An impulse to turn down a side street grabbed me one morning while I was riding on my way to a favourite piece of dirt track. A break in the bush bordering the road looked like a path, and I headed down its bumpy length. The path got narrower and branches slapped against me, and then it just finished. "Wrong turn, dead end," I thought. I got off the bike to turn it around in the skinny space, and saw a snatch of sky through the trees. I leaned the bike against the foliage and stepped through, to be confronted by a startling vista.
I was looking way, way north, a direction usually hidden from me on my normal routes. I saw now rank on rank of hills, four of them one behind the other; the valleys of each ridge revealing the heights of the one behind, into the distance. A light mist was bathing the mountains that morning, and the early light was not yet strong enough to show much detail on the ridges, which showed in solid blue-grey. Each rank of hills was slightly paler than the one in front of it, and there was a perfect tonal gradation all the way to the horizon, meeting the pale sky.
A couple of minor scratches, and a short walk pushing the bike to where I could mount it again, were the only costs of the "wrong turn". Without out it, I would have missed the indelible imprint of those hills. So I guess maybe there aren't really any wrong turns, just turns.
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