Tag Archives: nature

On the Trail:  My Sneakers & A Nature Walk

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I meant to be quiet on our nature walks.  A walk in the woods should be a meditation, I think.  At least, that’s what I decided today, though it is not my nature to be silent. As I walk I muse on the slogan on my shirt, Arma virumque cano…, “Of arms and the man I sing…” which is the opening of Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid. I try to think of other slogans.

We chat about the acorns and the walnuts – we almost tripped on the walnuts, as usual.  Then we see a strange animal, and wonder if it is a beaver, though it may have been a badger. 

It is fairly quiet, though it it is not a wild park.   It is an urban park, and in summer it is crowded with picnickers, fisherman, and people sprawling by the lake. There are slim trees, scraggy trails, and a paved trail, which we have chosen because it has rained for two weeks, and there’s mud everywhere.

Here’s what I’ve learned about hiking shoes: sneakers are the perfect footwear for almost every occasion. My white sneakers are for the the HD opera and art museums; my black sneakers are for the woods and the rainy days. 

Today I mixed my shoes up, and my white sneakers will never be pristine again. The  black sneakers  don’t show the mud, because they are already crusted with mud, so what’s a little more mud?  “Here’s mud in your eye!” says Hazel in Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde.” This is how Hazel toasts the cleaning lady after she is resurrected from suicide.

What did I see in nature today?   Dozens of monarch butterflies, which are now an endangered species, with their flight patterns disturbed by climate change, so I am thrilled to see them, ghosts from the past, from a time when scientists warned us about climate change, before it had dried up rivers and caused never-ending wildfires. .

We also saw a hawk – there’s always a hawk – they soar, they swoop, they’re beautiful from a distance, but I don’t like the look of them close up.  There were geese on the lake – there are always  geese. And there was a goldfinch, and a Great Horned owl.

At the end of the walk, which came much too soon, I told my Other Half the plot of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, because he had never heard of this masterpiece.  I said off the top of my head that the psychedelic scene is Hesse-esque.” Why did I say this? There’s an academic article lurking in there.

And then we are peaceful and silent on the way home.

No, Really, You Want to Read about Nature!

If you’re in holiday despair, if your industrial-farm turkey didn’t roast properly (the chemicals make it rubbery), if you got the wrong kind of cranberry sauce, there is only one solution:  go live in the woods.

The good news:  Henry David Thoreau did it first.  He lived simply in his cabin by Walden Pond.  “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion,” he writes in Walden.  That seemed profound when I was a young woman.

Nowadays, sitting on a pumpkin sounds very Cinderella.  Was her coach a pumpkin?  I honestly can’t remember.  But sitting on a pumpkin sounds uncomfortable.  How large was this pumpkin?  Did it come in small, medium, and large?  Could you put a velvet cushion on top?

There is a lagoon not far from us, but it is not Walden pond.  It is murky and weedy, and the ducks live there, and if they can, I can.  Except for one thing:  what would my source of drinking water be?  And there you’d be, ice-fishing at the lagoon, and the hikers would give you money, because they’d think you’re a homeless person living in a tent by the lagoon, and they might kindly tell you that there are no fish in the lagoon.

If you pretend to be Thoreau, as opposed to Cinderella, many will condemn you as a social misfit. It’s one thing to go to the ball in a magic pumpkin and enchant a prince-husband, but it’s another to escape the trappings of capitalist society and live off the land, i.e., the lagoon.

On a different note, I recommend Conrad Richter’s 1953 novel, The Light in the Forest, a compassionate novel about a young white boy, raised happily by Indians (Indigenous people) after being captured as a child.  He is very close to his Indian family, but his life is ripped apart when a British edict declares that the Indians must return the captives to their white families.  The story is touching, and very sympathetic to Indigenous culture.  Is it right to take the boy away from his family and culture twice?

Another great book for nature lovers is Louise Rich’s We Took to the Woods (1942), a chronicle of her family’s life in a rickety house – actually a former fishing camp – in the woods in Maine.  Rich takes each season as it comes.  In winter, she and her family are cut off from town for months because of the snow. They stock up on canned goods, chop wood, garden, fish, occasionally hunt game, and attempt to train their affectionate huskies to pull a dog sled.

Here’s an excerpt from We Took to the Woods:

Winter, to look forward to, is a long, dark, dreary time. To live, it’s a time of swirling blizzards and heavenly high blue and white days; of bitter cold and sudden thaws; of hard work outdoors and long, lamp-lit evenings; of frost patterns on the windows and the patterns of deer tracks in the snow. It’s the time you expected to drag intolerably, and once in a while you stop and wonder when the drag is going to begin. Next week, you warn yourself, after we’ve finished doing this job on hand, we’d better be prepared for a siege of boredom. But somehow next week never comes. There’s always something to keep it at bay.

Winter is just starting here. Snow is predicted for tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of your holiday!

The Politics of the Trail

I hate to see July go, though August is beautiful and slightly fallish already: I’ve seen a few crumpled brown leaves, the sumac is red, and the light is softer.

And yet I’ve been on the trail less this year than ever.

This agoraphobia must end, I decided. And so I went out on my bike with a pannier full of water bottles, banana, book, sanitizer, and wipes. Most people are slightly apprehensive, but you can’t wear a mask on a bicycle, or at least I can’t, because I need to breathe deeply. I have been known to try to hold my breath when I pass someone. Now how would that help? I do have a buff, a stretchy scarf you put around your neck and  can pull up over your face if someone looks particularly germy.  (I’m psychic!)

Most trails are wide enough that you can pass people easily, but some people hog the trail, and on one narrow section I turned around and backtracked because a group was spilling all over the place and walking toward me.

The politics of the trail!

I sat down for a snack, but the banana had popped in the pannier. I drank the  water as I read  Marie-Helene Bertino’s experimental novel, Parakeet. In the first chapter, a parakeet flaps around the narrator’s hotel room. Turns out she’s the narrator’s grandmother, trying to warn her against getting married!

Intriguing, yes? But soon it was time to go back and navigate the Covid-19 crowd.

Covid-19 is political:  we knew it, but you can see it more by the behavior on the trails.