mount echo

There are places around Cincinnati that hold great meaning to me. This meaning isn't "built in" but acquired through years of experiences and memories that have been forged in these places. Mount Echo is one of them. I always speak quite fondly of the park, but truth be told, it's nothing especially great. I just went there a lot because it was close to where I lived and now live (five minutes away, at the most). There are certainly better parks in Cincinnati: Eden Park, Mount Aries, Ault Park, I could go on. But Mount Echo retains a fondness in my heart. 

During my freshman year of college, my friends and I would go out there with paintball guns. We'd play a game called "lost boy" where one of us (usually me, because I actually preferred the role) would play a kid lost in the woods being hunted down by deranged lunatics. We'd run around through the woods shooting at each other with paintballs. It was during one such escapade that I found an overgrown path winding through a dead apple orchard to a hobo camp. Lots of mattresses and chairs strewn around, sleeping bags and the like. It was picturesque, too, set midst a field of wildflowers. I'd also spend a considerable amount of time there alone: after my O.T. History class, I'd get a chai from the Hilltop (this is before I did my three-year stint there) and go to a log just lying in the woods and sit there smoking cloves and drinking my vanilla chai. Other times I'd park at the overlook and smoke cigars. Grenadiers, usually. I'd smoke and just look out at the city and feel all the hope about finding a great girl, going into ministry, having a family. Old dreams that died hard but died nonetheless.

Come sophomore year of college, I entered a depressed stage where I'd go there and smoke my cigars and wonder why life pans out the way it does. I dated Julie during this time, and we went to the bridge scarred with the carved initials of long-lost lovers and I dared to hope that our love wasn't lost but found and to never be lost. But I was a hopeless romantic--icky, I know--and reality taught me a different lesson. I said "fuck it" and quite literally did so, losing my virginity in a quiet patch of flowers in the woods and returned home with mud on my kneecaps and spoiling my shirt and shorts. We'd go there a lot to have sex before the whole relationship spiraled out of control.

Junior year, I'd go there with my next girlfriend, Karen. We were going to get married, and at the park we'd dream about the future, we'd try to put all the pieces together. That relationship didn't last, and I spent the rest of Junior year practically absent the park. My visits to the park steadily decreased over the next two years, but recently I've been going there a lot more often. It's an excellent place for prayer and meditation, for wrestling with God and also with yourself. Wrestling with God, I think, is always done best in places of nostalgia.