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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.”


My Heart With Pleasure Fills

My Heart With Pleasure Fills

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I’m thinking of that poem, the one we learned in elementary school, the one that seems jaded and obvious — until you stumble upon it in real time.

The other day I rounded the corner of a paved path and there was my own “host of golden daffodils.”

Or not my own, actually. That was the beauty of it. They were for everyone, were wild and free, glorifying not just a single backyard but a widespread and well traveled community woods. Tucked among the oaks and maples and just a few feet away from the skunk cabbage.

I slowed my pace as I strode beside them, wanting to savor their beauty as long as possible. Other amblers did the same that sweet spring morning. There was a hush in the air, a reverence for the blossoms.

I did not wait for “the inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude.” I took no chances. I used a camera. And now, as I look at the photograph, I remember the flowers’ surprising presence in that parceled suburban landscape. The words flow into my mind before I can stop them: “And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.”

In Their Glory

In Their Glory

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On Saturday morning I took one of my favorite walks — through the Franklin Farm meadow, around a lake, through a woods and back home. It is a varied terrain of shade and sunlight, and the day was so warm I could feel the old earth turning and sending its shoots skyward. Geese were grazing on deadnettle and other early spring flowers.

I’ve walked this way for years now and no longer see just the path ahead of me, the rough fields on either side. I see what has been and what will be again, the tall grasses of midsummer, the chicory and Queen Anne’s lace. I hear the crescendo of cicadas. The meadow soil has a memory, and so do I.

The walk was so lovely that I went back later with my camera. The setting sun slanted across the pond and lit up the cattails. I found a spot under a Bradford pear where I could snap meadow, pond and woods. All these humble sights that I look on in my wanderings, that have made me feel connected to this place, they were transformed in the mellow light of early evening. I saw them in their glory — and captured them that way.

Landscape, Still

Landscape, Still

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“Landscapes are, in general, one of the few predictables we have.”
Deborah Tall, From Where We Stand

As I walk and write and think about the place we live, about its texture and topography and my ability to bond with it, I enjoy collecting the thoughts and experiences of others who have made similar journeys.

Deborah Tall moved to Geneva, New York, to teach, and From Where We Stand is the story of her becoming connected to that place. She does it through coming to know and love the landscape, particularly the lake, and she does it through learning the history of its people.

The Finger Lakes Region has made her its citizen by throwing her back on the land, she says, “instead of distracting me with urban amenities.”

In the suburbs it is easy to be distracted with urban amenities. Here we are only 10 minutes drive from one mall and 15 minutes from another. Our landscape is mostly hidden from view by large houses and strip malls.

But get out of the car, cut through back yards, find the hidden trails, and you will find landscape. It is still here.

The Old Route

The Old Route

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Yesterday I left the house early, and as the sun rose I was walking an old route I hadn’t been on in years. Some of the houses had additions, but other than that the scenery was just as I remembered it. The yards were just as deep and forgiving, the trees as lofty.

And the route itself: There was the same rise to the straightaway, the expansive section in the middle, the one that was such welcome shade in the summer, it made me happy in the winter, too.

I didn’t walk long, but I felt as if I had been on a brief vacation. Such is the power of landscape to reset the mood.

Environs

Environs

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As our tree now sits all glittery and ornamented in a place of honor in our house, I think back to where it comes from. It’s nice to have a tree whose family you know, whose environs you remember. A placed tree, I guess you’d say.

I wonder if our tree carries within it any memory of that north-facing slope, or the faraway view of the Blue Ridge it had once — and lost. Now it looks serenely over our living room, and, if it turns its head a bit, the kitchen, too. It can also look out the windows and French doors, see other trees still rooted and attached to the ground that gave them life.

Well, if the tree can’t remember, I can. When I look at it I see a place where the land rolls and houses are tucked into the folds of it. I see a place where beauty is not forgotten.