I didn’t start my walk today looking for a dead raccoon. I’d venture to say that most people wouldn’t. But that’s what I found.

Determined to soak up some of the very rare for this time of year sun, I set out to my local park again today and decided I’d be a bit more adventurous with which paths I chose to walk. Nothing that looked too intimidating and nothing that seemed like it would go too far from the main roads and trails. After all, I’m currently breaking in some new insoles and I’m well aware of the potential danger of being a woman walking alone in the woods. Also, I only had one tiny bag of trail mix and no water. I couldn’t afford to get lost. So nothing too far away from main roads and trails for me. Just a little bit of exploring.

As I set down one very inviting looking path, I kept thinking to myself that I needed to be cognizant of the twists and turns. Though I’d walked around the park many times before, it had always been with other people, and I am generally not the sort of person who can concentrate on where the hell I’m going if I’m also walking and trying to maintain a conversation with that someone.

My feet tromped down the path, grateful the ground wasn’t too wet and, even better, that the path wasn’t narrowing or twisting or branching. While I was glad for the increase in nature and the greater seclusion it afforded me, my enjoyment was tinged with a sense of preliminary regret. I knew that if I didn’t want to venture too far, I’d very likely have to eventually turn around.

So I was partly relieved when I saw a fence blocking off the rest of my path, but I was also partly disappointed. I figured at least I’d walk all the way up to the fence and be nosy and peak at what was behind it. I also wanted to prolong my stay amongst more trees. My growing frequency of park visits had afforded me some encounters with deer and squirrels I’d come to really appreciate seeing. I was hoping I might be more inclined to see them here.

But what I saw instead was much less pleasant. A few feet in front of the fence, a dead raccoon lay face down in the grass and mud. Or at least, I was pretty sure it was dead. Half a second of reasoning told me that I probably didn’t want to find out if a raccoon sleeping in such an exposed state was alive or dead and if something else killed it, I probably also didn’t want to stick around to see that either.

So like a Scooby Doo cartoon character, I took a couple of steps backwards before hightailing it out of there.

I continued the rest of my walk on more familiar ground. And I didn’t come across my “deer friends” as I’d come to call them. But it occurred to me later, I had to backtrack. I’d gone down a path I thought I might have to backtrack from and I’d initially been feeling a bit of shame about it. In the past, I’ve cursed my propensity for getting turned around and lost when walking alone. I’d taken my frequent need to turn around and retrace my steps as a weakness, yet another sign of my lack of directional skills.

But on this day, I was going to have to turn around no matter what. Even if there hadn’t been a dead (presumably?) raccoon on my path, the fence would have kept me from going any farther. And it doesn’t mean that I made a wrong choice to begin with, and it didn’t mean I was going backward when I had to turn around. Paths don’t all have to be walked in full and there’s no reason why you can’t go back to more familiar paths. There is nothing wrong with turning around because a path you started down didn’t turn out to be what you thought it was. 

It’s probably a fool’s errand to look for deeper meaning in my midafternoon mental health meanderings. But being someone who often looks back and worries I’ve made the wrong choices in life, it felt important that I had that little mini realization. I repeated the words back to myself.

“There is nothing wrong with turning around because a path you started down didn’t turn out to be what you thought it was. Huh. ” As per usual, no one was around to witness me talking to myself. Hiking in the winter really is underrated.

I thought about the realization again. If there’s nothing wrong with turning around because the path wasn’t what you thought it was, then there’s also nothing wrong with stopping doing something because it turned out you were bad at it, or you hated it. Maybe the same was true for life choices. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with backtracking because the path you were on at first wasn’t the path you thought you wanted. Or maybe you have to turn around because when you chose to walk the path you were a different person. In today’s case, I had previously been a person who didn’t know that there was something gross and dead on the path in the woods.

It would be silly to be upset with myself for walking down a path I didn’t know was actually “Dead Raccoon Drive”. For my hikes, the most important thing is really the walking anyway. Well, that and coming up with a good name and backstory for that dead raccoon. I’m thinking Angelica has a nice ring to it. I like to think that she was trying to decorate a friend’s home before accidentally falling to her death. Anyway, the point is, if the point of the paths in the park is the walking, then maybe the point of paths in life is just living. And even if you have to turn around or course correct at times, if you keep walking, you’re doing alright. Plus, every minute spent on the trail is another minute you might come across someone with a dog you haven’t gotten to pet yet, which in my opinion, is pretty great motivation both for walking and living.