As some of you may know, I work at the local REI store, selling camping equipment. When you hire on at REI, they ask you to name your favorite outdoor place, and they have it engraved on your name tag, below your name. The other people in my hire group were naming off all the big-name, big-deal destinations. You had Yellowstone, The Grand Canyon, The Smokies, and so on.

When it came my turn, I didn’t have a good answer. I’d never been to the places the other folks mentioned, though I wanted to see them all.

I Hate Playing Favorites

I have been to a lot of neat outdoor places. Saguaro National Park was like a beautiful alien landscape to this Midwestern boy. Michelle and I had a backpacking trip to North Manitou Island in Lake Michigan that was so good I’m sort of afraid to go back, lest it not live up to the memory. The Badlands were beautiful, and so were the Black Hills. But so was a waterfall along a trail at a rest area we’d stopped at in Minnesota. So were the rocks along the bed of a creek in southern Indiana. And so were a thousand other places I had been.

Each place was unique. Every one held beauty in its own way. All of them had special memories for me. Each had touched me. How could I even pretend to compare them, or choose among them?

I stalled for time. They weren’t placing the order for tags until Tuesday, and I worked that day, so I promised an answer then.

Inspiration Strikes

I was listening to the radio on the drive home, and as luck would have it, an old Crosby, Stills, and Nash song came on.

If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.

Stephen Stills

I realized that most of the really beautiful places people mentioned were places I would probably only get to go to once. But that’s not love. That’s a one-night stand. Where would I go back to, again and again?

Over dinner I talked with Michelle about my dilemma. And she asked me “when you envision your ‘happy place’, where is it?”

And in answering those questions I knew what my favorite place was. Nobody was more surprised by the answer than I.

My name badge, and some of my flair.

Indiana’s Only Wilderness Area

A Wilderness Area is a special thing. It’s a large tract of Federal land that’s completely undeveloped, and has been specifically designated as Wilderness by an act of Congress. It has no roads and no structures, and it never will. It can have trails, but they can only be built and maintained by human and animal power. The trails are open to hikers and horses, but not to bikes or any other wheeled conveyance of any sort. Congress intends these areas to be as free from human interference as possible, so that future generations may continue to have wild lands to study and explore. You can read the text of the Act here.

Some states are blessed with a lot of Wilderness Areas. But Indiana has only one, the Charles C. Deam Wilderness Area.

As Wilderness Areas go, it really isn’t very impressive. It has no sweeping vistas, no “bucket list” features, no exotic apex predators. It’s a dense, second-growth forest growing on a series of rugged ridges overlooking a man-made reservoir. A lot of people go there, so the campsites show a lot of use. If you go on the weekend you’ll meet dozens of other hikers on the trails. In short, it doesn’t feel terribly wild.

A pretty typical view.

So how could it be my favorite place?

A Forest Grows On You

Deam had one huge advantage over nearly any other place we could go backpacking: it was only a two-hour drive away. If the urge to get outside for a weekend struck us, it was really easy to go down to Deam. Even a quick overnight in the woods can do wonders for our outlook. And in the early 2000’s our outlook needed a lot of help. So we ended up at Deam a lot.

But we got bored with the place pretty quickly. The wilderness has 36 miles of maintained trails. That sounds like a lot, but if you can hike twelve miles a day, you can cover the whole place in one long weekend. Then what do you do?

Luckily, we noticed that there were a lot of side spur trails leading off the marked trails. So we decided to start exploring those. The hiking was more difficult, but we didn’t meet anyone else. If a tree had fallen across the trail nobody cleared it off. We had to clamber over it, or around it, or under, or through. If the trail was engulfed in a patch of briars, we had to work our way around it and pick up the trail on the other side.

This trail was abandoned about 40 years ago.

It may have been more difficult, but it definitely felt more wild.

Our Little Secret

We mapped many of the side spur trails using GPS and mapping software. After each weekend of exploration I would update the map with the new (to us) paths and places we’d found. We studied old books and maps for clues about where to find more old ruins and more abandoned paths. Then we would go out and explore those, and add them to the map. But we didn’t share the map.

Aside from the simple joy of discovery, we did these explorations in search of solitude. If we shared the map with others, we’d lose the solitude. I have shared a few of the places with a few people I trust, but I won’t ever publish my map.

The Place You Go Back To

We’ve been going to Deam (as we call it) for a long time. We took many of the nature photos you’ve seen on this blog somewhere in Deam. We made pet names for some of the campsites we found.

If I tell Michelle I’m going to Camp X she knows exactly where to find me. (We named Camp X in honor of a secret OSS spy training base in WWII, because both places were secret, and overlooked a lake.) If she says she’s going to Frog Pond, I know where she’ll be, and we share a moment of recollection of a wild, stormy night many years ago.

The place is full of memories for us now. We know the trails like we know the contours of each other’s bodies. Every hike builds new memories, and evokes memories of other hikes, other trips, other people we’ve met along the way.

It’s no Grand Canyon, but it’s pretty to me.

Wearing it with pride

I probably get at least one question a week about the place on my name tag. Sometimes the customer just remarks on it, and how much they enjoy going there too. Sometimes people have questions. Beginning backpackers in particular want to know all sorts of things. Gradually, my co-workers have come to regard me as some sort of expert about the place. I don’t like to think of myself that way, but I suppose I know a little about it.

All in all, I am glad I chose Deam to be the place on my name tag.