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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.

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.

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.

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.