The Road
“I dream of journeys repeatedly/…The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone/… Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, —/ One learned of the eternal/…Once I was something like this, mindless,/ Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar/…I learned not to fear infinity/…The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow/…The lost self changes/…All finite things reveal infinitude…”
— Theodore Roethke, “The Far Field”
Never — in all of my life — have I ever regretted a walk in the woods. And yet, these days, I find it harder to find time to leave behind my obligations and various projects, and enter this quieter space, engage a slower pace.
Although I consciously limit my driving time and distances, I still spend more minutes and miles behind the steering wheel than I wish. I am hesitant to visit some of my favorite trailheads. Queasiness about burning petrol or annihilating road-crossing wildlife is hard for me to quell.
Thankfully many of my secret haunts are close-by, rarely requiring me to shift past third gear to get there. The odometer barely adds twenty miles roundtrip. Totally doable for a soul who prefers foot speed.
Despite a nagging to-do list this past weekend, I decided to explore a new — to me — stretch of forest and swampland. I’d driven past the turnoff to the dead-end gravel strip innumerable times, finally scouting the area briefly last deer season. A local land trust maintains several hundred acres and a few miles of trails here.
I backed the truck into a recently blocked-off logging yard at the edge of the gravel road, and was immediately welcomed with the trance-inducing song of a winter wren and the zoo-zoo-zoooo-zoooo-zee notes from a black-throated-green warbler. The sky was overcast, the air somewhat humid, and the mosquitoes were out in full force.
May is a magical time of year. Flowers bejewel the tips of countless trees, shrubs, and myriad herbaceous perennials. Lush foliage is alive with the enthusiastic vocalizations of songbirds, many of which have travelled great distances from South and Central America — here only briefly before continuing further north to rear young. One’s neck is perpetually achy from gazing into the canopy hoping for even a millisecond glimpse of a reclusive warbler.
Without specific or otherwise strategic planning, I decided to bushwhack along the edge of the wetland, then cut back to the road. A well-worn hoof path paralleled the backwater. Before long I found fresh deer spoor, and ten minutes later heard an alarm snort from the edge of a beaver dam. As I continued south, I caught movement on the far side of the brook, and quickly raised my binoculars in time to see a buck, his antlers velvet nubs of new growth.
Aside from the hum of the blood-sucking insects and an occasional Logan-bound jet, the woods were blessedly quiet. Midday stretched into early afternoon, and the birdsong became less frequent. Only the gurgle of running water and the muffled footfall of my boots on pine-needled ground echoed in my ears. I stopped to savor the delicate blooms that seemed to grace every square inch along the forest floor.
After I returned to the road, I scuffled along for a short while, then picked up a blue-blazed trail that led up a low ridge. The hill crested into a dark grove of hemlocks. Blackburnian warblers whistled their buzzy tune high in the conifers’ crowns.
The trail headed downslope, toward a faintly strumming brook. Though some pressure-treated timbers had been intentionally stashed by the edge of the trail, the land trust had not yet constructed a foot bridge, and I relished the challenge of a slippery crossing, using the few exposed rocks and old limbs to keep my feet out of the cold water.
Eight-tenths-of-a-mile later I found myself suddenly perched above a steep ravine filled with yellow birch, including an old-growth matriarch, her bark plated like armor. I scampered down a narrow path to the brook. Cascading over a terrace of ledge, the rushing water had sculpted the rock smooth. Several small basins were filled with foamy bubbles.
As I climbed back up to the top of the ridge, patches of blue sky revealed themselves to the north, and before long the sun emerged, inviting a tiger swallowtail butterfly out of hiding. I was surprised, but nevertheless happy, to hear the nasally mumbling of a lone red-breasted nuthatch in a copse of evergreens. These diminutive tree-scalers usually breed further north, but there are occasional pairs that reside locally year-round. I saw two more before I reached trail’s end and the stoney track again.
I was not content to end my hike. The sun was warm and vibrant, and more butterflies basked and flitted along the gravel’s muddy margin. I decided to poke along further, and noticed an unmarked, though obvious pathway at a bend in the road.
Several hundred yards in, I realized I was walking atop faded macadam, the yellow-painted centerline still visible in patches where wind had blown away the accumulated leaf litter from many previous autumns. A disintegrating section of concrete guardrail posts and braided wire still clung to the edge of a steep embankment, and some of the trees which lined the road had huge trunks.
Nature was slowly healing this intrusion. A handful of miniature dragons — red efts — coursed this route, and I carefully avoided crushing them. As elated and encouraged as I was to see the woods reclaiming this spot, a strange, uneasy feeling welled up within me too.
Though hard to describe, the sensation felt like stumbling upon a cellar hole in the heart of mature woodland. The mind attempts to picture what the house and surrounding countryside looked like two hundred years ago, and strains to imagine the lives of the people who resided there. One is left humbled, bluntly reminded about the transience of things and how tentative and fragile even our most vaunted creations are.
This forgotten stretch surely harbors ghosts. Indeed, someone had recently zipped through on an ATV, ripping up moss and forest duff while revving through the straightaway. I didn’t linger long. Earlier in my walk I had picked up a beaver-felled beech sapling, each end tapered to a razor point by the rodent’s incisors, and I felt somewhat reassured.
Back in the sun, feet on coarse-grained gravel, I was caught between eras, between worlds. As I slowly strolled alongside a pocket wetland on the way back to the truck, a northern waterthrush beamed its refrain from the shadow-dappled forest. I happened to look over my shoulder and lock onto a wild calla. The white flower blazed against the dark water like Jupiter drifting through the bottomless depths of the cosmos.
Stefan, you are absolutely amazing and are a true advocate for mindfulness and being in the moment, your father is so proud and Im sure you heard him in the wind. james