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Category: walking

Still Life with Hay Bales

Still Life with Hay Bales

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Last evening in the golden hour of slanted light, I walked up the road a quarter mile to a field I’ve been seeing on our drives.  My goal: to capture “on film” a field of daisies. 

But the daisies were a little too far away and the traffic was whipping around me as I stood on the scant shoulder, so I made quick work of the shot. On the way back, though, I raised my phone to photograph another beautiful field, green grass studded with hay bales lit by the lowering sun. 

I’d actually crunched and marched my way across this field when I thought I could reach the daises on foot, before I discovered the rusty wire fence and the treed border. I’d taken some photos of the hay bales from that angle and found them lacking.

But up above, on the berm, I could capture the sunlight and the shadows— beauty on a larger scale. Proof, once again, of the power of perspective. 

The Lark Ascending

The Lark Ascending

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I was lucky to find early in my life the twin passions that drive it still. One is words, the other is music. I’ve made my living from the first and kept the second for pleasure. For that reason, music has been the great unexplored ocean — restless, deep and ever-changing. 

This morning for some reason I hankered to hear the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Thanks to the streaming service I had free for six months and decided I must keep, his pieces were at my fingertips. 

My walk began with Overture to the Wasps, which after a buzzing start, settles into a brisk march and then a shimmering serenade. 

I listened to The English Folk Song Suite, Fantasia on Greensleeves, and then… The Lark Ascending. It’s this last one that I can’t get out of my mind, so much so that I came home and started playing it on my computer. The comments on the YouTube page — more than four thousand of them — speak to the power of this special piece and of music in general.

People write about emerging from depression after listening to The Lark, of saying goodbye to dying loved ones with this soaring melody. The piece harkens back to a simpler time, said many. One man wrote that it reminds him of his parents peddling through the English countryside during World War II, his father on leave from the RAF, the couple picnicking one golden afternoon. Life amidst the madness, ending somehow on a high note, despite it all.

One-Car Weekend

One-Car Weekend

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I remember when the driveway used to resemble a parking lot — five drivers and as many as four cars. Lately, there have just been two parked there, both gray sedans. And starting Friday, with one car in the shop, there’s just been one. 

This might have seemed difficult in the past, a juggling act, but lately not so much. We  often run errands separately, but those can be planned around each other. Appointments seldom overlap. Neither of us parks our car all day at a Metro lot.

Life is simpler in this respect, and it makes me wonder … could we do this permanently? I’d like to say yes, doing our bit for the carbon footprint and all, but I’ll have to say no. 

In the suburbs, the car is autonomy, mastery and sometimes salvation. I’m thinking about the other day, when a walk I thought would be one hour was more than two, how glad I was to see my car parked beneath the trees, waiting to carry me home.

So as much as I’d like to be noble and economical, I’m hoping that the one-car weekend doesn’t become a one-car week. 

Briefly Lost

Briefly Lost

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I started off slowly yesterday, as if I knew the walk would be longer than usual. It was one of those sultry afternoons that envelops you in summer, humid without being oppressive, full-bodied and yet (to me at least) still comfortable. 

The Glade Trail beckoned, cool and single-minded, one long tunnel of green. I took it to the Cross-County Trail and then to Lake Audubon.

I had strolled around Lake Audubon before and knew you could not circumnavigate it, but I tried again anyway, knowing it would spit me out somewhere. And it did — only at first I had no idea where that somewhere was. Was it a neighborhood near the pool? A development near the shopping center? 

For a moment, I had to get my bearings. For a moment, I was lost. 

But I turned the way I thought I should, and there, on my right, was the Montessori School, a marker. Nowhere near where I thought I would be. But somewhere I knew, just the same. 

Mixing it Up

Mixing it Up

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Walking yesterday I found myself going the “wrong” way on familiar routes. I was, without intending to when I began, mixing it up. 

Down West Ox and into Franklin Farm, striding down the shady path into the neighborhood instead of out of it, as I usually do. From there to Dower House Drive, and only picking up the open trail when I got to Flat Meadow.

One of the last times I was in this area the walking paths were being repaved, and I was chased away by a small tar-roller machine. This time it was quiet, a Sunday morning, fresh and cool after days of oppressive humidity. 

The trail was open, the way was clear. I need to mix it up more often. 

Shank’s Mare

Shank’s Mare

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Today, my feet are in the suburbs but my soul is in the city. I’m missing New York City in many ways, especially in this one: walking there is purposeful. It’s about getting where you need to be, not taking 10,000 steps.

You don’t bother with the subway if you’re just hopping 20 blocks. Taxis are harder to come by than they used to be, and on Thursday night, Uber was asking $120 to take you from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side. Yes, they are on opposite sides of the island, but come on!

Which brings us to shank’s mare, that most dependable mode of transportation. It might be hot and it might take a minute, but walking will get you where you need to be.

Yes, I rhapsodize about the practice of walking. It calms and inspires me on a daily basis. So much so that it’s easy to forget its original purpose, which is to get us from one place to another. In New York City, you don’t forget.

A Symphony

A Symphony

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If walking in the suburbs is a sonata, walking in the city is a symphony. It is the cued entrance of  countless well-tuned players, the trilling of a piccolo, the thrum of a timpani. It is pedestrians striding through the square and construction workers in hard hats taking a break. 

It’s a stroll on the High Line and a view of lower Manhattan from Little Island, the city’s newest park. 

It’s meandering through the West Village, down Bedford and Barrow, past the Cherry Lane Theater and on to Bleecker, where I’ll grab a Napoleon and watch ten white-habited monks who’ve come from Our Lady of Pompeii to buy some cannolis. 

It’s the plume of a fountain in Washington Square Park and the chess players and weed hawkers and pickup jazz bands that gather nearby.

It’s a trip to the Strand Bookstore (still there!) on the way uptown, then dinner at a hundred-plus-year-old bar and grill.

Four movements, none of them replicable. A city walk. A symphony. 

A Walking Trifecta

A Walking Trifecta

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I’m filing this under the category of “books and book reviews I wish I’d written” — a single article in yesterday’s print copy of the Washington Post that covered three books on walking — a trifecta of pleasure that has added three tomes to my must-read list.

In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration, by neuroscientist Shane O’Mara, describes the many benefits of walking, most of which I know but all of which I love hearing about again: how it helps protect heart and lungs and even builds new cells in the hippocampus.  

In First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human, paleontologist Jeremy DeSilva explains the importance of bipedalism to human exploration, how it made possible the longer legs and shoes that have taken us to colder climes and, ultimately, even the moon.

Finally, the reviewer, Sibbie O’Sullivan, discusses Healing Trees: A Pocket Guide to Forest Bathing, which explores the Japanese concept of shinrin-yoku, immersing oneself in nature:

“Every page of ‘Healing Trees’ reminds us how separated from the world, from nature, from the trees, we’ve become,” writes O’Sullivan, who injects herself beautifully into the essay by describing her own walking, falling and resultant knee surgery. “Too often we take walking for granted,” she writes, “but we shouldn’t.” 

Drive to Walk

Drive to Walk

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Now that I have a little more time on my hands (emphasis on “a little” … but I’ll talk about that in another post), I often drive to walk. That’s drive to walk, not to work.

Before, I had meetings and deadlines that meant I would slip out of the house with 30 or 40 minutes only. No time for the 10-minute drive to my favorite Reston trail — only enough to get me up and down the main drag of my neighborhood.

Which is not a bad stroll. In fact, it’s still my go-to favorite, with houses and people I know and a path so familiar I could probably trudge it in my sleep.

But now I can mix it up a little, even though that means indulging in the great suburban irony — driving … to walk. 

(Bridge over Glade Creek on one of my favorite drive-to trails.)

Bikers and Bierstadt

Bikers and Bierstadt

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A late walk yesterday after the rain stopped. Trees still dripping, air cleansed, sun blazing bright just hours before setting.

I wasn’t the only one out and about. Neighbors were picking up their mail, stretching their legs, walking their dogs.

A bevy of bikers zoomed past, the usual Tuesday evening crowd. Except that nothing is usual anymore. I didn’t see them for a year, so spotting them again, watching them fly past (I could barely wrestle my phone from my back pocket in time to catch them) was the cherry on the sundae that was yesterday’s stroll.

As I walked back to the house, the trees were lit up like a Bierstadt painting.