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Rhythm of the Amble

Rhythm of the Amble

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Lately I’ve been running as much as walking. This may be good for my physical well-being but I’m missing the measured thought that comes with slower foot fall.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth more rumination. My theory has been that running requires enough effort that there is little left for anything else.

But the other day, on an especially soothing woods walk, another possibility presented itself: It’s the rhythm of the amble — left, right, left, right — allowing each step its own percussive moment. It’s trance-inducing after a while. And very conducive to cogitation.

Then again, it may have been the autumn color and the deepening dusk that worked its magic.

The Encounter

The Encounter

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I saw him on the path to the Franklin Farm Meadow, a placid paved trail adjoining a napkin-sized playground. Fat and sleek, he sat munching grass, completely oblivious of the human two feet away.

His jaws worked each mouthful as he hungrily tore into each new tuft. This was one hungry guy — though from the looks of him he hadn’t missed too many meals.

Groundhogs are always bigger than I think they’re going to be. Good-sized and galumphing. But this one wasn’t budging. He had found a tasty patch of fescue and was going to eat it all or else.

After a few minutes I delicately eased by the guy — and that’s when he sprang into action. He snapped around and assumed an attack position, crouched, teeth bared. I spoke to him quietly, told him I wasn’t after his grass, just on a run.

When I turned back to look at him, he had gone back to his dinner.

A wild thing, observed.


(I’m fresh out of groundhog photos, but this is near where I saw him.)

World Wide-Webbed

World Wide-Webbed

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We’ve had a bumper crop of spiderwebs this year, perhaps brought on by the cooler, damper summer — or perhaps not. Perhaps just brought on by an especially industrious crop of spiders.

Whatever the explanation, the webs have been out in full force. They catch you in the woods, cling to your hair, your clothes, your shoes. Not, of course, to your dog. He’s too short to be webbed.

They drive you to carry a stick and walk along the paths swinging it madly from side to side; in other words, webs make you look foolish.

Webs appear overnight, strung across the trampoline or the pergola, nature’s bunting. True, they are not good for hikers or unsuspecting insects. But stand aside, glimpse one with the sun behind it, thin threads gleaming, and it’s clear that webs are good for the soul.

(Photo: Tom Capehart)

Waist-High Weeds

Waist-High Weeds

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I found my neighbor, Teresa, weeding in the woods. “It’s Japanese stiltgrass,” she said, “and the only way to get rid of it is to pull it up.”

Tell me about it. I’ve been pulling it up all summer, but have never felt sufficiently ahead in my own yard to take on the common land.

But Teresa has. And does. She and her husband, David, often take a bag along on their walks to pick up trash in the neighborhood.

I do not bag and neither do I weed. Instead, I ponder the stiltgrass as I walk, notice the height of it, waist-high in spots, think about this wild vegetation taking over the woods, the fields, the yards.

It’s a green wave, a green sea, rolling ever forward. We can try to stem its tide, but we are powerless in its wake.

Light on Water

Light on Water

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I walk when the time is right, when the writing and the chores are done. I don’t always consider the quality of the light.

Maybe I should.

Yesterday, Copper and I made our way through the woods as the sun slanted low through the oaks, glanced at their roots and spotlit the creek. The water shimmered in response, gave up its secrets, its depth, its hurry.

The light was a laser pointer teaching the landscape. Look here, it told me, here are sights you should not miss.

Place, Unexpected

Place, Unexpected

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So I’m reading along in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, a re-telling of the last months of Thomas Cromwell’s life, riveted by her story of intrigue in the court of King Henry VIII, not expecting a discussion of place, when I find this:

He [Cromwell] is buying land in the lusher parts of England, but he has no leisure to visit it; so these farms, these ancient manors in their walled gardens, these watercourses with their little quays, these ponds with their gilded fish rising to the hook; these vineyards, flower dens, arbours and walks, remain to him flat, each one a paper construct, a set of figures on a page of accounts: not sheep-nibbled margins, nor meadows where kine stand knee-deep in grass, not coppices nor groves where a white doe shivers, a hoof poised; but parchment domains, leases and freeholds delimited by inky clauses, not by ancient hedges, or boundary stones.

 Here is a longing for place that is ancient but real, the pull of the city-dweller toward the bucolic retreat, the dream of land when land is owned but not possessed.

How many of us moderns feel the same?

Liftoff and Letdown

Liftoff and Letdown

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of going through airport security twice for the same flight. I’d left something in the car. Later in the day, while waiting for a connection in another airport, I walked past an even busier security checkpoint, people rushing to lace up their shoes, stuff toiletries in bags, zip laptops into cases.

That flying is an exhausting, dehumanizing experience is news to no one. But you forget just how exhausting and dehumanizing when most of your trips are by car.

In exchange for the miracle of flight, we have the humiliation of full-body scans, the inconvenience of unpacking what we just packed and stuffing it into gray bins, the thrill of padding barefoot along the airport floor.

A reminder that even though we soar through clouds, our fears and troubles usually keep us earthbound.

Big Sky

Big Sky

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There is the Big Sky of the West, mesas hulking in the distance, red rock, cloudless sky, the tang of  wild sage.

But what I had forgotten is that there is also the Big Sky of the beach, the vast horizon beyond the breakers, the vistas north and south, clouds looming in the late afternoon sky — seeing the weather before it arrives.

Here too is a vast panorama, scenery that takes me out of myself, the curve of the earth implied but not stated.

Sun on Water

Sun on Water

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The sun rises and sets every day, of course, but in my regular life I don’t see it.

It’s an everyday miracle hidden behind hills and houses and daily routines.

But here at the beach I have time to watch the sun as it moves through the sky. Faraway star, morning beacon, evening entertainment — it disappears, finally, behind banks of clouds. But first a light show, late rays on water, glorious, best viewed in silence.

Blue Ridge

Blue Ridge

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We live an hour from the Blue Ridge, but there are places near here, places so near I can walk to them, that give me a tantalizing glimpse.

A smudged line in the distance. A bank of green in the foreground.

So pleasing to the eye, this mixture of green and blue, of meadow and mountain, of the up-close and the faraway.