Outdoors – Page 5 – Grace Mattern

January 21, 2014

Small Stone #21

The exposed skin on my face aches and stings and my fingers are numb. The trees look brittle and the branches I pass as I ski snap and break. Another storm moving up the coast bruises the southern sky a deep purple, dark beneath the sun’s low ball of hazy light. The woods are a different world than yesterday, when it was 20 degrees warmer, the snow was soft and wet, the sky blue between passing clouds, trees tossing off clumps of slush from the storm on Saturday. But Flat Meadow Brook is still open and I stop to listen to the tumble of water running, the music of motion through a landscape descending back into winter.

January 18, 2014

Small Stone #18

Don’t go looking for 1 – 17. I’m starting with 18 because that’s the day’s date, the date of the day I caught on to this year’s Mindful Writing Challenge.

I drove home from Albany today, across southern Vermont, just ahead of the snow that was moving up the Hudson Valley, smack into the snow off the coast. Again and again as I drove Rte. 7 and then Rte. 9, the horizon would be pulled up close with the steep slope of a field, the curve of the hill climbing to sky. Like skiing up from the bottom of the hay field behind the Johnson’s old farmhouse, a field of snow bleeding off into blue. I love that view.

December 29, 2013

Above Tree Line: December

Eleven out of twelve is a good record. David and I realized our 2013 intention of getting above tree line at least once a month for elven out of the year’s twelve months, and it was as much fun as we’d hoped it would be. We freely stretched our definition of “above tree line” in order to make the eleven, but not so much that we didn’t admit it didn’t happen in November. Just too much going in.

But we made did it in December, yesterday in fact. Cathy, Betsy, Sam, David and I took the Crawford Path to Mt. Pierce, the first above tree line hike we did in 2013, back in January. There was far less snow yesterday than 11 months ago, a clouded summit, and trees that looked like underwater growth, which I guess in a way they are, shrouded with ice then snow then more ice and snow until there is only a slightly tree-shaped mound along the edge of the trail.

There were also snow ribbons draped in loops from the thin horizontal branches of saplings. And the always welcome ease of footing on a packed trail; even if a bit icy with rocks sticking through in spots, between new insulated boots and micro-spikes, it was a quick, easy walk.

Into another world. 2014?

December 19, 2013December 19, 2013

Day 11: Play

The outside world is tinted indigo, the color of thick clouds reflected from the snow that fell last night. There are deer tracks thrashed through the piles of plowed snow that rim the driveway, flattening the fresh inches in the walkway, circling the yew bushes which the deer ate to almost bareness last winter and appear to be ready to do again. So much action in the dark while we slept.

This is the first morning in many that I haven’t risen in darkness. Instead of being up to watch the first hints of day come in to the eastern horizon, I watch the darker clouds with their faint hue of purple move across the further, grayer sky. Will we see sun today?

Yesterday playing in the snow settled my squirrel brain as it always does. The calming effect of bi-lateral movement never fails me, being outdoors, the quiet glide of my skis, one after the other, through deep powder, my body in rhythm with ancient patterns, one foot in front of the other, one hand in front, then the next, each side of my body and brain having its turn in moving me to a new space, an awareness of change and stillness and being.

December 18, 2013

Day 10: Slow Down

The sun kept burning a blur through the clouds for a couple of hours after the snow started. At one point the day even brightened, the sun sharpened in the gray sky, and the snow picked up. A paradox. By the time David and I headed out across the fields for a quick ski before dark there was only snow and a flat, monotone sky.

Climbing a steep hill I heard a loud flutter and crash and looked up from working my skis in a herring bone pattern to counter the slope. Turkeys, several of them lifting from high in the white pines, dark shapes moving between the tall trunks and settling back into the jumble of branches, disappearing again.

I’d started my day frustrated and teary, getting lost on my way to a writers’ group meeting. There was no reason to be lost. I’ve been to this friend’s house many times, I’d looked at the directions again on-line before I left. I even took the right turn, then told myself it didn’t look right and turned around. For at least a few miles I knew I was going the wrong way but I didn’t stop to put the friend’s address into my phone and get directions. I just kept driving.

It didn’t make sense, to keep going in the wrong direction because I was late and impatient and felt like I didn’t have time to stop and make sure I knew where I was. And where I was going. It all just made me even later.

Why do I have so much trouble slowing down?

Wild turkeys don’t think about where they’re going. They heard David and me climbing the hill under where they were roosting, one of them flapped off its branch, which stirred the rest of them, and there was a commotion for a few moments. Then quiet.

Where am I trying to go?

Wherever that might be, the late day ski helped me let go of my mistake and frustration. One ski forward, then the next, my arms planting my poles into the snow in a regular pattern. Left, right, up, down. Movement. I wasn’t trying to get anywhere other than into the woods, in the snow, in the falling light.

Skiing back to the house the falling snow in dusk light made it look like we were moving underwater.

December 16, 2013

Day 8: Active with Glide

The snow was a heavy swirl around the flood light on the corner of the barn when I woke, white flashes in the black. By the time there was enough light outside to see, the snow had slowed to small flecks. By mid-morning there was a fine, freezing mist blurring the horizon, a cloud across the fields. After lunch, David and I drove down the road looking for snowmobile tracks so we could cross-country ski. I’d tried earlier and there was too much snow to track alone, over a foot, and getting heavier as the mist soaked into what had been fine, dry powder. I kept losing my ski tips in the snow and couldn’t lift them to take the next step.

Yes, tracks! A snowmobile had come across Coe Farm, an old woods road, and continued up Canterbury where we wanted to ski. As we got ready the sun finally came around some clouds, making a cathedral of light in the dense woods. We snapped our boots into our bindings and kicked off.

“Active with glide.” That was how Eric described what he loved best, outdoor sports that translated his effort into a gliding motion – cross-country skiing, kayaking, biking. I love it all too, and nothing better than skiing. David had skied enough before I’d satisfied my craving, and after he drove home I followed the snowmobile track over Coe Farm Road, the day turned gray again. Clouds, snow, dark pines and hemlocks, bare oaks and maples, and occasional beech saplings, still fluttering pale brown leaves. Mostly a black and white world, even the needles of the pines muted under their drapes of snow. Color isn’t what I come out into this world for.

I come out to play. To kick and push and then glide. After I’d skied up and over the hill of Coe Farm Road and come back, I climbed Canterbury Road again. So I could ski down, so I could slip around the curves of the hills and feel the ground falling away underneath me, fast enough to have to pay attention to just this, the long slide, the metal sky above, the stone walls hidden in white mounds, the slick of the day moving into dusk, darkness coming, another round.

November 24, 2013

A Seat In the Woods

Yesterday’s bright sun and hard wind (though not as hard as today) called for a walk in the woods. Which made me think of the Great Brook Trail in Deerfield, a three-mile walk through a variety of woodlands and wetlands, past beaver ponds and along the Great Brook, and up and down hummocks of granite ledges. There are bridges to cross, delightful hand-lettered signs pointing out side trails to vernal pools and overlooks, and best of all, a bench set on a rock outcropping halfway along the trail, positioned to look up Great Brook as it runs through a small gorge.

A seat in the woods is an invitation to be present. Present to what? To whatever has brought me outside, or even better, to what is in front of me now that I’m out. Often it’s simply the need to have more space around me, to let some of the energy radiating from my body be absorbed by the wind and rocks and trees. In my last blog post, I described my project last year at this time to write 300 — 400 words each day of the two weeks leading to the winter solstice. On the second day I wrote, I need to be outside moving around. There has been too much moving inside me the last several months, and expanding this churn of energy into a greater sphere has come to feel essential.

Whenever I pass this bench along the Great Brook I imagine coming here some day with a book and a journal and just sitting. Observing, reading, writing. I think the same on many of the hikes I do, imagining an afternoon on a favorite ledge with no ambition beyond being in that spot for as long as I can manage to stay still.

I never do it, always moving on, with some place to get to or some place to be. But yesterday I did stop long enough to sit on the bench and watch the water coming down through the rocks, noticing how light was falling into the woods through the bare trees. I walked and sat and looked. Present.

October 23, 2013

Above Tree Line: September and October

Intentions are a means of getting ourselves where we want to be, rather than letting life’s currents spin us along. Not that letting currents take you into unknown and unexpected territory is a bad thing. After all, my tag line for this blog is “Life is more about floating down river than it is marching across a field.”

Balance is the key, between letting events and experiences unfold, and making sure you have enough of what sustains you in your life. The intention David and I committed to for this year — to get above tree line at least once a month — was meant to make sure we have enough hiking in our lives, because hiking to a view is nourishing for both of us. The effort, the exercise, often the friends with us on the hikes, the reliable renewal of being outdoors, and the visual expanse all contribute to the pleasure we get from being above tree line.

So does the hiking we did in Arizona and Utah count towards that intention? Yes. Even though we weren’t technically getting above tree line, we were hiking. A lot. In fact, in the Grand Canyon we hiked down to an elevation that would be far above tree line in New Hampshire, and for the entire time we were out west we were at elevations that would be above tree line here. We had expansive views on every hike, mostly because we were below tree line, we were outside for most of every day, and there was plenty of effort and exercise, often to get to a mesa top where there were trees again, after walking through rock-walled canyons.

We had the intention of going out west to center our days around being outdoors, walking in new territory, and seeing vastly different landscapes. And that’s what happened. It was grand.

August 24, 2013

Above Tree Line: August x 2

Any month that includes two trips above tree line is a good one. Earlier this month, David, Anne and I hiked up Mt. Garfield, making our way easily up the 10 miles of trail to a clear summit. Earlier this week, David, Anne and I hiked again, this time with five other friends, to celebrate my 6oth birthday. We climbed Mt. Carragain, again 10 miles and only 250 feet of additional elevation gain over the 3,000 it takes to get to the summit of Garfield. But the trail is far gnarlier, with rocks and roots and straight ascents up Signal Ridge, rather than the mostly even footing up the switchbacks of Garfield. It was not an easy hike, but it was glorious. When we got to an opening on the ridge with views down into Carragain Notch, we stopped for lunch and a birthday celebration. Alison had brought cake, she lit a candle, and a group of young men and women, on an orientation trip from Yale, joined in singing “Happy Birthday” to me.

It was just what I wanted to celebrate this milestone birthday. Not a big deal, but really, a big deal — a day in the mountains with friends, savoring good conversations, a challenging but satisfying stretch of my muscles and strength, and long views off into the waves of mountain ridges, blue fading into smoky gray then climbing back up into bluer sky.

July 20, 2013

Too Hot to Blog

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I’ve been busy, not that being busy is in any way unusual for me, but there have been deadlines to some of what I’d had to do this past week (consulting work), and getting things done that require paying attention, sitting at a desk, in a hot house, has not been easy. Normally, I spend an hour or three at a time at my desk, whether writing a grant as a consultant, or doing a webinar, or doing my own work, editing poetry or writing an essay or pulling something together for one of the boards I’m on. When I get restless, which happens a lot, I go outside and weed my garden for a while, go for a bike ride, a swim, a walk, or pick some of the abundance of wild blueberries this year, something outside and direct and physical.

Not this week. When I needed a break from my work, I just walked around looking for a cooler space in the house. Being outside during the day was impossibly uncomfortable and hot. I did go swimming, but not much else. I got my work done, went for a swim, then sat on the back deck at the end of the day with David, both of us basically panting, trying to stay cool enough to get through dinner and get into bed with multiple fans blowing on us. My brain was on semi-permanent melt — work, eat, collapse. What was there to say that would be interesting for a blog?

But I was paying attention to the forecast (another thing that is not in any way unusual for me) and kept seeing the temperatures predicted for Friday as being the highest of the week. Early in my week of work, I decided to get what I needed done completed by Thursday afternoon so David and I could have a summer vacation day on Friday.

We did. We got up yesterday morning and put the kayak racks on the car for the first time this summer, then loaded up the kayaks and a cooler of snacks, and headed for Squam Lake. Squam Lake is a special place for me. It was our family vacation spot for all the years from when Sam was a year old until two years after Eric died — 21 years. Kayaking on Squam was Eric’s favorite thing to do, the lake his favorite place in the world. The day Eric died, as we were trying to figure out how to prepare his body for pick up by the funeral home, Adrienne, Sam, John and I agreed that nothing would be so fitting as dressing Eric in his kayak shorts and water shoes. We considered putting a paddle beside him, to be tucked into the coffin and buried with him, but knew Eric would object to that as a waste of good equipment.

As David and I turned onto Metcalf Road yesterday, headed for the kayak launch spot on Squaw Cove, a wave of memory passed through me, bringing back all the years of getting ready for a week on the lake, all the years of Eric and I kayaking to favorite spots to swim and pick berries and relax, all the years of dipping our paddles into the clear lake water as we watched the march of the Sandwich Range mountains fading into the haze of summer days on the north shore.

Yesterday on the lake was perfect. It was viciously hot in most of the country, but fine sitting on the fine white sand beaches of Squam Lake, half-submerged in water. David and I paddled and swam and read and had a picnic and I wrote in my Island Journal, a memoir I’m writing that I can only write while on islands (more on that in a later post). We went to three islands yesterday. At one point I asked David how he was doing (not an easy week for either or us, for reasons as easy to ascribe to the heat as anything else) and he said, “I’m great. This is the essential ‘us.’ Getting out into the world and moving and being and enjoying”

We didn’t leave the lake until dinner time, driven back to our car by hunger. We picked up sandwiches in Holderness and ate sitting on a dock, watching the light fade over the water. Yes, maybe it was a week too hot for blogging, a week to hot for anything but getting done what had to be done. But it was an evening cool enough for imagination, after a week soaked in the sweat of real life and obligation. Time to let go. Time to float into a weekend as the cooler air moved in.