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The Kindness of Strangers

The Kindness of Strangers

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My new assignment (which I gave myself): Walk the Cross-County Trail in earnest. Cover the sections I haven’t covered (which are most of them). Chart the great green heart of this populous county.

The timing of the assignment: regrettable. I left later than I’d intended and was little more than halfway on my route when the low clouds and heavy air gave way to the severe storms that had been predicted (and which I had ignored). Forced from the trail at a detour, I picked my way through the wind and rain to a nearby street. I huddled for a while under trees that were short enough not to kill me if they fell but full enough to shelter me from the brunt of the storm.

Ten minutes into the deluge the wind picked up, the rain fell slantwise and I decided to make a run for it, to find an intersection where I could call for help. It was then, as I tried to make a phone call, that there emerged from the storm a kind soul with a large umbrella.

He motioned me over, I ran toward him, and together we dashed to the shelter of his garage. He disappeared for a minute and returned with two towels. For the next 20 minutes we talked about the storm, the fearsome way it blew up and (typical suburbanites) the siding we had on our houses. I never learned his name.  This morning I read in the paper that a tornado touched down less than two miles from where I hiked.

I went to the woods for wilderness and solitude; what I found instead was the kindness of strangers.

I wasn’t far from here when the storm struck.

Picture Postcard

Picture Postcard

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I am a sucker for the post card shot. The off-center, the too-close, the out-of-kilter — these do nothing for me.

When it comes to landscapes, I have a middle-brow sense of composition. Give me blue skies, puffy clouds (see yesterday’s post), a road winding in the distance, fir trees in the foreground, and I’m happy. Even if there’s a bit of blurring (because, say, the picture was taken out of a car window at 50 miles an hour).

This is a photograph of Glacier National Park, snapped on a vacation there  a few years ago. It made me catch my breath then. It still does.

Caught in the Web

Caught in the Web

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The woods are full of webs these days, spun silk across the path, invisible until breached (which of course is the point) and therefore impossible to avoid. Built by aerialists for aerialists, they don’t bother our fern-high hound.

But for me, the biped, they are an annoyance, tangling themselves in my hair and sticking to my arms, legs and face. I tried swinging a stick in front of me as I walked, but felt ridiculous.

So I decided (without formally deciding) to accept the webs, to brush them off as I stroll, to apologize silently to the forest as I unravel its delicate stitchery, knowing this is just one way among many that I alter — just by moving through it — the woods I love.

Among webs’ many annoyances is the difficulty of photographing them. At least I snapped the perpetrator in this shot.

Sunday Drive

Sunday Drive

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A late summer afternoon, work and chores are done, the sky still light, the air still delicious, a car in the garage — and not just any car but the red convertible. We pop off the top, drag out the maps, find a route and head west.

For the first few miles we zoom along in familiar traffic, but then the road narrows and the scenery swells into hillocks and pastures. Fields are green and the hay is baled. The landscape soothes, as it always does when left to its own devices.

Half an hour later we cruise down a road we’ve never driven before. Trees arch overhead, stone walls line the lane. I lean my head back against the seat, trail my hand out the window. We could drive like this for hours; it would be fine with me.

Genius of Place

Genius of Place

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I’m part way through a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted called Genius of Place, by Justin Martin, and already it has gone from being a book I was going to skim and return to the library to one I’m willing to pay to finish. (It’s overdue and can’t be renewed.)

Olmsted was not only a renowned landscape architect; he was also a farmer, writer, publisher, abolitionist and world traveler. Thanks to a loving and well-heeled father who supported his ventures both emotionally and financially, Olmsted evolved from a lost young man to an apostle of place. His medium was the landscape. His message was beauty.

I’m not even halfway through the book yet — Central Park is barely a gleam in Olmsted’s eye — but I’m already looking for clues to what shaped him. One is that he knew places from the inside out.

“He’d walked all over Connecticut as a child; he’d walked all over England a few years back,” Martin writes. “Now he was intent on completing his tour of the South; he didn’t want to miss anything.”

I’m with Olmsted on this one: When you don’t want to miss anything, it’s best to walk.



Above: A view that Olmsted made possible.

Utilitarian Pasture

Utilitarian Pasture

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My walk yesterday was far hillier than I expected. There was
one moment when I stood still to appreciate where I was. The insects were buzzing and the heat was radiating from the dry grasses and the land rose and fell in such a way that I
could barely see the swell of the earth around me. 
It was a rough looking pasture, with scruffy
weeds, prickle vines and thistles. It could have been a Scottish
moor, so remote and wild did it seem. But it was, in fact, a pipeline meadow or an electric transmission
meadow, some sort of utilitarian pasture. Our open space is not for grazing but
for the humming wires and busy pipes that bring us what we need to survive.  
Beauty, in this case, is a byproduct. 
 

Meadow Music

Meadow Music

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A walk through the meadow. I pull out my earphones to hear the rustle of grasses in the wind, the sound of children playing, a ball bouncing. Past the pond, where a family fishes. The mother is veiled, the little boy intent upon his lure.

Along the ribbon of pavement that bisects a field, I breathe in the scent of pine and cut grass. The Queen Anne’s lace is nodding, the tall weeds waving. Insects buzz, the backdrop noise of summer.

But soon enough, I dart into the woods. There was a place there where I had to duck under a tree that had collapsed upon itself in the storm. But only a bare patch remains. Already I smell autumn in the air, the acrid aroma of dry leaves. I shiver as I stride.

The Severn on Fire

The Severn on Fire

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I’ll admit. These words are just an excuse to display this photo of the sun setting over the Severn. I spent a few days beside this river recently and am thinking how my life would be different if I had such regular contact with natural beauty.

Would I become ho-hum about it? Would they cease to amaze me, these fiery skies, this merging of river and cloud?

Or would I routinely fill my camera as I did night before last, snapping shot after shot after shot — and finding, after I reviewed them, that many of them were exactly the same?

Grandeur is like that. It turns our heads.

Escape Route

Escape Route

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A few days of blissful low-humidity weather mean that at the highest point of my favorite walking route the foothills of the Blue Ridge swing cleanly, clearly, briskly into focus. I like to think of this as my “escape route,” the one that gives me, better than any other, a glimpse of a world that lies beyond.

For the longest time the route — and for all practical purposes the view — didn’t exist. The road was curvy, two-lane and treacherous. You walked it at your peril. And even if you did, you wouldn’t have seen the mountains. They would only have been visible from the ridge above — and probably not even there, since the trees that grew along the brow obscured the horizon, too.

But when a new housing development shoved out the few remaining homes and a preschool, the view emerged. And the sidewalk supplied by the property developers opened it up to all.

I had to stop griping about progress then. For once it was on our side, the side of the walkers, the side of those who like to be reminded where they are in the world. The side of those who like their escape routes.


(This is not exactly what I see. My view is of the same mountain range, just farther east.)

A Change of Screen

A Change of Screen

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A change of scene is not always possible, so in its place, a change of screen. I choose a photo of a hike we took in the Czech Republic, high above the town of Czesky Krumlov. The Vltava River flows below, out of view in this photograph. And the hills that rise in blue infinity, those are the Sumava Mountains of Bohemia, in the heart of Europe.

When I stare at my computer’s desktop screen now, I remember the breathlessness of that walk, the little shrines we stopped at along the way, the snails that clung to the dew-wet grass, the view that awaited us at the top. Limitless.