Actually we encountered exactly one other person during our little hike at South Lyndon Park this morning (pics randomly included). He was a cheerful soul and with all of his gear, we pegged him as a birder, not a pervert.

Maybe I should back up a bit. I am not a birder but I have long subscribed to a birding email listserve (like since the late 1990s). The bird list is friendly but very specifically focused on messages about birds. Messages that stray to oh, I dunno, amphibians or insects or ecological issues, etc., are considered OFF TOPIC and a friendly moderator shuts down message threads that veer off topic PDQ. So it was a little surprising a couple weeks ago when the list came alive with posts about perverts!

Why? Well, a (male) birder was birding on Embury Road and encountered someone “creepy” who, if I interpreted the story accurately, exposed himself. This was followed by several pervert reports by other people in the general area of western Washtenaw County. No one in any of these situations was injured in any way and the perverts didn’t sound particularly dangerous. That said, I know that as a female, if I encountered someone like that while walking alone, I would be pretty freaked out.

Nevertheless, I became intrigued by Embury Road. I knew I had seen the road sign many times but I couldn’t remember where it was. Yesterday, a couple weeks after the pervert incident, people were talking about the trail system available via Embury Road and of course I had to check it out (the trail, not the pervert) and so that’s what we did this morning. Early this morning! (The poor old decrepit Pensioner – I dragged him up and out during an inconvenient sleep cycle and he crashed in the Lyme Lounge about noon.)

Of course we found Embury Road. We have The Google after all. Just as reported, there *was* indeed a trailhead. Lo and behold, it was part of the Waterloo-Pinckney Trail. Who knew and how do you like that boardwalk work?

We did not intend to do a death march this morning, just a few miles, but when you are on a “thru” trail like this one, it can be a bit of a challenge to decide when to turn around beyond just setting a time or distance limit. “We” do not do well with either of those strategies. After a mile or so of hiking, I looked at The Google and determined that we were walking straight toward North Lyndon Park, which we are well familiar with although we have always hiked in *South* Lyndon Park, just across North Territorial Road. At any rate, that provided a good place to turn around and so we did. Beautiful little hike up down and around kames (google it) and across long boardwalks through the wetlands between them. It was just a weeeeee bit chilly for the moe-skee-toes to be out and I was only harassed by one the entire trip but they are on the way.

As we began to drive back up Embury Road, a white minivan approached us from the other direction. Of course, we had to speculate on whether it contained birders or perverts. It stopped and we were able to see that the occupants were pretty obviously birders — a mixed group of baggy old people smiling and waving. People a lot like us. And they had probably stopped because somebody had spotted a yellow-bellied sapsucker or some such thing. I gnoffed and gnoffed. We are so silly 💩. I don’t think I’ll bother to speculate on whether a person could be *both* a birder and a pervert. Polly-tickle correctness be damned.

And I think I will go ahead and just post this thing, early in the day as it is. The day may not be done but this story seems complete. Of course I often come back and tweak things later so who knows.

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