Gail Rheinheimer
Kurt and Ava walk a trail at Carvins Cove Natural Reserve.
This was in the Carvins Cove Natural Reserve, the 11,200-acre preserve surrounding the reservoir that provides most of the water to Roanoke, Virginia. The park, recognized as the second-largest city park in the nation, also has some 60 miles of trails for hikers, bikers and horseback riders.
Along one of the prettiest of those trails—flanking the full reservoir—I was walking with granddaughter Ava, then six, as we trailed behind her father and brother and Gigi, aka The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All. Ava stopped and pointed just off the trail, having seen a tiny yellow plastic man—six inches tall with long flexible arms and legs, a big Walmart smiley face and a black-penned note across his round belly that read,”Have a Great Hike!”
Simply a perfect find for someone Ava’s age and walking through the woods full of leaves and twigs and rocks and an old man.
“Look, Papa, a little yellow man! He’s really cute, isn’t he?” She stepped over to the log where he was perched—maybe six feet off the trail—and brought him back to the trail to inspect further as we walked. She held him carefully and inspected him with equal thoroughness.
I agreed that he was cute and we walked on toward our destination, the edge of Carvins Cove for lunch. We talked, Ava and I, about how he got there, who might have put him there, how fun he was to find and about how he might feel being out here in the woods, standing in a stump.
And then, in another quarter mile or so, as she looked off to the side of the trail, she said, “You think he might like to stand over there on that log?”
It was a good-size log with some flattened spaces in it, and I said yes, I thought he would like that spot. She walked over and carefully placed him so that he was looking out toward the trail, with one bendy arm raised as if in greeting from his new sunny perch.
“I think a lot of people will like to see him there,” she said. She was pleased, I was pleased, and we walked on toward lunch.
We eventually caught up with the others, shared a pleasant lunch beside the reservoir and began our walk back. I had it in mind to be sure to have us wave to little yellow man on the way back, but neither Ava nor I remembered.
I thought little more of the little yellow man until a few weeks later when I was reading a blog post from an old friend and fellow hiker, talking about how he had been walking out at Carvins Cove one day and had come across a little yellow man on a stump. And then, he continued, a few weeks later had seen the same bendy guy on another log in the same area and thus decided that little yellow man was meant to be his hiking companion.
I sat down and typed out the story of Ava and the little man and sent it along to my friend.
A few hours later into that rainy morning, he emailed back that Smiley Boy, as he called the little yellow man, during his brief possession, was back in the woods where he belonged.
The story above first appeared in our November / December 2021 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!