What’s at the end of path? Far-off object in Scout leader’s photo reveals a surprise

I was reading the other day about the explorations of James Cook, the 18th-century captain who sailed uncharted seas on voyages so grand that he was forced into U-turns by Arctic ice, and I got a little jealous.

It wasn’t from thinking about the journeys he experienced, strictly speaking. I mean, his Valentine’s Day stop in Hawaii doesn’t sound so delightful once you get to the part where he’s stabbed to death on the beach.

No, what really got my imagination going was thinking about how Captain Cook must have started so many mornings without any good idea of where he’d end up that night. In a world covered by GPS, the days of setting off into the wild without a clue feel gone forever.

That’s why I love the art my wife put up in our bedroom last week.

It’s a giant print of a landscape I shot on a mountain trail early one summer morning last year. The view is all grays, browns and muted sage cut through by patches of almost glowing kelly green ground plants that invite you up a rocky path.

The trail, barely there to start with, seems to disappear into the trees nearly as soon as it begins. It might lead anywhere.

The framed photo is the perfect first sight when I open my eyes to start each day, a reminder of how much fun an uncharted path can be.

Head off without looking too much into what lies ahead and there’s a good chance you’ll end up in a fiesta or a fiasco. In my experience, it’s time well spent either way. The pain of fiascoes tends to vanish with time, and they do make for some of the best stories.

And man, oh, man… the surprise fiestas you end up finding yourself in!

Take, for example, the long path that brought me to the rocky trail whose photo I now wake up to.

I’d hiked to that spot as a leader on a scout outing, as with most adventures I find myself on in this season of my fatherhood. But on the day my first first-grader pulled me onto the scouting trail, I’d have never guessed that’s where I’d end up.

My only previous scouting experience had fizzled after a few months of my fifth-grade year, and I only knew two knots — one of which, I’ve come to learn, I’d been tying wrong. But my boy wanted to join a Cub Scout pack and I went along to everything because I wasn’t quite sure I trusted the whole situation.

By the time I realized it was an excellent program full of trustworthy people, I’d been hanging around long enough that I started to get assignments. Like Captain Cook, I had little idea what I was doing each time I moved forward on the path, but I took up one job after another until one evening last year I was introduced as the new scoutmaster of my sons’ troop.

I’m still uneasy sometimes when I look around at all the people who show up to meetings and campouts expecting that I’ll lead everyone the right way through what, for me, is uncharted territory.

The picture on my wall has a lesson for that, too.

As your eye follows the trail, there’s a hard-angled anomaly right about at the point where the path veers to whatever is waiting in the trees.

It’s an open-air trail toilet in the middle of the woods, because it’s important to relieve yourself before setting off into the wild without a clue. There’s a good chance you’re going to feel a little queasy when you look around and see where you’ve ended up.

Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com. And follow him on Twitter at @respinozakc.