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Footprints in Time

Footprints in Time

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These are dry days in the mid-Atlantic. Though we finally received rain on Sunday, there was precious little of it and it arrived after a record-breaking 38-day drought.

A funny time to be thinking of footprints, then, because I can’t imagine the hard-packed ground would yield to a pickaxe let alone a hiking boot. But I was just skimming a book called Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, who discuss the importance of footprints.

Footprints are clues to the presence of natural resources, the authors say. They embed us in a landscape. If we pay attention, the impression of a boot or a paw tells us who has come before.

Here’s how Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it: “All things are engaged in writing their history … Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.”

(Dinosaur footprints from the Algarve region of Portugal.)

Counterclockwise

Counterclockwise

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When I reached the loop trail yesterday, I went right instead of left. I thought I would walk farther, cross the road, stride all the way to the end. But that proved impractical. No matter, though. I had set the course. I would be walking counterclockwise. Everyone I passed was going the other way.

It felt fresher than I thought it would, fleshing out the flip side of a familiar trail. The low light touched the treetops in new ways. The path curved in all the wrong places. The woods spread out on either side, limitless in their lack of familiarity.

Why don’t I do this more often, choose the road less traveled? Is it habit, or a need to keep one way fresh? The second one, I think. So next time, it will be clockwise again.

Dark Walk

Dark Walk

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Halloween is more than two weeks away, but it felt quite present when I took a walk after dark the other night.

I left in a brisk wind, wearing light clothes and a head lamp. I was pretty sure cars would see me and my Cyclops eye. What I wasn’t counting on were all the little eyes staring back at me. They were from a deer family, perhaps a half dozen blithely munching my neighbor’s trees.

The walk only got weirder. I heard shrieks and giggles from the other end of the block. Flashlight tag, perhaps? Or a preview of coming attractions?

Many houses have dressed up for the season, with skeleton-head images superimposed on their walls, orange blinking lights and blow-up monsters in their front yards.

Add to this a wild wind stirring the leaves and sending twigs and small branches earthward, and … let’s just say I was glad to get home.

The Straightaway

The Straightaway

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Though I love a path that curves and winds its way through the woods, I’m also fond of a good straightaway.

Which is what I found myself on yesterday. A trail that branches off another, well-traveled one, a connector route, you might say. And I was struck with its clean lines and lack of mystery, with its uncomplicated beauty.

A straightaway is not a “straight and narrow,” with its whiff of boring respectability. A straightaway is redolent of race tracks and final surges to victory. It’s about power and clarity.

Sometimes that’s all you want in a trail, to see it clear from beginning to end, to know what you have in front of you.

Travel and Destination

Travel and Destination

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As I have so many days recently, I headed out this morning in a hooded jacket. The rain was so fine you could barely see it. There were no beads of moisture on my sleeves, but I could feel the dampness all around me.

I’d just been reading an academic article, and it felt good to stretch my legs. I wasn’t looking for much, just a break. But the ideas bubbled up anyway, as they often do when I’m moving. First the topic for this post, then an essay idea.

The mist may have made it harder to see what was in front of me, but it didn’t obscure my thinking. How to account for this phenomenon?

“Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking. And a few sentences later, she says this: “It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination.”

And that’s what this morning’s walk was for me — travel and destination.

Farewell to Blogspot

Farewell to Blogspot

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On February 7, 2010, when I wrote the first Walker in the Suburbs post, I knew only that I wanted to share a few thoughts with the world. I had no idea if I could keep blogging until the end of the month. Now, almost 15 years later, it’s time to move A Walker in the Suburbs to a new home. Truth to tell, it outgrew Blogspot long ago, but until now I’ve lacked the time and will to switch sites. 

Starting tomorrow, October 1, 2024, you can find A Walker in the Suburbs here. The content won’t change, but the design is updated, and you’ll be able to subscribe and comment.

Meanwhile, as I say goodbye to this platform, I think of all that’s happened since it began, the writing I’ve done; the people who are gone and the ones who’ve just arrived; how our world has changed. 

How grateful I am to have this opportunity to connect with all of you, to share my love of walking and place. Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope you enjoy the new Walker in the Suburbs. 

Two-Walk Day

Two-Walk Day

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I didn’t intend for it to be, but it was anyway. A two-walk day, that is. Two-walk days usually result in deep sleeps, and this one was no exception.

Of course, a two-walk day is not a two-day walk. I imagine I would sleep extremely well after that. But a two-walk day isn’t nothing, either, especially if both are an hour or more, which these were. 

Yesterday’s strolls were in north Reston, with its well-peopled trail, its purposeful pedestrians. They’re not just sauntering; they’re making their way from Point A to Point B. They carry backpacks and shopping bags. They’re going places. To be in their company is to be caught up in meaningful movement. 

No Way to Say No

No Way to Say No

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When I began walking this morning, pink clouds were piling up on the horizon. The day was just getting to know itself. I needed a quiet tune, so I chose Dan Fogelberg’s “To the Morning.” 

There’s a line in the song I’ve always liked: “There’s really no way to say no to the morning.” It’s an obvious statement but one I need to hear sometimes.

To listen to it as I walked this Monday morning was to hear how beautifully reality can be crafted. Yes, there’s no way to say no. But there are so many ways to say yes.

Walking Distance

Walking Distance

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Yesterday, a walk with a friend. Not just any friend, but one who lives a walking distance away from my house. 

Granted, it’s a walk through the woods, and this time of year the woods are full of burrs that attach to your socks and spider webs that cling to your hair and clothes. 

But still, to be able to walk anywhere around here is a triumph. And to walk to a friend’s house … even better. It humanizes the neighborhood. It allows me to think (even fleetingly) that I live in a village instead of a ‘burb.

(A downed tree I clambered through on my walk.)

Ice Cave Ridge

Ice Cave Ridge

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When I was a kid, I liked to explore the farm behind our house. It was mostly a cow pasture, but my romantic 14-year-old self once mapped it, naming one sheltered section the Land of Eternal Snows. 

I probably made this discovery in early March,  and I imagine that the small amount of white stuff that remained was gone the next day, but the Land of Eternal Snows it was.

Today I walked past fissures so protected from the sun that snow can last in them well into June. Since we were hiking in August, these were simply caves, not ice caves, but to peer into them was to see the earth revealing itself, layer by layer. 

What was most impressive about this trail, though, were the views off the ridge: mountains beyond mountains and a brow across from our trail, higher and more impressive than the one where we stood. I stayed well back from the edge. I always do.