I write this post to the sound of waves pounding the shore. It’s a sound I never grow tired of. Nature’s white noise machine, its beating heart.
Like a white noise machine, if you listen hard enough you find the rhythm in the randomness, the patterns in the passages.
Like an inhale and an exhale there’s a sucking in and a blowing out, a familiar back-and-forthness. Action, pause, reaction. A rush, a rustle, the life force.
(Gulls in the surf, oblivious to the white noise?)
Having spent time on the Gulf Coast of Florida the last 10 years, I’ve been spoiled by the sunsets, so many picture-perfect ones, the great orb sliding down just before dinner, a fully awake time to be sure.
On the Atlantic coast of North Carolina, you have to wake early if you want to see the sun rise. I didn’t yesterday — but I did today.
Rolled out early enough to see the first color streaking the sky, to wonder if the clouds would impede or dramatize the rising (the latter), to document the moment when the blood-red disc came out from behind the ocean, to feel a sense of relief then.
A line from Walden came to mind: “It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.”
The Outer Banks of North Carolina (known on sweatshirts and bumper stickers as OBX) is close enough that I should have visited long ago. But here I am now, which is all that really matters. It was a brisk welcome, sunny and cold, with wind that meant business and had busied itself burying the stairway to the beach.
Just a reminder of who’s in charge, as if we need it after Fiona and Ian.
The dunes here are protected but diminished, and seeing them yesterday, proud seagrass waving, was to feel an ache for all the beautiful things that grace our lives … then disappear.
You might call it the Sandwich Trail: a route that begins in forest, exits on the other side of the neighborhood for a mile of striding down a prettier-than-average suburban lane, then dips back into parkland again before returning.
In the language of sandwiches, the woods is the “bread” and the long stretch of pavement in the middle is its filling.
In the woods section I notice dry stream beds, new plank bridges, a path I thought I’d lost. In the pavement part I see houses with new siding, a massive and magical rubber tree, boulders in a garden.
Two parts trees and beaten-dirt trail, one part easy striding along a less-traveled road. A sumptuous repast.
A late walk yesterday, after I finished a class assignment. I drove to a favorite Reston trail itching to move through space after a computer-centric day.
The path did not disappoint. There were the familiar markers of fern and stream and swamp. There were the dog walkers and stroller pushers and trail talkers, those who first appear at to be muttering to themselves but are revealed upon passing to be wearing those distinctive white ear pods.
The second leg of this walk is a segment of the Cross County Trail, with its dips and valleys, already crunchy with brown leaves and blowsy with stilt grass gone to seed — but beautiful in its roughness. Laser-pointers of light struck the thin trunks of the understory.
Scampering through the lambent air in the almost-equinoctial evening was an excellent way to end the day.
In the continual quest to match music to landscape, today’s choice might seem a bit odd. Who tramps through the suburbs listening to Brahms’ German Requiem?
Someone who loves the piece and believes it ennobles whatever they see while listening to it, I suppose.
And so the stilt grass, that long-legged invasive, looked more like slender bamboo fronds waving. And the Joe Pye weed was more elegant, more proudly purple, than its usual shaggy self.
The shaded trails embraced me, the meadow views broadened my vision, and the pond gleamed golden in the morning light.
It was an ordinary walk made extraordinary by the music in my ears.
In one of the last chapters of Devil in the White City, the engrossing nonfiction narrative of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, author Erik Larson writes, “The fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that their cities did not have to be dark, soiled, and unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful.”
The fair gave common folks a glimpse of what cities could be and inspired artists to create beautiful fantasy cities of their own. Walt Disney’s father, Elias, worked on the fair and its beauty rippled down to his son, Walt, who created his own “White City” in the Magic Kingdom. Author L. Frank Baum visited the fair and it informed his vision of Oz.
Though some critics complained that the World’s Fair, with its emphasis on the neoclassical, actually delayed a more uniquely American architectural style, the pendulum seems to have swung around on that point. “The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe,” Larson notes.
Daniel Burnham, the architect who created the fair, later devoted his expertise to helping real cities attain the sweep and majesty of the White City. He drew up plans for parts of Chicago, as well as for Cleveland and San Francisco, and he helped fully realize Pierre L’Enfant ‘s vision of Washington, D.C.
It was beauty that drove this quest, the desire to replicate the grand cities of Europe. A noble occupation, I think, and one to admire.
Last week’s get-together meant I focused more on family than landscape, but on walks and short drives to beaches and beauty spots I laid eyes once again on a landscape I love.
What is it that inclines us to a certain place? I think it has to do with what Annie Dillard calls “topology … the dreaming memory of land as it lies this way and that” — a quotation that serves as the frontispiece to this blog.
Dillard was describing her hometown of Pittsburgh in this passage from An American Childhood. But topology — the study of a region as defined by its topography — can apply to any place that strikes our fancy, that holds within it the balance of sky and meadow, shade and sun that makes our heart sing.
These are our places of memory, whether we’ve been to them hundreds of times … or only once.
The wind finally eased enough to make it possible to kayak around the lake, or at least our small portion of it. A brief rain squall engulfed us as we made our way to the dock, but it passed just as quickly.
And then … I was on the water again, moving in that way that only water provides: bobbing and slicing. There are more motor boats in this location, and their wakes kept me on my toes. They also reminded me of how much I need to work on my upper body strength.
All in a day’s work … or at least a vacation day’s work.
(The lake in the distance, with a bucolic foreground.)
When I reached the top of the hill, a rise barely perceptible when driving but all-too-noticeable on foot, I could go straight or go back. Turning left or right wasn’t possible, due to the high volume of traffic and distinct lack of shoulder.
I wasn’t ready to go back, so I forged ahead, onto Toothpick Road. There were trees and homes tucked away in them. There was a steady descent. Most of all, there was the promise of the park at the end of it all. A small brown sign I hadn’t noticed before pointed me in that direction.
And sure enough, two brief turns later, I was crossing the bridge that leads to the park. Water to the left of me, water to the right of me, all shining in the late-day sun.
I thought about the route I had been taking, which was several miles longer. I couldn’t wait to get back to the house and tell everyone about the shortcut I’d found.
But my news was greeted with confusion. Everyone else had already discovered Toothpick Road. Their GPS programs had routed them that way from the beginning, whereas I, well, I hadn’t been using an app to get to the lake, thinking I knew the way from last year.
Still, a shortcut can be a glorious discovery, even when it’s old news.