Find the big blue lake. That was our task. It was big! It was blue! We didn’t find it.

My niece Elizabeth and I set out for that goal a couple years ago, on a splendid October day. There had been rain, and the trail was suffused with water, just stupid with it, running in channels and splorching wantonly into the surrounding meadows. The whole hike was basically water pie in a trail crust. We were having a good time, and if there was a lake out there it was likely to be nice and full. In fact we passed by more than one, but not The One.

Neither of us is particularly goal-oriented. We have that in our favor, I think. If we do not achieve our goal, or frankly even remember our goal, we are not dismayed. We’re happy with wherever we are, assuming the absence of biting flies. It’s all good.

The last time we were here, for instance, we got distracted by a hornet’s nest the size of the moon, off to the side of the trail. It was gorgeous. And clearly unoccupied, since it had been torn nearly in two. We had to get up close to examine this architectural wonder. It was a thing to see! And be happy about!

Well, it was a thing all right. A hornet’s nest for sure, judging by the atmospheric river of hornets that poured out of it the moment we got good and close. This was a hornet’s nest that had only very recently been vandalized, perhaps that very morning, and its occupants were seriously pissed off. At times like these I can readily imagine that the Greek gods and goddesses who poked the nest are real, and hoovering popcorn on Mt. Olympus while they watch the little humans run just as fast as they could through a gumbo of saturated meadow.

(Not fast at all.)

At any rate we had yet to find the blue lake the trail was so famous for. We plowed on, certain we’d put in the requisite number of miles, but the trail began to peter out, and kept petering, and the thing about “petering out” is you’re never sure when the “petering” is done and the “out” has happened, because there’s still a trail, but it might be for voles. And everything was still beautiful, but at a certain point we decided to double back, and clambered back over the logs that had been piled up to make sure we didn’t take the path we did take, and we were back on the proper trail. There were even people on it.

“Is this the way to the blue lake?”

It was. Everyone agreed. But depending on the condition of the hikers we encountered, it was either “just around the corner” or “a mile away.” We had a time constraint but we decided to hoof it for the lake. Hoof it, slither sideways, shoot down a muddy half-pipe on our fannies—whatever. And just when we had decided to turn around, we saw the lake.

We saw a lake.

“Is that it?” Elizabeth wanted to know.

Well, it had to be, didn’t it?

“It’s supposed to be on our right.”

I considered. I turned 180 degrees. “It’s on my right now,” I said. We experimented. She turned. I turned. Once we’d turned a few times, it seemed conceivable we had the right lake. (Then again, as Dave puts it, while shaking his head incredulously, we are “Brewster girls.”)

[Overheard on Mt. Olympus. “What are those two doing now?”
“Looks like Tai Chi.”
“No, I don’t think so. I think they’re just spinning in circles.”
“Oh look, awesome. That one tipped over.”]

Elizabeth was skeptical. “Thing is, it’s not that blue.”

“True,” I said. “But it’s cloudy. Maybe it’s bluer when the sky is out.”

We went home. We studied the map. That was not Blue Lake, in fact, but the real thing wasn’t much farther. The lake we saw was called, apparently, Sahalee Tyee, which is Umatilla for “Not all that blue, actually.”

Now, two years later, we tried again. We totally got the part where you weren’t supposed to clamber over all the logs that had been laid out to keep you off the vole trail. We went straight to Lake Sahalee Tyee. And we kept going. About twenty feet. Where a vast and very blue lake appeared in front of us.

On the right.