Browsed by
Category: landscape

Evening View

Evening View

Comments 0 Comment

Now that we’re in Daylight Savings Time, I can bounce on the trampoline in the daylight, not the darkness. It’s more inhibiting, true. With tree cover still nonexistent this time of year, I have to keep my trampoline dancing moves to a minimum lest neighbors think I’m crazier than they already think I am.

But what daytime bouncing lacks in concealment it makes up for in scenery.

As Copper ran around the yard squeaking his new yellow day-glow ball, I was treated to clear skies, a slow drain of color and finally … this view.

What a way to leave the day!

Name That Path

Name That Path

Comments 0 Comment

A recent walk through the Folkstone woods led me past a shady glade and creek curve where the girls used to play. They called it Brace Yourself. Maybe there was some feat of derring do they had to perform there, walking across the creek on a log or picking up a crawdad. I’m unclear why they gave it that name, but the point is that they did.

Brace Yourself got me thinking about the joy of naming places. I remember doing that when I was a kid. There was the Valley of Eternal Snows — a sheltered cove in the Ware Farm field behind our house, a place where I had once found some dirty snow late in the season.

And then there were the Block-up Boys — not exactly a place, I know. They were the bullies on the street who wouldn’t let me ride my tricycle to the top of the hill. (So there was a place involved, sort of.)

When we name a place we make it our own.  We look at it with fresh eyes; we see it whole. Why do we stop doing this as we get older? Do mortgages and responsibilities drive it away, this penchant for staking imaginative claim to the places we love?

I made a tiny vow right there at Brace Yourself. I decided to start naming the bridges and paths, the springs and glades. Even if no one else ever hears or knows these names — I will.

Mappiness

Mappiness

Comments 0 Comment

In a few minutes I’ll bundle up and take to the streets. It will be my lunch break and I’ll spend it walking in the suburbs. No surprise there. But what is news, at least to me, is how much scientific evidence there is to back up my hobby/exercise/obsession.

In 2010, a British environmental economist named George MacKerron created an app called Mappiness that allowed him to check in with 20,000 volunteers several times a day and ask them what they were doing and how they felt about it.  The data he collected showed that people are significantly happier when they’re outdoors — even when other variables are accounted for.

Great news, right? Unfortunately, he also found that people are indoors or in vehicles 93 percent of the time. So even though we’re happiest outside, we spend most of our time inside.

What to do? Another researcher, Timothy Beatley of the Biophilic Cities Project at the University of Virginia (which I’ve just been reading about and will definitely discuss some day in a separate blog post), says we need daily doses of nature: everything from New York City’s High Line to the little park around the corner. We can’t let the perfect (a hike in Yosemite) be the enemy of the good (a walk around the block).

It’s always tough to parse the value of the walks I take, to figure out how much of their benefit comes from moving through space and how much from the space I’m moving through. All I know is that the woods and trails around my home and the parks I frequent in the city are far more than backdrops; they are mood-enhancing and soul-stirring. They are the stars of the show.


(Thanks to Ellen for sending me the Wall Street Journal article where I learned about this research.)

Moon Shadow

Moon Shadow

Comments 0 Comment

I took the flashlight, but I didn’t use it. The moon was bright enough to light the road and throw shadows on it — dense and hulking where woods meets the road, a more delicate tracery where only a tree or two (and earth’s atmosphere) stood between me and the orb.

The illuminated landscape was like a negative, an inside-out version of the view. Devoid of life and color, a dreamscape in black and white.

I passed no cars until I was on the way home, their harsh, artificial glare a counterpoint to the natural light.

It was like plunging into another world, this early morning walk, like visiting a barren island nation.

October Sky

October Sky

Comments 0 Comment

Out early for a walk this morning, just chilly enough for a light sweatshirt. The skies were clear and bright. I thought, as I often do when faced with the infinite, that I’d like to understand it better.

Not all of it, of course. Just to nibble around the edges of it, to know a little about astronomy, for instance.

Overhead for my walk this morning was one of the dippers, the little one, I think, and also Polaris, the North Star.

What a comfort to walk beneath this canopy of light, to feel both small and enlarged at the same time. Because isn’t that what infinity does for us? Puts us in our place but also connects us with something larger than ourselves.

(Photo: Earthsky.org; title: Homer Hickham)

Milkweed on the Fly

Milkweed on the Fly

Comments 0 Comment

A bushwhacking expedition wasn’t on Sunday’s list of activities, but on the way back from breakfast I noticed a brown Fairfax County Park sign in a place I’d never seen one before, at the intersection of Fox Mill and Waples Mill Roads. We doubled around and pulled into a small lot that used to be in front of a great wall of bamboo.

A man was there weed whacking. He stopped and talked, said he lived nearby and was trying to make the area presentable. He pointed out a barely discernible path through the meadow. Bamboo never totally leaves a place, of course; it just bides its time. For now, though, the little park is walkable.

A quarter mile into the tangle of grasses and weeds, there was a small, clogged pond and a stand of cat tails. Milkweed pods filled the air with their fairy fluff; I tried to photograph each cottony morsel as it flew by.

It was next to impossible, but I had fun trying.

Late Light Walk

Late Light Walk

Comments 0 Comment

It was almost 7 p.m. last night but the air was so fresh and still, so lit up from the inside, that I just had to pull over and walk through it.

Luckily, I was near a Reston path. So I laced up my spare tennis shoes and hit the trail.

I’ve just been reading Annie Dillard (more about her in a later post) and am sorely conscious of how beautifully light can be described.  So let me just say that I felt as I was walking through a painting by Thomas Cole or other Hudson River School painter. I felt that the light was shimmering all around me, that it was bouncing off the trees and the darker shapes and illuminating them, too.

It wasn’t quite as dramatic as these photos (snapped, ironically enough, quite near the Hudson River, on the train trip home night before last) but it had some of this drama.

It was dark by the end of my walk, but that didn’t matter. I was all lit up inside.

Making Waves

Making Waves

Comments 0 Comment

These are crazy days. Buying cases of wine at 9 p.m. Forgetting my lunch.  Making lists of lists.

Still, the mind observes. Even when in crazy mode, the mind is active, laughing at its own craziness and finding the world an interesting place to be.

This morning on the radio, I heard a segment on artificial waves, how a company has been perfecting them, will sell its technology to indoor wave pools, the estates of sheikhs. Few details of this report have remained in my brain, but one phrase did. “We’re carving water,” said the wave creator.

The poetry of that sets the mind to spinning.  An ultimately futile task, one would think. And yet someone makes a living from it.

What do you do? I make waves.

Happy Centennial!

Happy Centennial!

Comments 0 Comment

They are a ridge-top trail along an old mountain. A path winding perilously down a near-sheer canyon wall. A hot walk through the hoodoos in Bryce.

These are just some of the strolls I’ve taken in national parks, which celebrate their one hundredth birthday today.

While it’s wonderful enough just to glimpse the Grand Canyon or Zion or Yellowstone, it’s even better to walk through these places. To inhale the piney air and feel the sting in your calves from trudging up an incline.

National park hikes are some of the most treasured walks I’ve ever taken. And today I think of them, and of all the protected natural beauty that makes them possible. Happy National Parks Centennial!

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Falling Stars

Falling Stars

Comments 0 Comment

The Perseid meteor shower had good press this year. Some reports said the celestial event would produce up to 200 shooting stars an hour. This raised all kinds of hopes and set off visions of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

But this number didn’t take into account the ambient light of the megalopolis, the heavy tree cover and the lateness (earliness?) of the hour.

Still, I managed to see a few streaks of light flash across the late summer sky.The first couple seemed a trick of the eye — a blink, a quick gleaming stitch in the firmament. But the last couple were bonafide star blasts. They illuminated not just the night sky, but all the possibilities it offers.

Not “Starry Night” — but not bad.

(Photo: Wikipedia)