Aurora 2022-Final

Julian Green

Sara Allard

The Exact Same Steps

Rushes

Long before McCormick’s Creek was a place for families like mine to make fond memories—of orange leaves and finally beating your dad at checkers in front of the lounge’s fireplace—it was a sanatorium. You might associate that word with the mental asylums of yore, but sanatoriums were much more pleasant. They were mainly designed to treat tuberculosis. Back in the olden days, the most popular way to treat TB was for patients to remain holed up in their rooms, and as far away from the outdoors as possible. It wasn’t until a doctor named George Bodington came along in 1840 that things started to change. He proposed something rather controversial: that fresh air and nutritious food were not only healthy enough to heal TB, but maybe healthier than throwing weak people into a room and throwing away the key. Apparently, this idea was akin to witchcraft, and his proposal was soundly rejected from the Lancet. Fortunately, a doctor from Germany named Hermann Brehmer decided to build the first tuberculosis treatment center. Patients got to eat good food, drink lots of wine and, most importantly, take plenty of walks in the fresh air of the Silesian mountains. Basically, your average trip to the state park. I wish I couldn’t imagine what it was like for the patients before the sanatoriums, forced to hide themselves from the outside world, wondering if that hiding was going to make them feel healthy again. Or wondering when their pain was going to end. In a strange way, though, I can relate to their struggles. The event that always draws the biggest crowd to McCormick’s Creek is their weekend - long Halloween party. After the sun goes down, hundreds of families line up outside the nature center and wait for their chance to walk down the “haunted trail.” Sometimes they’d sprinkle the trees with Charlie Brown or Ghostbusters decorations, all with an eco-friendly edutainment flavor, of course. Other times there would be no decorations at all, and your DNR ranger guide would just turn off her flashlight, mimic some owl calls, and let the eerie echoes of the raptors create the spooky ambiance themselves. However, I didn’t know anything about this trail for years, because little me adamantly refused to join in the fun. Despite loving trick-or-treat as much as the next kid, I hated much of the Halloween aesthetic. My least favorite day of the year was when I saw the black and orange signs start to pop up in our local Walmart, reminding me that one of my biggest nightmares was back for her annual visit—like a distant aunt you really didn’t want to see. My admittedly-contradictory hatred of the season could be blamed on a little something called animatronics. Now, I didn’t know they had a more

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