I know people who extol the beauties of fall — the color, the crispness, the end of humidity — but I’m not one of them. To me there’s always a backward glance at this time of year.
I don’t mind the heat, I relish cicada song, and I love the long days that summer brings.
So on the last day of this summer, I’m reveling in the sun that’s trying to peak through the ever-thickening cloud cover, and I’m savoring the adventures — from Seattle to Scotland and all the places in between.
Plants are parched. Streams are struggling. Some might say it’s time to water. I say … it’s time to cross a creek on stepping stones.
I was thinking of a stretch of the Cross County Trail close to my house (though not close enough to walk to, of course), which has thwarted me before because of an almost submerged stone crossing.
Yesterday the water level was low enough to make the crossing easy. And that single detail opened up a world of forest and creek and pasture. Plus one of my favorite sections of the trail, which skirts a bamboo-fringed pond.
Just as low tide reveals a wealth of sea life, shells and sand dollars, low water offers up paths for trekking, vistas for gazing. In other words, possibilities.
Yesterday I found the trail I was looking for. It was tucked away in a corner of the county that adjoins the Fairfax County Parkway and its monolithic soundproof walls.
The path featured several fair-weather stream crossings, but nothing that could scoot below or hang above all that parkway asphalt, as impassable as a raging river.
There was a tunnel under a lesser road, though, a dark enclosure that paralleled a stream. I took that — despite the warning.
Sometimes you have to walk on the wild side. Even in the suburbs.
Yesterday I hiked off in search of a trail I’d heard about over the weekend. It was a path I thought I knew, but after reaching it, I quickly discovered it was just a short cut-through route.
A waste of time? Not really. One good thing about living somewhere a while is knowing approximately where you are, even when you’re turned around.
I knew that if I backtracked up a little hillock I would find a street that connected me with an entire trail system, one that would take me home.
Ninety minutes later, I was relaxing in the hammock.
I was driving down the road, a crowded highway that required my (almost) undivided attention, when Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony came on the radio.
This is the warhorse of all warhorses, the world’s most famous symphony, whose opening notes — dot, dot, dot, daaaaasssshhhh — became associated with victory in World War II, the short, short, short, long of the letter V in Morse code corresponding with Churchill’s two-finger V for victory sign.
It’s not my favorite Beethoven piece. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that would be: The second movement of the Seventh Symphony, which first came to life for me in the basement of the University of Kentucky’s performing arts building? One of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, which I have tortured for decades with my amateur playing? Or maybe the magisterial Ninth Symphony? That’s a logical candidate.
But no. It was his work in toto I considered as I drove, pondering what the world would be like without Beethoven, which is unimaginable. How many other artists have similarly enriched our lives? We all have our lists, whether they contain de Kooning or Flaubert, Springsteen or Brahms. There is an endless supply of artist names to list, of course. I just randomly chose these, except for Brahms, of course.
(Brahms portrait by Hadi Karimi)
For the most part, I write a post, read it over once or twice to check for typos, then pretty much let it go. But today I’ve been making sure I have all the posts I’ve ever written, grouped in months, in PDF files on my computer.
I couldn’t help but read a few as I went along: There was the round-the-world trip of 2016.
And something much smaller: riffing on journalism after seeing the movie “Spotlight,” and remembering how my daughter said the film was “a little slow.” That made me smile.
And then there was the couch sitting in a field in the Rocky Mountains. There’s a story behind that one, as you might imagine.
So often just the single line. Even when I had fever and chills, congestion and headache. But then, two weeks ago, two lines appeared, clear and undeniable. Positive.
I quarantined, masked, rested … and eventually re-emerged.
But the final step remained. Yesterday I swabbed, stirred, waited.
And lo and behold, a single line.
Testing negative never felt so good.
Several days during the trip last month the air was filled with flying fluff. It took a while to determine the source, to realize that the fluff was the down of a thistle, the national flower of Caledonia.
Here’s a perfect example of vacation thinking. Were I at home, I would find the thistle a weed and the fluff frustrating evidence of its spread. But in Scotland, I found it enchanting, winged messengers of hope and beauty.
Watching the gossamer stuff float through a heathered Highland landscape was a magical experience. It brought the Clement Clarke Moore lines to mind:
“He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle/And away they all flew, like the down of a thistle …”
And that’s just what we did — fly away, that is. I miss that magical vacation thinking.
(I saw a lot more heather than thistles.)
I’m going to stay with The Power Broker for this post, too. I realize that most of my comments about the book have been about its weight. But 923 pages into it I can say at least a few words about its content.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is an in-depth portrayal of New York City’s traffic and building czar, Robert Moses, who held sway over the Big Apple for more than three decades, crucial years during which much of the city’s modern infrastructure was shaped.
Moses built parks and dams, bridges and highways. He moved rivers and shorelines, condemned homes and destroyed neighborhoods. He shaped not just New York but all the cities of this country, because New York was held up as a model. And in it, public transportation took a back seat to the automobile. That there was a connection between this deficit and the highways that were clogged with traffic almost immediately after opening was just beginning to be understood in the 1940s and 50s.
The book is also a study of power, how it seduces and changes a person and, by extension, the places over which that person has control. In this meticulously researched account of Moses, author Robert Caro shows young reporters and writers how to tell a big story, one so big that for years it wasn’t understood, let alone written.
It’s for that reason that the book was assigned as summer reading before I entered a graduate journalism program years ago. I bought it then, a used copy for $7.50, but am only now getting around to reading it. The book has been worth the wait — as well as the weight.
(Entrance to the Queens Midtown Tunnel, which Moses tried to block. He disliked tunnels.)
