A Walker in the Suburbs

The commute continues to exhaust and befuddle. It took me two hours to get home last Thursday and almost that long last night. I arrived at the Reston North Park and Ride lot just as the sun was setting.

I had my bag, having parked in the garage, but the round trip there and back would have taken 15 minutes, and in the interest of working in a walk before it was completely dark, I decided to stroll bag in hand (or, I should say, bag on shoulder).

It was a wonderful time to be on the trail. The sun had come out late in the day, and people were making the most of it. There were bikers and runners and walkers. There were commuters in work clothes and exercisers in sweats and spandex.

Goldenrod and grasses hung their heads over the pavement in a shaggy profusion. There was a stillness to their beauty, and it calmed and centered me. What a difference the walk made, better than a drink or a drug. It wasn’t magic; it was the trail.

Yesterday I walked on the Washington and Old Dominion trail, a long ribbon of asphalt that runs from the inner suburbs to the foothills of the Blue Ridge. It was a fine spring afternoon, trees bursting pink and white, birds flitting from branch to post.

Bikers zoomed by. “Passing on the left.” So many of them that I moved to the narrow gravel shoulder. “Share the trail,” the signs said. This felt less like sharing and more like abandoning. I walked quickly — and not just for exercise. It was scary out there.

Two weeks ago I moseyed along the same stretch of path. It was still winter and I had the trail to myself. Yesterday I longed to be back in that gray afternoon, warming myself up on an empty trail.

I found it sooner than I thought, the southern terminus of the Cross County Trail. Found it and savored it, this beautiful spot along the Occoquan, a place where water meets land. The southern tip of Fairfax County.

I’ve followed the trail more than 40 miles, from the falls of the Potomac along Difficult Run to these placid waters. It was a long walk, a walk of many segments, and now that I’ve completed it all I can think of is how I’ll do it next time.

Robert E. Simon, the founder of Reston, Virginia, died yesterday at the age of 101. Simon was a big thinker — and the big plan he had for the parcel of hunt-country land in western Fairfax County was that people should be able to live, work, shop and play all in the same place.

What held his vision together were the Reston Trails, lovely paved paths that wind their way from village cluster to village cluster, passing lakes and wetlands, woods and meadows.

The Reston Trails are my stomping ground. I’ve walked them for more than a quarter century now, walked them in all weathers and moods. I’ve pushed my babies in strollers on them and, later, watched my kids bicycle ahead of me on them, still wobbly but proud to be training-wheel-free. Now I walk them in this new phase of life, my children living their own lives away from home.

While I’ve used the paths to muse and find some quiet time, the point of Reston was actually just the opposite. “Community,” Simon is quoted as saying in an obituary in today’s Washington Post. “That word is the whole discussion. … I think having facilities
readily available for people of all kinds, from little kids to the
elderly — that’s the most important thing of all.”

(Lake Anne Plaza, Reston’s original village and the home of Robert E. Simon.) 

I still have wrapping to do, cooking and baking, too. Yesterday’s rainy walk was a calm oasis amidst the holiday to-dos.

At one point I found myself walking along a fencerow. To my right, a golf course. To my left, a tangle of trees and brush. It was only halfway down the path that I realized there was a fence on my left, as well.

So this was a double fencerow, the land between fences, uncultivated, unclaimed. Except … it has been put to the best of uses. It leads from the eddies and ripples of Little Difficult Run to the sleek office parks of Blake Lane and Waples Mill Road, and from there (I now know from experience) to lakes and dams and ridges.

It’s a trail, a passageway. It takes us from one place, one reality, to another. And it looks very inviting here, I think — in a Thomas Hardyesque way!

The thing about hiking in the rain — in any
weather, really — is that the weather becomes part of the walk. In this case,
the splatter and the damp made their way into the setting. There was mud, of
course, and lots of it. In a couple of low-lying spots someone had thoughtfully
laid long two-by-fours as makeshift bridges through the muck.