The day after Christmas: filled with boxes and bundles, loading up the car, waving goodbye, saying hello, eating (some more). And then, when it’s almost too late, a walk to the Severn River.
From the warmth and chaos of a family holiday to the pure piercing beauty of a midwinter sunset.
When I work at home I can see the morning happen, can see night peel off around the edges.
No dramatic sunrise today, just steadily less dark. A lighter shade of gray and the tall oaks emerging from it, first the trunks, then the large limbs and finally a crowd of branches at the top.
Only now can I see the houses, three from this vantage point — gray, tan and brick. Only now do I notice the dark fringe around the horizon, the woods on the far side of the road.
But I keep my eyes trained on the sky, on the vast ceiling above us that finally gives way to day.
What a difference the sun makes. It’s cold, slightly above freezing, a steady breeze blowing off the lake. But the day is friendly, not the alien weather of yesterday, which was inhospitable to humans.
I say this from experience, after first rambling along the shore and then trudging up to the ridge, where the combination of exertion and distance from the lake made the temperature almost bearable.
Today there are sounds of life, some hammering next door, an occasional car engine. It’s time for me to go outside — if for no other reason than to know how good it feels to come back in!
I’m writing from a cottage in Indiana as the wind whips whitecaps in the lake and sends the wind chimes into overdrive.
I’ve come here for years but never in the winter, never when the water opened up before me on three sides, never with a sky so leaden and gray.
It’s a cozy place to hang out for a couple of days. And I’ve figured out how to create a “personal hotspot” to post these words.
Here, in a “frame,” is Lake Monroe, snapped from inside, the only place to be today.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.