Questions Without Answers

The smell of damp leaves, the squelch of boots on a muddy path, the last autumn leaves being rattled by the breeze on the now almost naked trees. Those are the things I recognise when looking at this picture. Who the people are and where they're going are what I don't know, but to be quite honest, I wouldn't want to. Since this picture doesn't bring me back memories from a certain event, I enjoy the fact that I can live into the moment of it... travelling in thought to an uncertain destination. My mind scrolls through my list of travelling adventures and I wonder if those 3 hikers experienced any similar ones. To be quite fair there must actually be at least four of them since one is taking the photo. Are there any others behind him/her?.. What sort of people would they be then. In the picture it looks like a youth outing, but who knows, maybe the parents are just standing behind the photographer. It's strange to think that this photo is to one of those travellers a very long narrative. To me its worth lies not in the fact that it's part of a story with an ending, but rather that the story itself is unknown to me. It appeals to my adventurous side and triggers my mind into living through a thousand possible excitements along a path that may actually have been rather uneventful in reality. The feelings the photo awakes in me are a bit contradictory in that way. Just as much as it appeals to me because I can relate to it through my own memories of hikes I've been on, I like the fact that their hike is still a mystery to me. The picture holds questions without answers, or answers I don't want to know because in my mind I'm enjoying exploring every one of the fifty different answers I've thought up so far...

submitted by Cherry Magnet, Age 20 Portstewart, USA submitted August 16, 2003

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