The Gray's Lake Loop Is Where I Actually Think

Gray’s Lake sits about ten minutes from my apartment, a paved loop a little under three miles around, and I’ve been walking it most weeknights for going on two years now, usually right after dinner, usually alone. It’s not a scenic secret or anything, half of Des Moines uses this same path, joggers, people with strollers, a guy who fishes off the same spot near the boathouse every evening I’ve ever seen him there. But it’s become the one part of my day that doesn’t have a screen anywhere near it, no phone out unless I’m checking the time, and after a decade of scheduling software and dispatch calls I’ve come to genuinely need that.

I used to bring a podcast. Stopped doing that maybe eight months ago, not for any principled reason, I just noticed one night that I’d walked the whole loop without hearing a word of whatever I’d queued up, mind somewhere else entirely, and figured the podcast wasn’t really adding anything I was actually using. Now it’s just the path, the water, whatever’s going on in my own head, which some nights is nothing in particular and some nights is an entire review I end up writing almost word for word once I get home and sit down.

There’s a stretch on the south side, past the amphitheater, where the trail pulls right up against the water with nothing between you and it, no railing, no bench, just grass sloping down. That’s the part I always slow down for. I couldn’t tell you why exactly. It’s not dramatic scenery, this is Iowa, not the coast, but there’s something about that particular hundred yards that resets whatever’s been sitting in my chest from the workday. If I’ve had a bad dispatch morning, a job that ran long, a customer who wasn’t wrong to be angry, that’s usually where it actually lets go, not before.

I’ve thought about moving the walk indoors when it’s cold enough to make it miserable, and some winters I do, treadmill at the gym a few blocks over, podcast back on because a treadmill without one is unbearable. But it’s not the same walk. Nothing resets the same way on a machine going nowhere as it does on an actual loop with an actual lake at the middle of it, even a small one, even one I’ve walked probably four hundred times by now and could describe with my eyes closed.

I don’t have a bigger point to make about it. Some things you do because they work and you stop questioning why. This is one of mine.