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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.

Poison Idadee

Poison Idadee

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When Suzanne was little and first encountered an itchy rash on her arm, she couldn’t quite say “poison ivy.” It came out “poison idadee.”

And “poison idadee” it has remained these many years.

I’ve been getting into some “poison idadee” myself lately — and I have the itchy arms and bottles of calamine lotion to prove it.

It’s not fun, but I’m glad that I’ve ventured off trails, explored new paths and hacked my way through brush and briar.

Summer will be over soon enough.

Tread Well

Tread Well

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Yesterday’s walk began in the woods, late afternoon light slanting in through the canopy. Copper and I crossed Folkstone Drive, strolled down Treadwell, a street I love not just for its name (perfect for walkers) but also for its length and lack of traffic and for the calmness I feel when I’m on it.

Treadwell ends in a pipestem with houses tucked deep in the forest. Before you reach it, though, there’s a path back into the woods. We took it, picking our way through some sticker bushes and crossing a creek that required my first sitting down on the bank (a hesitation Copper didn’t understand) before launching myself forward to the other side.

Once across the tributary, we could wander from one trail to another. I noticed the silence, interrupted only by the caws of a crow and the hum of a distant airplane. Was it the silence that freed my mind to appreciate the beauty, the jewel-green moss atop the decaying log, the ferns waving slightly in the breeze?

Nothing is not beautiful here, I thought: the weeds, the stumps, the whole trees uprooted and left lying where they fell, their root balls like the inside of giant umbrellas. All of it a pleasure to the eye.

As we grew closer to the exit, the woods became noisier. It was a landscaping crew grooming the yard of a nearby house. Two mowers and a weed whacker. Welcome back, they seemed to say with their jangle and bluster, welcome back to the world.