Irv Oslin recalls finding that one forever friend in the great outdoors
WELLINGTON − Not all my memories of Findley State Park are good ones. One such memory came at a moment in life when I began to realize that not all my “forever friends” were forever.
In a previous column I reminisced about weekend trips to Findley State Park with my friends Willard and Roger. We were in our mid-teens at the time and we’d ride our clunky old one-speed bicycles from the West Side of Cleveland to Findley Lake to fish and camp.
I mentioned in the column that, on a recent visit, I hiked the trails and did some canoeing. I also camped there, something I hadn’t done in 55 years. After pitching my tent, I wasted no time hitting the water. I paddled my solo canoe into a strong headwind from the campground to the spillway.
Before I go any further, a little background is in order. First, about the park and the lake. Then about my friendship with Willard and Roger.
Findley State Park's 292-acre lake created in the 1950s
In the 1940s, Judge Guy B. Findley donated more than 800 acres of farmland south of Wellington to the state to be converted into permanent public forest. In 1950, the Division of Forestry transferred the land to the Division of Parks and Recreation and it became Findley State Park. In the mid 1950s, an earthen dam was built, creating a 292-acre lake.
I met Willard and his brother Roger when we were in middle school. We hit it off because, unlike our urbanized classmates at Wilbur Wright Junior High, we had a deep appreciation for outdoors adventure.
It was a short walk from our West Side neighborhood to Lindale Reservoir, which once provided water for steam locomotives. For us, it provided many a carefree afternoon of fishing. In later years, it provided a place to drink beer and avoid the Lindale Police, when they weren’t busy running speed traps on Memphis Avenue and later on I-71. (That section of the interstate hadn’t been completed yet.)
It wasn’t until one of our trips to Findley State Park that I realized Roger couldn’t swim. While we were fishing from the spillway, Roger lost his footing on the green slime that coated the concrete and slipped into the water. Suddenly, he was floundering in the spillway basin and yelling, “Help, I can’t swim!”
Fortunately for Roger, Willard had the presence of mind to extend a fishing rod to him. Roger grabbed the tip of the pole and Willard pulled him to safety.
I’m afraid I wasn’t much help. I stood there dumbfounded, thinking, “Oh great, if he drowns how are we going to get his bicycle home?”
It was then that I realized Roger and I weren’t all that close.
Willard and I remained best friends into young adulthood. We had outgrown Lindale Reservoir and our West Side neighborhood. Now mobile teenagers, we chased adventure on the open road in Willard’s ’56 Ford and later his Morris Minor.
When we were without wheels, we hitchhiked. Shortly after graduating from high school, we hitched to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. It was during that long road trip that I realized there were times when I didn’t want to be around Willard. Nothing about him in particular. Just a feeling that, no matter how close, “forever friends” aren’t forever.
Perhaps some people go through life never experiencing that. Or not admitting it. When we’re young, we choose our friends by virtue of proximity, and not necessarily because of compatibility.
One of life’s lessons, learned in the great outdoors — one friend I’ve never grown tired of.
This article originally appeared on Ashland Times Gazette: Remembering Findley State Park & finding the outdoors a forever friend
