Category: Outdoors

Posted on

Outside

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Yes, all day today, outside!  The forecast was for off and on clouds and some rain, but we woke to a completely clear blue sky.  I carried the deck furniture up from the basement of the barn and we had our morning cappuccino sitting in hot sun.  It snowed yesterday, so this was an unexpected treat.

Then I went for the first bike ride of the season, and as soon as I got home, David and I went for what Eric and I, years ago, coined a hikette — more than a walk, less than a hike.  We drove to the top of Blake’s Hill Road and walked on Mountain Road, an old woods road that runs just north of the small peak, Saddleback Mountain.  From Mountain Road, we got to the trail that took us to the summit of Saddleback, where a vein of marble cuts across the granite outcroppings, and other hikers have created cairns that look like a band of motionless people among the grass and rocks as you come around the last corner of the trail.  We had a snack on the ledges overlooking the White Mountains to the north, then hiked home.

It did cloud up and start to rain a bit, but not enough to keep me out of the yard.  I cleaned up the wood pile, broke dead stalks off perennials, and looked at my spinach and radish and pea sprouts, the peas making a sheen of green along the line of the fence.

Now I’m on the porch, writing my first blog post of the spring outdoors.  The buds on the maple are thick and fuzzy and red.  The geese who come into the farm pond across the street in the evenings just honked along their descent.  It’s warm enough to sit out here with only a light jacket.  This feels magical.  An entire day outside, when yesterday it snowed.

Posted on

Haiku LXI

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Trees know winter’s bone
Pace and character of snow
Quickening of light.

Posted on

Haiku LVIII

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Stonewall in snow woods
Granite ledges split open
Out walking to home.

Posted on

Haiku LVII

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Shadows on hard snow
Brook beginning to open
Ice lacing water.

Posted on

Storm Skiing

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Two storms in two days, and in preparation for the second storm and the predicted dump of another foot of snow, the state more or less shut down.  David and I decided early to get out into the storm for a ski, then come home to get our work for the day done.  The snow was falling thick as we set out on the trail to the west of the house, blowing into us across the open fields, making the world a hazy grey.  It was hard to get any sense of depth or direction as snow swirled around us.  Our skis were lost under the deep snow.  Our hats and neck warmers crusted as snow melted from our body heat, then froze again.  

Once the trail headed into the woods, the black of wet pine trunks and the green needles showing dark against their loads of snow provided contrast that gave the world around us depth.  The snowmobile trail had been tracked through the woods, probably last night after the first storm, and our skis started to appear again out from under the snow.  The trail took us across several roads, up the power lines, then up over a ridge draped with hemlocks and tall white and red pines.  We crossed the stream pouring out of Durgin Pond, rocks capped with great domes of white against the black water. 

The storm was cold and glorious and windy and wild and we skied right through it.  Lovely.  We came home and were able to catch our neighbor before he finished plowing, moving our cars out of the way so he could pile up the snow from the whole driveway.  Facing the five foot wall of snow between the driveway and the house, all that was left was figuring out how to get to the door.

Posted on

Another Play Day

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I’ve been skiing up the ridge of Nottingham Mountain for decades, following the gradual rise of Tarleton Road to a sharp turn where the old road hairpins up a steep pitch.  At the top of the pitch, the road turns back to the north and follows the ridgeline out to the clearing of Neville Peak, where you can see the White Mountains on clear days, including the distant, often white tip of Mt. Washington.  Thirty years ago we skied up Nottingham on our old wooden Bonas, with 3 pin bindings holding the boot in front of our toe to the skis.  Control was minimal, but we never attempted the steep ski unless there was ample powder to fall into.  Which meant deep snow to climb up through.  Lots of work, lots of fun. 

In the years since my equipment has improved, greatly improving the control possible while skiing.  But the greatest control has come in better understanding what I can realistically do.  Today, David and I set off to ski up Tarleton Road with our snowshoes in our backpacks.  At the steep pitch, we’d leave our skis and snowshoe up to the summit of Neville Peak.  We’d still have the glorious run down Tarleton in ski tracks through luscious powder to enjoy, without thrashing up and down a nearly impossible, twisting pitch.  The ski down Tarleton Road, below the steep section, has always been a joy, enough of a drop to provide a fast run, sweeping around corners, dropping through hard woods and hemlocks, and finishing up with a long straight hill down to a bridge over a brook. 

When we got to the beginning of the trail up Tarleton Road, a young man was just leaving.  I asked him where he’d been.  “I went up to Neville Peak,” he said.

“Up the steep ridge?”

“Yes, it was great.  But I needed my skins to climb up,” he said, and then talked about how wonderful the ski down was.  I wasn’t the least bit tempted.  I don’t have skins and I don’t need to be able to do everything I could 30 years ago.  Much of it, but not all.

When we got to the beginning of the steep rise and changed into snowshoes, I felt as if I was floating.  With the weight of the snowshoes out of my pack, and only the snowshoes on my feet to navigate through the powder, climbing the last of the ridge felt almost effortless.  As we got to the top, the sun came out and drew sharp shadows on the snow.  On Neville Peak, we could see snow clouds coming our way.  We had a snack and started down, flakes floating around us like tiny pieces of our day settling deep to be remembered in the work week ahead.

Posted on

Playing Silence

This morning I heard steps across my porch.  My neighbor and friend Amy was at the door.  “We’re hoping you and David want to ski with Paul and me?”  It was like a childhood friend knocking at my door 50 years ago to ask, “Can you come out and play?”  Earlier this week, another friend emailed to say her husband “can go out and play for a couple of hours on Sunday.  Are you guys up for some snowshoeing?”

Three weeks ago it suddenly became winter in NH — snow, frigid air, snow, snow, snow.  The skiing and snowshoeing is the best it’s been in several years, and all our outdoor friends are taking advantage of it.  Last weekend, when I got home from NY, there was a message on my answering machine from Alison.  “The skiing’s great if you’re interested.”  I didn’t get the message until late that evening, after skiing with David, but Alison called again on Sunday morning.  “Anne and Peter are coming over at 11:00 to snowshoe, then Anne and I are skiing.  Want to come?”

I called back.  “Yes, David and I want to come over and play.”  And play we did, snowshoeing the new trail through the Epsom Town Forest, then skiing up a snowmobile trail to the untraveled rise of Tarleton Road, making our own tracks to the height of the ridge.  The snow was dry, light, deep and very cold. 

Today is warmer.  There’s been more snow. After skiing with Amy and Paul, David and I came home and had some lunch and headed back out to play.  This time we skied the snowmobile trails from our house, then followed the ski tracks we made last weekend down an old road to a marsh, out across the open expanse. We crossed the brook that feeds the marsh and skied up along its bank, the snow keeping us high above the few spots with water still running between deep mounds.  As we crossed the marsh, I thought of a weekend just about four years ago. 

It was another frigid winter, but there was less snow.  Adrienne had come home for the weekend, as she did almost every weekend that winter after Eric died, and we went for a walk in the woods.  The brook had frozen solid and clear, a long flow of ice, into the frozen swamp.  The poem I wrote that night ended up in the book I wrote that year, and was published the following winter.  Here it is, and here I am, four years later, playing my way through the winter, bumping up against deep snow and silence. 

Silence

I am squatting in the fireplace, hands out
to catch the heat off the first flame, the only
heat in the house, the furnace fan out,
the belt and pulleys jiggled off their mounts. 
Last night a friend and I were comparing pathetic
and now I win.  I am trying silence today,
lie on the floor, again, in the sun on the carpet
in the room where you died, heavy wind,
the shadow of plants below the great windows,
warm, how grateful you were for this room, open
and high.  I don’t want to make sense, I am fed up
with misfortune.  I walked the frozen brook
into the wind of the marsh, following the tracks
of a dog.  I sat in the sun but it was too cold.