Pratfalls Road

Find a friend and drive north out of Baltimore together on the main artery for 20 minutes and then west on a bucolic country road, past 90s-era houses each on their own small hill, each with their own big tree, until you come to a left turn onto a narrower road, then another left on an even narrower road named, you might figure, after the daughter of the man who cleared it, and then, when you come to a cornfield and maybe a parked car, stop. Get out of your car, stretch. Step around the rusty chain spanning the entrance of the overgrown access road and walk into the woods. Walk till the access road becomes a path through a thicket, a copse of trees that creates a fairy tale-like opening, where at night the fireflies do indeed gather for whatever reason fireflies gather, and keep walking. Hang a left and walk another 10 minutes until you feel yourself going down a slight incline, one that seems like the end of something, and look on your left for a footpath down a steeper hill. Step carefully now around the rocks and small trees till you come to a large rock face below you, a rock that slides into the cool expanse of reservoir that provides water for so many Marylanders, peel off your shirt, dive in, climb out, look in the scant patches of grass for snakes. Finding none, or confident that the one you found is, like you, content to sit there in the sun, sit there in the sun. Then, walk out, back to your car, where, for some reason your friend goes into the cornfield, and you use your phone to videotape him running out, when he falls, laughs, and asks, “Did you get that?”