A Walker in the Suburbs

It’s spring break in these parts. Families are on the road — or if not, they’re putting together a crazy patchwork quilt of daycare options to make it through the next five days.

I’m staying put but paying attention. I’m braking for spring.

On Thursday, I parked at the W&OD to hike the trail to Meadowlark Gardens, bursting with bloom, where I snapped the shot you see above.

On Saturday I caught these weeping cherries at Lake Anne’s Van Gogh Bridge, part of a walk from Reston Town Center, where I dropped off my library books, to Lake Anne. It’s a favorite stroll, especially this time of year.

Still on my early spring to-see list: the Bradford pears and daffodils in Franklin Farm, which I hope to visit today.

All of these sights are best seen — and some are only seen — when I stop the car, get out and take a walk. When I brake for spring.

Yesterday brought freakish warmth. Welcome warmth, given the cold winter, but freakish just the same. Last week I was still debating if I could walk without gloves, and I began the stroll with hands balled up into my sleeves.

I trod counter-clockwise around the lake, spotting a fellow walker halfway around. She was craning her neck between houses to get a better view. She was quick to share her discovery.

“I’ve never seen swans on the lake before,” she said. “But I just did.” She showed me where to look, and there they were, vague dots of white on a smooth, glassy surface.

I snapped a shot, not just of the swans but of the place that held them: the green foliage thick with rain, a house in the distance, dark trunks fading to gray.

It was not just the swans but swans on the lake. It was that moment of that walk, captured in time.

Today I took my first walk around Lake Anne in more than a month. The ice was thinning and the path was clear. I spied sand containers on sloping sections of the trail, do-it-yourself ice remedies.

My ice remedy is to stay off the paths. Now that our second snow has melted and our third has yet to fall, I took advantage of the mild weather to circle Reston’s oldest lake.

Unlike three weeks ago, when I snapped this shot, there were puddles and bird song and a sense of movement in the landscape.

Spring isn’t fully awake yet, but it’s beginning to stretch its arms and legs.

Yesterday I had coffee with a trail watcher, someone who lives near a Reston trail and knows its condition. “I’ve seen people walking their dogs on the trail,” she said. “I think it’s plowed.”

Did I speak too soon yesterday when I moaned about being trail starved? After all, I haven’t been driving around to all the trailheads in the area, checking their status. The Franklin Farm trails are certainly not plowed, and the Reston trails near Lake Anne were unreliable when I tried them last week.

So after we parted, with the odd snowflake flying in a blustery gray sky, I went in search of a nearby path to wander. And sure enough, one that wasn’t cleared last week was down to pavement.

How good it felt to amble among the trees again! There were a few stretches of black ice to avoid, but other than that, I was in business.

These are long days for walkers in the suburbs. Yes, we can walk on the roads. We can and we do. We can use ellipticals or treadmills in gyms or in our basements. Some of us (my neighbor, in fact) traipses around her house when everything else fails.

But what we cannot do (unless we have snow shoes) is walk on a trail. My neighborhood and many of the developments around me have no sidewalks. What they do have, though, are paths, often paved.

Finding these and using them has lifted my heart and put a skip in my step. Trails have given me what I didn’t think was possible when we first moved here — a walking life. A way to make my way on foot from one place to the other.

But for almost three weeks now the trails have been off limits; more ice rinks than paths, and I’m logging miles on the main street in my neighborhood. I’m still putting one foot in front of the other, propelling myself through space. But I’m trail starved. I can’t wait to be back.

(If I’m going to imagine a trail walk, I might as well make it summer.)

The snow bricks are shrinking, the berm crud is thinning, and the road is widening. But not enough. Motorists still hesitate to cross the yellow line. Sometimes they can’t, because there’s a car on the other side. Other times, they just don’t.

Walking in the suburbs has never been more fraught. The trails I frequent are a slick, icy mess. Which means I’m forced to do all my walking in the neighborhood, along the side of the road. Some drivers seem reluctant to move over to give me a safe-enough berth.

I think it’s just rule-following, of which I’ve been guilty, too. But as a walker in the suburbs, I’m hoping cars cut us more slack these winter days. The gravelly stuff along the road is like quicksand, and walkers can’t exactly hop out of the way when they’re striding alongside a five-foot-tall mountain of snowcrete.

The cars that do cross the line have my fervent thanks and appreciation. As for the rest of them, I’ll paraphrase Robert McCloskey and say … make way for walkers.

(The cover of Make Way for Ducklings, from which I borrowed the title of this post.)

No time to walk yesterday until almost nightfall., but it’s light enough now that I could leave my house at 5:30, stroll through the gloaming, and be back before 6 without walking in the dark. A good reminder that spring is on its way, even though the groundhog saw his shadow.

At this point in the season 6 p.m. is still a hard stop. With no shoulders due to snow boulders, and no sidewalks or street lights, it’s better to be safely inside by this hour. But that I could amble abroad at all after 5 was a surprise and a delight.

It’s such a pleasant time to wander, yellow porch lights beacons of warmth in a frozen landscape. I saw a single doe jump from the snowy woods over the road, her white tail flashing.

Yesterday, as an experiment, I tried one of my regular walks at an irregularly slow pace. It wasn’t easy, but I promised myself I would do it, so I did.

The route was a familiar one, just two miles round trip. It took me most of an hour — that’s how leisurely I was ambling. It was the pace of a hiker struggling up a mountain, but my trail was mostly level ground.

A pair of young runners rushed by, then a lone jogger in a white jacket. Everyone passed me. But I plodded on at my slow gait.

Being a Kentucky girl, I remembered that the term “slow gait” can be an official one for the artificial gait of the American Saddlebred horse. It means that each of the horse’s feet strikes the ground separately in a measured, steady and highly stylized way. Not at all the way that I was moving!

Though my feet dawdled, my mind roamed far and wide, an inverse relationship. Maybe “not so fast” should be my walking mantra more often.

I noticed it last week — a break in the fence, right at the place I used to scale it. An absence, a window, an opening. How long have I waited for this break? Or, at the very least, for a stile across the fence?

At first, I thought I was seeing things, but I when I walked up to investigate, I noticed the discarded planks. Will there be a gate here someday, to preserve the opening, or will it once again be fenced?

Taking no chances, I strode through it, avoiding the longer and more circuitous route to the Franklin Farm meadow that I’ve taken ever since I stopped climbing fences.

It seemed a fortuitous New Year’s omen. An opening. An invitation. I embraced it.