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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. 

What Passes for Darkness

What Passes for Darkness

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Sometimes a path presents itself, opens as if by magic. It was almost 7:30 when I started walking. A cloudy night, the light fading fast. As I entered the dark passage, my eyes picked up the brighter green of a nearby field. A fox ran toward it, auburn and plump. It posed in a green corner, then skulked into a bordering thicket.

I followed the curved walkway, my feet moving fast on the downward slope. I asked the woods to hold me up, the path to carry me. I asked only movement, and in that movement absorption. If that is all I ask, I reason, the walk will give it to me.

And that is what happened. The path, so close yet unfamiliar, the day almost over, the slight sense of danger as I walk in the woods in what passes for darkness in this well-lit suburban place.

Cross-section

Cross-section

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A cross-section of woodland soil laid bare by Little Difficult Run: See how the roots dominate the picture. Is it just here that they are threaded, wedded to the Virginia clay? Or do we walk on a carpet of them? Everywhere we tread, then, connected to a tree, a shrub, a plant. Our feet fall on the tuberous and the gnarled; our paths linked not just to other routes but to the very land itself.

Unendangered

Unendangered

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Of the three houses I lived in growing up, all had woods and fields nearby where I could ramble. These weren’t parks but undeveloped land, and about them hung an air of impermanence. The neighborhood I left to go to college was once known as Banana Hollow and had been known locally for its fine sledding hill. But the slope had long since fallen to the bulldozer.

I roamed the edges and bottomlands of this territory — just as I had the Ware farm which backed up to our previous house. That land, a plentiful pasture studded with the occasional giant oak, was home to a herd of grazing cattle. Some mornings I woke to the sound of their tramping and munching on the other side of our fence. But the Ware Farm was gone soon after we left that house, when I was a sophomore in high school.

All this is to say that when I hike through Folkstone Forest and the adjacent stream valley park, I am mindful of the gift, the certainty of this semi-natural land. Sure, in winter you might glimpse houses along its periphery, but plunge deep enough and all that’s visible is tree and fern and vine. It is stream valley land, prone to flooding and therefore protected.

I walk in an unendangered suburban wilderness. And I am grateful for that.

Room with a View

Room with a View

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When I was a kid, I liked to climb trees. Not as a daredevil would, not to the highest branches, but high enough that I could see our house and yard from a new angle. It was like standing on my head, something else I liked to do back then.

Now I dream of a cabin on a ridge. Mountains will rise in the distance, a ribbon of river binding them to earth. And beyond them, clouds will pile plump as pillows. It will be hard at times to tell the mountains from the clouds, the soil from the sky. But I will know the horizon and my place in the world.

Is this the allure of views, then, that they help us belong? Or is it the opposite: that they teach us to escape?

Wild Places

Wild Places

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A few days ago I wrote about Robert Macfarlane’s book The Wild Places, how the author sought remote mountaintops and bogs as comfort and as challenge. I’m almost finished with the book now, and Macfarlane has learned something.
–>He talks about the wildness that is all around us, the simple views of field and fern that may be recorded in a journal or a letter or may not be recorded at all but simply held in mind.
Most of these places, he says, “were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in a river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along — these might be enough.”

A few paragraphs later, Macfarlane says this: “It seemed to me that these nameless places might in fact be more important than the grander wild lands that for so many years had gripped my imagination.”

To take Macfarlane’s idea one step further: These nameless places are what attach us to a place, what make us feel bound to the land around us. This morning, I think about my own “wild places.”