path that led to overgrown wildflowers taller than a man. A trail led out of the sunlit wildflower area into the trees. I didn't expect the trail to be the beginning of a system of trails, sometimes dirt, sometimes stone and concrete, sometimes wood that became stairs up steep hills and down into the White River. I spent more than hours exploring the trails. I was a little leery of being alone in the woods. An evil-minded stranger could easily have mugged me. There were few others on the trail. I asked a young woman who was there with her boyfriend where a trail led. She told me it went under the bridge to the other side of Meridian Street. This was the trail I had intended to check out.
Down at the river I saw this other young woman who had loosed her two dogs to play in the shallows. At the other side of Meridian, I chatted with a woman who had brought her two boys there to play barefoot in the mud and water. They were about six and eight years old. While other people were thronging the malls, these people were in the middle of wilderness that looked unlike the city most of us know.
I took 233 photos while at the park. Many of them were blurred. I was using my Lumix pocket point-and-shoot, the camera I use most of the time nowadays for being small and light enough to tuck into my back pocket when I went on a walk or hike. The resolution is not great but I've taken more photos with this tiny camera this year than I have with my Canon cameras. To think that I didn't use the camera for over a year after I bought it. I couldn't get the hang of composing on an LCD screen rather than in a viewfinder. Now I love it! I can hold the camera near the ground or above my head. This was what made me fall in love with digital cameras many years ago with my tiny 1 MB Sony. I still mourn losing that camera when someone broke into my office in Broad Ripple. I could tilt that camera for a view of the light that totally changed the picture I was taking. The Lumix does not seem to allow this but its small size makes positioning the camera in versatile ways that makes up for the stability of a tripod.
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