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Category: landscape

Catch a Falling Star

Catch a Falling Star

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Who knew a comet could be lassoed and landed? Who knew a comet could be stalked and studied, pursued and parsed, its every movement charted and filed, honed to such precision that its whereabouts could be predicted with certainty 300 million miles from earth?

A comet has always seemed a quicksilver thing to me. More light than substance, even though I know it has rock at its core.

Now this rock hurtling through space — the ultimate moving target — has become a laboratory. It may yield the secrets of our solar system, the scientists tell us. It is a “cosmological dream,” the Washington Post says.

A dream not just for cosmologists, I’d say, but for us all.


(Photo: Curiousread.com)

The Deer Hunter

The Deer Hunter

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I had seen warning signs like this one along the trail for months — “Archery Program in Process.” But until last weekend I had never seen a deer hunter. He was decked out in camouflage and his face was smudged with paint. If he had been in a tree stand I would not have seen him.

But he was on a trail and I was, too. We passed each other, exchanged brief hellos. He held an elaborate bow, nothing like what I remember as a child. It was all metal and wires. It meant business. And he did, too. If I’d had more time to prepare myself I might have asked him to pose for a photo. But he was in a hurry and did not look happy. He was not dragging a six-point buck behind him.

I curse the deer that gobble up the daylilies and scrape the bark off the Kwanzan cherry. I think of them not as Bambi but as Super Rat. I wish they were gone — all but one or two I could spot across a sylvan glade once or twice a year.

But the idea of this guy up in a tree looking for movement, scanning the woods with his high-powered scope — well, frankly, it creeps me out. So I gave the deer hunter a wide berth — and I shivered as he passed.

Cutting My Losses

Cutting My Losses

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The walks I’ve been taking lately on the Cross-County Trail are not without their lessons, and one of the foremost is learning to recognize when I’m lost. The trail is well marked — most of the time — but on Saturday there was a stone crossing, a sudden turn and — voila! — I was in uncharted territory.

There was a path, of course, but there are many paths in the woods. Some are barely perceptible, the width of a deer (and given the skinny deer we have in Fairfax County, that’s not very wide); others are broad but lead in the wrong direction. The latter is what I was dealing with Saturday. It could have been the Cross-County Trail — except that it wasn’t.

When I’d walked for a while without noticing the distinctive CCT marker, I turned around and retraced my steps. There was a trail that went off to the left, but it was rockier and less cleared than I was used to — probably a dead end. There was another possibility, but it looped back onto the path I was on. I walked all the way back to the steppingstones before I found my error — and it was a big one — turning the wrong direction after I crossed the creek.

Once righted I could immediately tell the difference. The path was sure and springy beneath my feet. I had cut my losses quickly. I was on my way.

How We Learn About Meadows

How We Learn About Meadows

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On Sunday’s walk I passed an informational display telling me what a meadow is, why a meadow is
important. How sad that we have to learn about meadows from a sign! How much
better to learn about them from the burrs in your socks, the poison ivy on
your ankles and the sunburn on your shoulders.
I grew up in savannah land — bald, barely treed land where
meadows ruled. I learned to treasure the shady tree line around the edges of fields and the majesty of the lone burr oak. I
learned first-hand  the loud racket of meadows — cicadas chanting,
grasshoppers buzzing — but also the quiet heart at their center and how their beauty is best set off by the
presence of a grazing cow or thoroughbred.
 But mostly, I learned my way around meadows by tramping through them, by looking out at them from fence rows, or by harvesting them, collecting goldenrod, Queen Anne’s Lace and Joe Pye Weed. So when I came across this meadow sign on Sunday, I snapped a shot — but I made sure that there was a lot of meadow in the picture too.
Hidden Pond

Hidden Pond

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Today I walked down an old section of Hunter’s Valley Road to twin stone pillars flanking a trail. A few hundred feet down a muddy path I came to a grove of bamboo so thick that light barely penetrated the thicket. It rained hard last night and everything was drenched. Moisture beaded up at the ends of the bamboo fronds and dripped on me as I shoved my way through the foliage.

Once into the enclosure I marveled at the space. A pond, completely hidden from view, surrounded on three sides by bamboo and on the other by banked rows of rhododendrons and azaleas. Fallen leaves and lily pads dotted the surface, and the great shaggy bamboo, weighted by water, hung its head in the pool.

What is it about a hidden garden we find so appealing? Is it the incongruity of something outside and in the open but still out of sight? Or is it the feeling that it gives us, one of enclosure and safety. Whatever the explanation, the place had a magical effect on me; it calmed me, slowed me, made me want to stay.

Walking to the Potomac

Walking to the Potomac

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Yesterday a hike from Colvin’s Run Mill to the Potomac River, eight miles round trip on the Cross-County Trail. The river is the trail’s northern terminus and you have to work a little to get there. Floods have taken out part of the gravel walk along the stream and there’s a stretch where you must clamber over rocks or turn back. Combine that with two fair-weather creek crossings and I used up my courage quotient for the day.

The destination was worth it, though, walking along the roiling waters of Difficult Run as it makes its way to the river, plunging and skipping over rocks, through channels narrow and deep. (Hard to believe it’s related to the rivulet that meanders through my neighborhood.)

And then coming finally to the Potomac, the orange and yellow kayaks glimpsed through the trees, Maryland on the other side. The stateliness and otherness of a river. And a walk that made the destination matter.

Rain Power

Rain Power

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I don’t love the rain but I do appreciate its force and manner, the way it reminds us of elemental things, of topography, for instance.

My neighborhood is laced with the tributaries of Little Difficult Run, and when showers are heavy these timid trickles become raging torrents. I’ve seen bridges lifted off their moorings and deposited downstream. I’ve seen small lakes form as creeks flood their banks and become rivers. I’ve seen trees topple, their roots torn from rain-loosened soil.

Today’s deluge is not enough for that. But it’s enough to make me remember.

(Before the storm.)

A Little Enchanted

A Little Enchanted

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Like many children, especially now grown-up ones, I spent hours reading fairy tales. I don’t remember special favorites, only the joy I knew at the covers of the books, some of them still vivid in memory. Those stories took me to another shore, and then, when it was time to come home, they deposited me safely back again.

I know there are theories of why fairy tales are good for children, that they allow kids to face fears and work out complex feelings. But over the weekend I read the best explanation yet of what fairy tales meant to me. It comes from an essay by C.S. Lewis:

“Fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

So here’s to the real woods I walk in that will always be touched with magic, and here’s to the magic of this lovely explanation why.

Canopy Walk

Canopy Walk

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As walks go, this was a short one, only about 80 feet. But it was 25 feet above ground — and it swayed as I moved. Up there amidst the live oaks and cabbage palms, I was not just in the foliage but of it.

Florida’s Myakka River Canopy Walk was modeled on canopy walks in the South American rain forests. It’s humble and natural and sturdily built (or at least I pretended that it was).

A 76-foot observation tower on one end let me climb up through the trees to glimpse a panorama of forest and river. I was above the canopy rather than under it.

My knees quivered and I thought about the fear that comes not just from height but from exposure. I felt a kinship with creatures that hide under rocks or brush.

Enclosure is safe. Exposure is dangerous — and exhilarating.

Beach Traffic

Beach Traffic

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Foot traffic on a beach goes two directions— up and down along the strand and back and forth from towel to surf.

When I walk the beach I take the former. I’m a woman on a mission, moving quickly, arms swinging. I’m not alone in this purposeful movement. There are bikers and runners and beachcombers, all of us with goals in mind.

The bathers, on the other hand, amble easily toward the waves. They stop and start. They turn back. They pose for photographs. They brake for sand castles. 

Yesterday on the beach a man performed the slow, intricate steps of tai chi. He summoned up the calm of the ocean into his arms and legs. He was going neither up and down nor back and forth. He wasn’t going anywhere at all. He was simply being.

This is what I take with me from the beach.