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A Walking Trifecta

A Walking Trifecta

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I’m filing this under the category of “books and book reviews I wish I’d written” — a single article in yesterday’s print copy of the Washington Post that covered three books on walking — a trifecta of pleasure that has added three tomes to my must-read list.

In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration, by neuroscientist Shane O’Mara, describes the many benefits of walking, most of which I know but all of which I love hearing about again: how it helps protect heart and lungs and even builds new cells in the hippocampus.  

In First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human, paleontologist Jeremy DeSilva explains the importance of bipedalism to human exploration, how it made possible the longer legs and shoes that have taken us to colder climes and, ultimately, even the moon.

Finally, the reviewer, Sibbie O’Sullivan, discusses Healing Trees: A Pocket Guide to Forest Bathing, which explores the Japanese concept of shinrin-yoku, immersing oneself in nature:

“Every page of ‘Healing Trees’ reminds us how separated from the world, from nature, from the trees, we’ve become,” writes O’Sullivan, who injects herself beautifully into the essay by describing her own walking, falling and resultant knee surgery. “Too often we take walking for granted,” she writes, “but we shouldn’t.” 

From the Top

From the Top

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It’s been two weeks since we returned from our Northwest jaunt, and I often catch myself looking through photographs when I have a spare minute. Which means that I’ve noticed trends.

For instance, I was often pointing my phone camera at flowers: roses, rhododendrons, formal gardens, cottage gardens. You would think I have no blossoms whatsoever at home, which is not the case. 

But also, whenever possible, I snapped photos from ridges and hilltops. Luckily, both Portland and Seattle cooperated, providing expansive views where I least expected them, like the one above — which appeared out of nowhere on a walk — and others (like the one below) where I huffed and puffed to reach it.

Reliving these vistas now, I feel like chucking it all and buying a piece of land in the Shenandoah. It can be small, it can be humble — all it needs is a view. 

A Walker on the River

A Walker on the River

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After days pounding asphalt and concrete, we had the luxury of a few hours on the water, where legs are for the most part irrelevant. We left the floating home mid-afternoon for a slow cruise on the Multnomah Channel, a tributary of the Willamette.  

How calm it all was, how evenly the ripples flowed from our wake. 

We cruised under the Sauvie Island Bridge, passed sailboats and motorboats and a contraption that looked like an elliptical on water. There was an osprey nest off our starboard side and an abandoned restaurant farther down. Mostly there was sun and stillness and companionship. When we landed, the light was golden.

A Constant

A Constant

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Morning on the Hunter’s Woods Trail: Mozart in my ears, details in my brain, details I hoped would filter away like a dusting of snow through trampoline mesh. And the rhythm of footfall did clarify the day; it reminded me of what is most important, which is to live fully when and where we are.

I was aided in this by the appearance of wildlife: first, a fox sauntering down the trail ahead of me and then, on the drive home, a wild turkey beside the road, bobbing its head as it fled into the woods.  

The critters pulled me into the present and away from the fact that this is a departure day, which is not nearly as nice as an arrival day. 

But the warmth is finally here, and the day is as perfect in its way as the cold, windy Thursday that brought her here. Both days are required, one for coming, the other for going — with the walks a constant between the two. 

Blue Sky

Blue Sky

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In group meditation, we are visualizing creativity as blue sky and a spark of clear spacious light that expands and grows until it covers the universe. 

This is easier said than done. Into the mind comes the grocery list, the calendar, the need to notify team members that I’m off today. Blue sky vanishes behind clouds of my own silly making, which is what it always does. Because clouds are almost all of my own making. 

But today I’m stepping away from calendar and duties, hoping to spend as much time as possible outside, under the real sky, which is, as it turns out, mostly blue today.

Open-Door Policy

Open-Door Policy

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It’s a drizzly morning filled with bird song. Water beads on the just-sprouting branches of the climbing rose and small puddles collect on the aging deck floor. 

I sit on the couch just inside the back door, which is open to the moisture and the song, which matches the morning in its timbre and intensity.

It’s often like this in the warm or even warmish months: back door open to breeze and heat and whatever else is out there. That we’ve had mice and snakes and an occasional bird is part of the package. I’ll accept them if it brings us closer to the landscape. It’s my own open-door policy.

(The only open-door shot I could find is of the front door. It’s often open too, but it has a storm door.)

Up in a Tree

Up in a Tree

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Oh, how I love to climb up in a tree
Up in the air so blue
I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a guy could do
Scaling the trunk and sawing the branch
Till I can see all ’round
Hoping I’m belted and harnessed all right
So they’ll catch me if I fall down!
Till I get back to the Earth again
Back where the chipper chips
The homeowners cheer when I’m in the clear
Don’t they know, I never slip?!
(With apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson.) 

Winter Sight

Winter Sight

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As seasons pass, dimensions change and distances shrink. The greenery that hemmed us in only last month has thinned and drooped. Leaves have shriveled and blown away. What was once a screen is now an open book.

We hear about winter light, the low-slanting sun, but not as much about winter sight.

My woods walks lately reveal shiny new objects: small metal discs hammered into tree bark. Some trees have been tagged recently because the metal gleams and the discs swing freely on their nails. The older discs have dimmed and dulled; some you can hardly see because they have been swallowed up by bark. The trees have grown around them. Eventually those markers will seem little more than a metal eye.

While these older markers have been there all along, I saw them as if for the first time over the weekend. It was the winter landscape that drew my eyes to them, the same bare expanse that lets us glimpse a hidden stream or the outline of a hill, once shrouded in green. It is winter sight.

Turning Back

Turning Back

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A hike yesterday on less familiar ground, light slanting low from the late-afternoon sun. Only a short way down the trail came a fast-moving stream and what was billed as a “rock crossing” on the map but which was in fact a few slick stepping stones spread far apart and barely peaking their razor-thin edges above the rushing water. 

The first few stones of the crossing looked treacherous but feasible. If they weren’t so moss-slicked I could see getting across them. But then I’d be in the middle of the creek, and, from what I could tell, stranded. I could see only the barest, thinnest edges to the mostly submerged rest of the stone crossing. 

Feeling distinctly wimpy, I turned back. I don’t like turning back; it goes against my nature. So I found a side path to explore. It followed the stream for a few minutes, close enough to glimpse an ancient roadbed (see above), which seemed part of an old watercourse. 

I felt better, realizing that waterworks would have remained hidden had we taken the original crossing. And this morning, reading a description of this section of the Cross-County Trail, I felt even better about turning back. 

It describes a “stone crossing that is only usable during the low to normal stages of the creek.” The gurgling of the stream, its breadth and raucous rippling, made it clear that the creek was at a high stage creek, not low to normal.  

Perhaps I wasn’t as cowardly as I originally thought. Only prudent, even a bit adventurous. Ah, that’s better. 

The Summer Book

The Summer Book

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I picked up Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book because it showed up in a list of books that feature grandparents. There are precious few of these, I’ve noticed. 

Jansson’s Grandmother (she’s given no other name) is crotchety and wise and foolish and loving. She smokes cigarettes and breaks into a neighbor’s house. No cookie-baking for this grandma. She’s a renegade. But she also understands her granddaughter Sophia, pushes her and puts her in situations where she is bound to succeed. 

Grandmother also levels with herself and with others (when she’s not lying, that is). Here she is after the break-in: 

“My dear child,” said Grandmother impatiently [to Sophia], “every human being has to make his own mistakes.” … Sometimes people never saw things clearly until it was too late and they no longer had the strength to start again. Or else they forgot their idea along the way and didn’t even realize that they had forgotten.”

That’s the kind of gem Jansson strews about for us through the pages of this slim and lovely book, all of it amidst a natural world (an island in the Gulf of Finland) that is as beautiful as it is dangerous.