So many walks to choose from these days, paths around ponds and through forests. Trails in the morning, chaste of footfall. Paths in the afternoon, littered with leaf bits from all the walking.
On Tuesday I passed two ponds, a bright one with cattails and a shady one rippled as if a fan were blowing on it.
The water was meditative, brisk, a mirror of the moment.
Seattle is a city of neighborhoods, and I’m getting to know them. Today we toured the Central District (in hard hats, no less!), then lunched in Capitol Hill. Several mornings I’ve hiked along the waterfront. I also visited Green Lake and Woodland Park.
But I’ve spent most of my time in Seattle’s first neighborhood, First Hill, also called Pill Hill because of the hospitals here.
I’ve trudged up steep grades and sidled through shortcuts. I’ve spotted fewer tents under I-5 but heard more sirens heading up to Harborview.
It’s an urban neighborhood with all that implies, but there’s a gentility beneath the grime. Here are leafy lanes and named apartments buildings, an old German deli on Madison and a cathedral garden behind St. James.
I leave today with the smell of the city in my pores and the pitch of the hills in my calves. And I leave … from First Hill.
Sometimes it seems as if you could will away the marine layer that cloaks this city in the morning, that by walking up and down the hills, through parks and intersections, past coffee shops and markets you could build up enough heat to part the clouds and let the sun shine through.
That’s the way it felt this morning, as I ambled down Pike to Alaskan Way, and headed north … toward Alaska.
I didn’t get that far, of course. Only to Myrtle Edwards Park. But by the time I hiked back up the hill to the hotel, the sun was shining.
It seemed to start with the pandemic, with the chalk art and the concerts on balconies, the way we felt during those first few weeks of the ordeal when we thought our sheltering time would be more like a long blizzard than a new way of life.
Pundits ponder how many of the changes we’ve made over the last 18 months will become permanent fixtures. Let me add one to the mix: the proliferation of yard signs.
Before the pandemic I don’t remember seeing many that weren’t advertising a house for sale or a renovation taking place. Politics are too hot right now for people to use yard signs to advertise their candidate of choice — at least in my neighborhood.
Now there are signs welcoming kindergartners and high-schoolers, banners for birthdays and even notices with desperate requests. The latter includes one from a family in the neighborhood that used the back of their PTO’s grade school welcome sign to scrawl their own heartfelt message: Open The Schools!
At least that one is down now, but I think people are catching on to the potential of yard notices in an era when more of us are at home and walking around.
Yard signs … bring ’em on.
The warm and weighty air we’ve enjoyed lately has camouflaged what’s been going on close to the ground, where low branches have been thinning and yellowing. Where crimson and yellow leaves have mixed in with the green.
It was if the scenery had been clued into the equinox, which in a way it had, I suppose. A woods that looked summery just a few days ago seemed to morph overnight into an autumnal landscape.
I noticed this yesterday on my post-farmers-market stroll, a lovely routine that my newly freed up work status has allowed me to enjoy. The woods near there has a blend of trees and enough underbrush that turns early in the season to burnish the place with gold, to stamp it with the season.
But up above, there is still plenty of green. Time for many more autumn ambles.
I read in this week’s Brain Pickings newsletter that the composer Aaron Copland, in his book Music and Imagination, says listening to music is an art, just as playing it is.
If that’s the case, then I practice the art every time I walk.
This morning, fresh from reading about Copland, the “Overture to Die Meistersinger” in my ears, I thought about how I listen. It’s mostly with the ear of an amateur, someone whose love for music greatly exceeds her knowledge of it.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it; perhaps I enjoy it more.
“There are few pleasures in art greater than the secure sense that one
can recognize beauty when one comes upon it… ” Copland writes. “Recognizing the beautiful
in an abstract art like music partakes somewhat of a minor miracle.”
One aspect of walking I’ve learned to appreciate more in the last few months is its timing, how a stroll is shaded, colored, made whole by the time of day in which it happens. The fast dash of a morning feels totally different when transported into the slow slide of an afternoon. Or vice-versa.
I’ve walked the Lake Audubon Trail before but never at this time or in this season. Doing it in the morning, starting fresh from the ample parking lot rather than getting to it at the end of the long Glade Trail route — made it a new adventure.
There were shady stretches, sunny sections and a feeling of expansiveness every time I glimpsed the water. There were fellow fast-walkers, one man tugging his two Jack Russell terriers, and a young mother pointing out butterflies and squirrels to her toddler.
I’ve learned the hard way that the trail doesn’t go all the way around the lake. So I just made it an out-and-back. From the traffic I passed on the path, I wasn’t the only one.
When 19th-century statesman Henry Clay needed a respite from his life as the “Great Compromiser,” he retreated to the shady groves of Ashland, his Kentucky estate. There, as the sign tells us, he walked the trails of his beloved farm, using them for “tranquil contemplation” of the issues at hand.
For Clay, as for many of us, walking and thinking went hand in hand. Maybe these strolls reinvigorated the legislator after the rigors of rough-and-tumble politics. Maybe they inspired some of his signature moves.
But even if they didn’t, the paths Clay created remain for current-day walkers to explore. When I strolled them two weeks ago, I felt the hush of the giant oaks and sycamores. They stilled my buzzing brain.
Sometimes the solo walker craves the solo trail, to beg off from the world and the bustle. But other times, a peopled path is welcome.
A few Sundays ago I had one of those days — a mid-morning walk on the Glade Trail filled with dog-walkers and baby strollers, with runners and saunterers, with whole families, too.
And no wonder: it was early enough to be comfortable and late enough to accommodate the Sunday sleepers-in.
The smiles and nods gladdened my walk, made me feel part of a company of walkers, rag-tag and accidental, but a company just the same.
This morning, I walked across Kentucky. Not the 370 miles from Ashland to Paducah, or the 180 miles from Covington to Williamsburg. But the two miles around the Kentucky Arboretum trail, which promises to compress all seven of the state’s geographical regions into one stroll.
I saw conifers representing the Appalachian Plateau, dogwood and coffeetree for the Knobs and tall grasses for the Pennyrile Region.
The Bluegrass Region, where Lexington is located, is the most extensive, with bur and chinquapin oaks, several types of ash tree and outcroppings of shaggy limestone.
Ambling through the Arboretum warmed me up, wore me out and educated me, too. After just one visit I can tell it will be one of my regular hometown routes.