My brother, our friends and I used to come here in high school, long before they paved the place…read moreover. It had a lost, haunted, abandoned feel to it then. We had to hike through a graveyard and find a hole in the fence.
We used to have campfires, even in winter. Once, we raided my friends' parents' liquor cabinet and filled a few two liter bottles with a mixture of red wine, cheap brandy, and kahlua. Don't laugh! At age 16 it seemed like quite a score!
After we were done vomiting around the campfire, my brother wanted to see how sharp his brand new pocket knife was. He ran it along his thumb to test it out and--surprise! He immediately began to bleed all over everybody. I think he said, "oh, f--k, is that MY blood?" Though drunk and disoriented, we never lost our way back there, not even on starless nights without the benefit of flashlights or clear cognition. We got my bro to the ER, and I don't remember if they gave him a new thumb or just stitched him up. What a scene!
We always had an ear out for the cops, close as we were at times to busy Roselawn Ave., but they never came, and even if they had, they would never have found us. They didn't know those trails like we did. It was our secret place, and we were its kings.
I loved the Reservoir. I knew every inch of it and enjoyed it in every season. I collected medicinal herbs there that helped cure people. I buried a dead pet there. It was like having a forbidden, abandoned state park right in the burbs. But unlike state parks, which are highly regulated, manicured places, the Reservoir was like a refuge for the select few people who knew how to appreciate its depth and diversity.
There was prairie, old-growth pines, ponds, owls and pileated woodpeckers, a small herd of deer. Not to mention the actual reservoir itself, a creepy, unnatural hill with ancient brick buildings on the corners like the entrance to Druid burial vaults. We used to ascend its bare plateau and sit silently and smoke cigarettes as we gazed at the view of distant, downtown Minneapolis while we thought about the past and the future.
We did a lot of other things at this place that I will not mention, except that none of them were harmful to the land or other people, and they were equally the doings of carefree, misspent youth, and also formative experiences that helped us grow up.
I always felt a sense of belonging here, a peacefulness. I still do, even though it's paved over with trails. I married my brother and his wife here in a tiny, shotgun ceremony. A stranger's excitable dog came bounding up to us at the conclusion of the ceremony, and we all petted it and laughed. It was during the last snowfall of the season, in April, 2011. That was the last time I was there.