Category: Outdoors

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Walking Evening Into Dusk

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My days have felt focused and scattered, frenetic and flattened, too short and too long.  Trying to hang on to my balance in the swirl of events I’ve been living through lately, I’ve found walking the evening into dusk and then darkness has helped a lot.  I grind through the day getting what must be done done, or whacking away at some item on the long list of things I thought would have been done long ago, but aren’t.  Suddenly the day is almost over and a walk lit by the last of the light has been seeming just right.

A favorite track crosses the hay field at the top of Harmony Hill, then follows a trail into Northwood Meadows State Park, making a loop around the pond.  Yesterday the evening light turned rose as the clouds picked up color from the setting sun and the pine needles along the trail fired into a deep orange.  The pond reflected the changing light, from pink to gray to the last of the day’s blue.  Walking back to the car the trees were black and the path was white, drawing my attention to exactly where it should be, right there, right then, right now.

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Walking In the Woods

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Walking In The Woods

We have been walking in the woods since we were children,
we never stopped, we can see the forest, now our son
tells me to slow down, there’s no hurry anymore,
you are already dead, he runs. Water drops downhill,
a stone bridge at the top of the gorge, ice and snow still,
goblets of ice hanging from branches that cross a small fall,
sharp angles of rocks, going to the river. I find dry leaves
in a sunny spot above the water, a cloud shadow and the brook
is black and white, gold glint gone, then gold again, the cloud
is in everything, at the river, a rock bench by a pool under cliffs,
snow shards, a flurry in a squall, a bank of river stones.

From The Truth About Death

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Coincidental Conversations

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Three times in the last week I’ve stumbled into wonderful conversations with people I didn’t know before we started talking, and found much to affirm the almost constant swirl in my own head about what I’m doing with my life right now, what I think I should be doing, what I could do better if I’m not doing things exactly right or according to some indiscernible grand plan, and how I might be doing something different if that’s what I want.  Or think?

Sound confusing?  It is, but the conversations helped.  The first was with a long ago friend of David’s, at a birthday party for another long ago friend.  A group of people who had either lived in or been connected to a large communal household in the Boston area 40 years ago had gathered for the celebration, and David and I had a long talk with Barbara, another artist, trying to understand what role art and painting plays in her life.  Right now she’s not interested in “having a show,” painting for the purpose of selling her work, or even painting for anyone else.  Instead, she’s interested in finding her voice as a painter, and trying to explore and understand the role of creating beauty as a primary purpose of art.

As she talked, I could feel her thoughts resonating with ideas of my own I hadn’t even articulated to myself.  Why do I want to write?  Why aren’t I writing more?  Who am I writing for?  Is it enough just to write when I want, however I want, for whatever reason?  Does ambition about getting published and read and recognized help in the writing process, or hinder it?  And do I even care about any of that?  Talking to Barbara helped all these questions come to the forefront, and I’m far from answering them, but I know this is a conversation I want to keep having, however I can fit that into my life.

On Tuesday, with clear days and clear calendars ahead of us, David and I went north to the White Mountains for a couple of days.  We hiked first up Mt. Madison and spent the night at the Madison Spring Hut, allowing us to stay above tree line on the grand Presidential ridge.   The Appalachian Mountain Club huts provide sleeping bunks and hearty meals to hikers at high elevation locations, making staying in the mountains a truly in-the-mountains experience.

The night at the hut gave David and me time to summit both Madison and Adams, two of the tallest mountains in New Hampshire, and the chance to share dinner and breakfast with two interesting people, extending our own dialogue, both internal and between us, about what we’re doing, what we want to do, what we should do and how do we fashion our lives in the absence of huge jobs and the presence of significant creative urges.

Francois is from outside Montreal, and was on a multi-day hike, peak-bagging, and staying in shape for his central goal, which is to climb the highest peak on each continent. He’s already done 4, including getting to the summit of Everest last May.  He’s driven by a singular goal, focused, direct and intent.  Talking to him about his adventures was wonderful, because he seems to live with very few questions about what he’s doing.  When we asked him why he’s climbing the highest mountains in the world his answer was simple.  He loves it, he loves mountains, he loves the process and opportunity for success.

We also spent a lot of time talking to Cathy, the mother of one of the hut crew members, there to visit and spend time with her daughter in the mountains. Cathy is between major projects at this point, her children grown and starting out in their own lives, her own career as a landscape architect on hold for now.  She’s interested in writing, community design, food security, urban garden planning, and her family.  Talking to her was, again, like talking to myself.  What is this later life I’m experiencing for?  What’s the best use of whatever time I have left, where should I put my focus?  What am I doing?

One thing I’m doing is finding interesting people who are happy to talk about what they’re doing, whether they have a clear answer to why they’re doing what they’re doing or what it means, or they don’t.  Because it’s really all the same, isn’t it?  We’re here and we’re doing the best we can.

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As Good As It Gets

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Yesterday was a perfect summer day.  David and I have been mostly engaged in activities that use our upper bodies since our return from that 13-day-lower-body-workout-test of walking close to 200 miles in 13 days.  We’ve been swimming and kayaking, not only because it was time to give our legs a rest, but also because it was so hot in the week after we returned home there was little energy left in me after doing whatever needed doing in the garden each day except for something cooling.

Yesterday we woke up in Scituate, Massachusetts, where I grew up, in the house where I grew up.  My sister Jeanne and her husband John were visiting from Virginia, and my sister Meg and her husband John (my three brothers-in-law are all named John or Jon; at one point early in our relationship David said to me, “Okay, I guess I need to change my name.”) live in the next town and offered to take us all sailing yesterday morning.

We met on the dock at the Yacht Club, where I spent my summers from the age of 9 until I was old enough to be working and giving sailing lessons, rather than taking them.  A school of small fish were “kippering” around the dock, flashing in the clear sunshine, the brightest, driest, coolest summer day we’ve had for weeks.  Outside Scituate Harbor we could see a line of small, silver-white clouds sitting low along the horizon in every direction, like a ring of good weather goddesses.  There wasn’t much wind, so we headed back into the harbor, out of the chop on the ocean, and “ghosted” around among the thickly moored boats of every type and size.

After lunch on the Club deck overlooking the brilliant day unfolding over the harbor, David and I took the kayaks out and headed into the inner harbor, slipped under a causeway bridge, and paddled through the marshes behind Peggoty Beach.  We watched a cormorant surface two feet in front of our boats and swallow the small fish in its beak.  We wound through the marsh grasses, birds flitting into holes of the steep mud banks as they rose out of the water in the lowering tide.

As we made our way back to the small harbor beach where we’d put in the kayaks, I stopped to watch the mass of boats lightly lifting and rocking in the water, the line of houses on the shore holding steady, the low clouds still sitting like beacons of good fortune on the horizon.

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Art Attack

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Just about four years ago, in our first months together, David and I planned an art trip, an “art attack,” my friend Andi called it.  We were going to see a couple of exhibitions at the MFA in Boston, then drive to the Hudson River Valley to visit Storm King Art Center, and then come home through western Massachusetts, visiting the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and MASS MoCA in North Adams.  We got to all the museums, but it was a very rainy weekend and we decided to wait for better weather to visit Storm King.

We finally got there this week.  Planning our drive back to NH from Knoxville, we decided to treat ourselves and take our time to get home, staying in some lovely spots on the way.  The first night we stayed at the Hotel Strasburg, in the Shenandoah Valley, a wonderful historic inn full of antiques, paintings, and Victorian decor.  It was a welcome alternative to the big box hotels along interstates.

In planning our route home, David had realized we could visit Storm King, spending a night in another beautiful valley.  Storm King was as astonishing and inspiring as we’d expected.  Covering over 500 acres, the Art Center is full of outdoor sculptures situated on the beautiful grounds in ways that change perspective whether you’re looking at a piece from an open field, a picnic bench, walking one of the long allees (an allee is a planting of trees to form a long walkway; at Storm King there are 200 hundred pin oaks in one, 40 maples in another) or standing on the hill that holds the museum building.  Over an afternoon and morning of glorious weather, David and I took in the grand Mark di Suvero sculptures that dominate the fields, the stunning David Smith collection on the lawn by the museum building, the snaking walls built by Andy Goldsworthy, the constantly waving rods by Robert Murray, the contrasting color and form of mown lawn against tall native grasses, the sloping lines of distant mountains against the hills of the park, the beauty and grandeur of it all adding to the high we were already carrying home from the wedding.

The night after we left Storm King, at dinner, we started talking about our ideas for creating sculptures in the land around our house.  David has been thinking about outdoor art pieces for months; Storm King got me thinking about incorporating sculptural elements in my garden.  Wherever our trip home leads us in our art, it led us to a happy journey home.  And here we are.

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Deluge

David and I are in Tennessee, helping Sam and Marianna with wedding prep.  Yesterday we felt on top of enough of the many many many details we’re all managing (putting on a party for almost 200 people takes a lot of detail management!) to go for another pre-England Coast to Coast training walk.  We headed for Haw Ridge Park, right outside of Knoxville, because “it’s full of trails,” as Sam said.

A bit too full.  We found our way to the water along the edge of the big peninsula that makes the park, and had a pleasant hike, eventually coming to a couple of picnic benches out on a spit of land.  By then it was raining lightly, but it was dry under the trees and I took out my iPhone to check my exercise app and see how far we’d walked, and looked at the map function to see where we were.  We decided to walk a bit further along the water, then look for a trail to cut back across the middle of the peninsula to the car.

Then it started to pour.  Really pour.  And one trail looked like another, and there were a lot, and they all seemed to curve and twist and soon it was impossible for us to figure out where we were going.  Occasionally we’d stop, I’d take my iPhone out of my new gore tex jacket it was folded into inside my pack, David would hold the pack over my head to block the rain so I could look at my phone without getting it wet, and we kept finding ourselves in the same circle.  Not once, or twice, but three times we went in the same circle.

By now we were drenched, it was getting late, and we realized we were really quite lost. In one spot where we stopped to check the phone, there was a painted turtle on the path.  After we looked at the phone, I looked back for the turtle, which had been a couple of feet behind us.  It wasn’t there.  I looked down at our feet and it was trying to burrow under David’s boot, it’s head butting up against the black sole.

David stepped back carefully from the turtle, I put on my gore tex jacket and put my iPhone in my pocket so I could pull it out and check where we were going on the exercise app more frequently, and eventually could tell by the moving blue ball on the map that we’d found a path under the power lines that would eventually lead us out of the woods.  We got back to Sam and Marianna’s house drenched, muddy and hungry and feeling ready for whatever kind of weather and twisting trails England might dish up.

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Ridge Driving

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I pulled over into a small gravel turn off by a bridge, heading south on Rte. 340 in eastern Virginia.  David’s back needed a break after a good chunk of the day spent driving, and it was time to reconnoiter.  We’d gotten to the Shenandoah Valley later than we’d hoped (escaping the snare of traffic getting out of the NYC area to the southeast is never as easy or as fast as one hopes), and our plan to drive along the Shenandoah River at the head of the valley, then to go up on Skyline Drive for a leg of our trip before heading back to the interstate to spend the night, was looking tough to pull off.  We were hungry and it was going to start getting dark soon.

“Let’s just go up on the Skyline Drive for a bit to this point on the map,” I said, pointing to a dot marked Skyland.  “If we need to turn around, we can do it there.”  Driving through the entrance gate to Shenandoah National Park, which encompasses the Skyline Drive, we saw a posted sign naming the places to eat and sleep and camp along the road.  When we got to Skyland, we found a restaurant with a wall of windows looking out over the valley, the sun turning orange as it began to sink into the western ridge.  There was also a room available, with the same broad view of the  valley.  Rather than driving out of the mountains back to Interstate 81 to spend the night, we slept at Skyland Resort, at 3600 feet.

The next morning we woke to a view of mist hugging the snakes of the river below.  We did a short hike to the rocky summit of Stony Face Mountain, then continued to drive along Skyline Drive, almost all of which is above 3,000 feet.  The views were stunning.  In Waynesboro, Skyline Drive dips down into a gap and becomes the Blue Ridge Parkway, which we drove for the first 70 miles.  Again, stunning views, as the road swept back and forth and twirled around the ridge, views to the west, then views to the east.  Blooming mountain laurel made a pink hedge along some parts of the road, and at higher elevations there were trees of rhododendron of a deeper, almost fluorescent pink.  At one point we drove through a high meadow, with rolling fields and a view of a grand house sitting on a crest of land.

When we finally made our way back to the interstate to finish the drive to Knoxville, we agreed we want to finish driving all of Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway sometime in the next five years.  Driving a ridge is a treat we’ll give ourselves again.

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The Trail to the Cairns

If you walk out Canterbury Road from my house it turns into an old woods road, eventually petering out.  It used to be the way to Canterbury, and at a party at a neighbor’s house decades ago, a man from Canterbury told me he used to ride his horse from his house to my neighbor’s house on that road.  Many many years ago.

Eric and I walked the road often.  It rises slightly from my house, passes an old cemetery bordered by dairy pastures, goes back down hill, back up through grand old maples, down and up and down again many times as it passes houses and then heads into the woods, passes a junction with two other old roads, then about two miles from the house loses its definition.  There’s a large glacial erratic that sits along the road side just about where the road becomes indistinguishable from the ramble of woods around it, and that’s where Eric and I would stop.  Sometimes we’d hang out for a while, just happy to be in the woods.  It was our turning back point.

After Eric died, I started building cairns on the big rocks, a monument to Eric.  I walked out there often in the first two years after he died, adding to the cairns each time I went.  Then in July 2008 a tornado ripped through Northwood and laid a wide swath of downed trees and bramble and jumbled branches across the road, about a quarter mile short of the cairn rock.  I tried walking around it once shortly after the tornado, but the road was perpendicular to the tornado’s path, so the mess of downed trees went on for as far as I tried to walk around it.  I got lost.

After the hurricane, my neighbor who owns the land told me he planned to clear the tornado damage and open the road again.  I’ve been walking or snowshoeing or skiing out to the point of the tornado path for almost four years, hoping to find the road reopened.  When David and I walked out the road on Tuesday morning, our neighbor was working on moving and cutting the trees.  “It should be done in the next couple of days,” he said.  Today we walked out there again, and there were two young men, still clearing the last of the thick white pines that were the main trees to come down in the face of the tornado.  “We should be done by the end of today,” one of them told us.

But there was enough cleared for us to get through this morning.  I was so happy to get back to that rock, to those cairns, happy to pick up the few rocks that had fallen and put them back on top of one of the three piles.  Joy can be so simple.  A blocked path in the woods, open again.  Cairns at a turn around point, on random rock, rock I can reach.

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Walking, A Lot of Walking

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David and I are planning to walk across England this summer with a group of friends.  We’ll be doing Wainwright’s Walk,  a coast to coast, 192 mile path in Northern England.  To get ready for two weeks of walking between 10 and 25 miles a day, David and I have started training by doing long walks, so far walks that we can start out our door.

Yesterday we walked up roads to the top of Blake’s Hill, a rise to the south of our house.  From there we took a five-mile hiking trail created by the Northwood Area Land Management Collaborative, or NALMC, a local organization “working together across our stone walls.”  NALMC was created in part through inspiration from Aldo Leopold, a pioneer in the conservation movement and a proponent of a  “land ethic,” a holistic consideration of our actions as humans on the entire system of the environment, not just the land itself but all the animals and plants connected to it.

Getting ready for the walk, I pulled out an article I’d saved from the local free paper that announced the opening of the trail, along with a map.  It was dated July, 2008.  I’ve been waiting a long time to hike this trail.

I wasn’t disappointed.  The trail crosses beautiful open fields of Harmony Hill Farm then crosses into Northwood Meadows State Park.  The open fields rise up and down, then the trail passes through pines and hardwoods, loops around Betty Meadow Pond to the main road of the State Park, then finishes on old Mountain Road, crossing over a stream that flows out of the head waters of the Lamprey River.

When we got back to our house we had logged almost 10 miles.  I was happy to sit in the sun on the porch and enjoy a beer, getting ready for this same sequence three months from now in England.

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More Moon

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As we walked up the old wood’s road towards the beaver pond, a stream of warm air came up over us.  “Where did that come from?” Alison said and she and I backed up and tried walking into that spot again, to see if we could figure out where the warmth was coming from.  We couldn’t, but as we made our way along the new trail to the pond, the full moon through thin clouds lighting our way, more warm winds blew over us.  It felt like spring washing in.

The mild night grew brighter and brighter, as the moon got above the clouds.  At the beaver pond the moon was high above the trees and the Neville Peak ridge to our east, reflecting off the soft ice.  John identified Mars sitting to the left of the moon and we sat and walked around and chatted and delighted in being outdoors on a warm night, in a bowl of silver light.