The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
The Cattail Trail begins just off the picnic area and loops for two miles along the shore of Mountain Island Lake in Mecklenburg County’s Latta Plantation Park. I have walked that trail at least once every year since 1994, the year before I moved to North Carolina. We tend to think of trails as static things, unchanging lines on the map, but the reality is the Cattail has changed a lot since I first navigated it at the tail end of a Carolina golf vacation while I killed some time waiting for my afternoon flight from CLT: Trees have fallen. Saplings matured. Shores have eroded and streams changed paths. Bridges sagged to disrepair and were rebuilt.
A little over a year after that first foray into those woods, I bought a house less than 10 miles from the park and, remembering that pleasant Sunday morning walk, took my dogs, Jake and Cy, out for their first crack at the trail. Back then, the wide, well-kept Cattail ran down the center of the peninsula that juts from the park’s western edge, with single-track spurs that led 15-20 yards down to the water. Park benches were placed at the end of some of those spurs and provided tree-shielded alcoves for fishing, reading or quiet contemplation.
My favorite spot was about a quarter-mile from the picnic area where a sandy spur paralleled the main trail and opened onto a small beach and a bench facing west with a vista across the lake. In the evenings, the setting sun lit that cove in amazing hues of pink, orange and purple.
I have always considered myself an “outdoorsy” person, but like the trail, the exact meaning of that term has meandered considerably over the years; from a youth spent wandering the woods and along the shore of the Sandusky Bay, to working a rural homestead on the flat plains of Northwest Ohio, to the more upscale “L.L. Bean” affectation I had adopted by the time I moved South.
In truth, by the late ’90s I was much more invested in the idea of the outdoors than I was the experience. Now and then I would put on my best outdoorsy outfit, leash up the dogs and take them for an hour or two in the woods, often with a book. We would stop at that wonderful hidden cove and read for a while. It was all very Waldensian.
Jake passed away in 2003 and Cy a year later. Without the dogs for company, and busy with my startup consulting firm, walks in the park became less frequent and I lost track of the cove, sticking to the main trail on the occasions I needed a nature break.
In 2007, I started a new project in Statesville and acquired a new dog, Kasay. The Statesville project would turn into a full-time job, and Kasay, despite his diminutive size, would turn out to be far more at home in the woods than Jake or Cy ever had. With the pressure of running my own show off my shoulders and a willing outdoor companion, I headed back to the woods. On one of our first outings to the Cattail, we were walking along on a beautiful March day when we came across a girl of maybe 7 or 8 wearing a white dress and wings walking the other direction. That’s odd, I thought and continued. A hundred yards down the trail, we came across another similarly attired girl … and then another and another. It turned out that a section of the trail had been designated as Faelyn Village, and little girls had been invited to come and build “fairy houses” there.
Well, so much for the L.L.Bean vibe.
More disappointing, however, was the fact that shore erosion had claimed the secluded cove, which was now marked by two downed trees sticking out 30 feet into the lake. Pieces of the bench were still visible, but it was unusable. And the trail itself had shifted as fishermen moving from spot to spot along the shore had created an alternate path much closer to the water.
Six years later, as Kasay slowed with age, I acquired a new dog, Laika. On her second weekend with us, I took her out to the Cattail and walked her all the way to the far end of the peninsula. By that time, the original trail was all but gone, having been supplanted by the fishermen’s path, and the remnants of the cove bench had been completely washed out into the lake. A new bench had been placed at a popular fishing spot where the lake narrowed to a channel just 50 feet or so across. As I sat and looked out across the water to the shore on the other side, Laika managed to get free of her collar and took off at a run down the trail. There was no way I could keep up, and I feared she had run off into the woods, and I would have a heck of a time finding her, but when I got back to the picnic area, there she was, waiting for me with a look that said, “What kept you, slowpoke?”
This past fall, a new dog, Millie, joined Laika and me on the Cattail. During that walk, I noticed the county had replaced the footbridge across a little stream that marked the entrance to the south half of the trail, the last of the original structures from that first walk 26 years ago. In that sense, it is an entirely different trail now. Sure, a trail changes over a quarter-century, but probably not as much as the dogs and the people walking it.