For lack of any recent purist lake-monster material, I offer you now the highly scientific experiment of what happens when you put two Watson Fellows together.

“I’m on the fence. I could be happy either way,” was the last I told Kate that morning.

Days before, we’d both spotted posters for the Adirondack Music Festival in Lyonsdale, NY. I suppose that since it was within my state limits, I should have been the one to guess where Lyonsdale was, but admittedly I had no idea. Despite the connotation of wild predators from the savannah, we figured it’d be a perfect romping ground for an adventure.

Morning of, I had a better idea. I learned it was in the Adirondacks (hence the _Adirondack_ Music Festival), a few hours drive from my roost, and was at the culmination of a dead-end road. Imagine if you will, a friendly suburban cul-de-sac, with barbeques on every lawn. That’s the picture the mathematical world of Mapquest was encouraging, but I was certain that there were hidden surprises in the negative space of its art deco colors. Them be trees. Lots of ‘em.

And yes, there are lots of trees in the Adirondacks. Thankfully so. However, when it had become painfully obvious that the geometry of online mapworld bore no relation to the magical wooded land before me, I was visited by flashing high-beams in the rear view. Pulling to the shoulder and dropping the window, I witnessed one of life’s more comical modern renditions of the Honda mobile, made of steel but sporting all the colorful flair of a pair of patchwork corduroys. Its occupants came in peace, that much was sure.

Following suit, the windows dropped, and a waft of happy-smoke crawled up and out for freedom. “Hey dude, ya wanna beer? Can you get us to this show? We’ve been runnin’ around for 12 hours.”

So by this point, you’d have guessed it; I had jumped on the more spontaneous side of the aforementioned fence this morning. But to no regret. Kate was certainly keen as I was on making the most of a meandering voyage. Together as miscreants, we had taken the liberty of telling the map to piss off and instead entertained ourselves with the frolicking cows, local rural grocers, and quarter bouncy-ball machines. Yet by “the Honda point” we were pining for a destination of any kind. After a few ewe’ies, one-way bridges, and round-that-mill-over-thar’s we’d finally come upon the dale of Lyon, asitwere.

As it is now, of course, that dale of surrounding woods was a more or less chaotic land of bulldozed meadows for parked vehicles. We were greeted by will-call complications and missed rendezvous’, so we propped ourselves up with through some liquid inebriations alongside some fellow stranded friends.

It was then that I was visited by a wild baby bunny. Visited isn’t really the right term, but that’s all the vernacular I have for a wild critter that loco-motes across the ground and more-or-less nibbles at my shoes. More plastic than leather, by the way, just to kill any irony.

Now if you’d talked to me the week before, I might have given you a lecture on how evil words like “adorable” and “cute” are, somewhere between the damage factor of nuclear weapons and video games. But you know, only these words suit our little bunny encounter. Maybe I’m softening.

We both retreated into the floodlit vehicle to prechew it some carrots and altogether act like the pair newly visited by the stork-who-carries-rabbits. Strong of heart and resource, Kate had attached quickly to the furry creature. By now, she had, via cell-phone, solicited the help of a friend for some emergency web-research on rabbits.

The rabbit, while graciously eating our offerings, started to behave disoriented so we brought it back to some trees nearby and wished it the best. According to higher minds, this was the best prescription for lost bunnies. By morning it had disappeared, and the rest is up to whether you’re a half-full or half-empty kinda person. We tried not to talk about it too much, but we were both kinda glum about it. Our friend with comp tickets finally came by, but we would only find out later. Seduced by the mossy woods nearby, and a bit sobered by the environmental impact of mass entertainment, we’d decided we’d rather do a hike and had driven off.

And so we spent the afternoon ‘tiquing and hiking against all mosquito odds. The leaves, we both remarked, had never seemed greener, probably due to the misty rain of the day. The rain also introduced us to novelties like funny red newts and Marsh Pits of Doom. And you know by the end of it, I think we were both happy to have created our own destiny (and for the fortunate setting to debate the possibility of such a thing.) Altogether, if that weekend were a pattern by which our Watson years are about to be built, then I believe we have a serendipitous and unexpectedly rewarding time ahead.