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Land Between Fences

Land Between Fences

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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 Sound of Rain

The Sound of Rain

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I began in a light rain, parking the car at a gravel turnout
and approximating where I left off on this section of the trail a couple months
ago. Not the best weather for walking, but I had two hoods,
one on my sweatshirt and the other on my down jacket. Together, they kept most of me dry so that only my shoes and jacket took a hit.

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. 


And there was the
acoustic aspect, the splash of drops on leaves — fat drops that seemed more
solid than liquid (and afterward, on the radio, I heard we were expecting
freezing rain). 

This was my accompaniment on today’s stroll. A quiet world, just the sound of rain hitting earth.

Time for Sun

Time for Sun

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What a difference the sun makes. It’s cold, slightly above freezing, a steady breeze blowing off the lake. But the day is friendly, not the alien weather of yesterday, which was inhospitable to humans.

I say this from experience, after first rambling along the shore and then trudging up to the ridge, where the combination of exertion and distance from the lake made the temperature almost bearable.

Today there are sounds of life, some hammering next door, an occasional car engine. It’s time for me to go outside — if for no other reason than to know how good it feels to come back in! 

Long Way Home

Long Way Home

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The Building Museum on a warm, sunny day.

When the day is long, the air is cold, and the bag is heavy (last night’s contents: piles of work, a newspaper, magazine, shoes and gym clothes) the Judiciary Square Metro stop is the natural choice. It’s five minutes away from the office.

But last night I pushed on to Metro Center. It’s a mile or so down the road: Down E Street to Ninth Street to F Street to Thirteenth and almost to G. I walk past the Building Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, through Chinatown and Penn Quarter, get almost as far as the White House before I head down to the train.

I catch snatches of conversation (“Well, there’s that Italian place down the street…”),  spot the remnants of a farmer’s market, see scores of tourists milling around the Spy Museum.

My bag is heavy, I think of the errands I have to run before I get home. But I’m glad I chose this route. I was tired when I started. But I’m not anymore.

Legacy Trail

Legacy Trail

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In Lexington this weekend I was in mild trail withdrawal. For a couple of years I’d noticed what appeared to be a paved path running along Newtown Pike, my way out of town. And every time I’d notice it, too late to explore, I’d tell myself, next time.

This time was next time, so I did a little Googling, figured out approximately where it began, and stumbled upon the Northside YMCA trailhead by a happy accident. This is no cross-county trail. It’s 12 miles, not 40, and it has a self-consciousness that the Fairfax County trail lacks.

But it did what all good trails do: It took me out of the here and now, plunked me down into some other realm where roads are crossed at odd angles and places I normally zoom by are viewed slowly and in great detail.

It was sunny when I started, but I walked so far that it was almost dark by the time I got back to my car. The lights of Lexington blinked in the distance. I was in my hometown but I was not. I was in some other place, on a trail.

How to Live? Walk.

How to Live? Walk.

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I’ve been reading about the 16th-century writer Montaigne, who invented the essay, from the French essayer, to try. The idea of “writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity has not existed forever,” says Sarah Bakewell in her book How to Live or A Life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. “It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.”

“Unlike most memoirists of his day,” Bakewell writes, “he did not write to record his own great deeds and achievements. Nor did he lay down a straight eyewitness account of historical events.” Instead, he used ordinary topics — friendship, names, smells, thumbs, wearing clothes — as a way to explore the question “How to live?”

Here are some of his answers, according to Bakewell: Pay attention; read a lot; wake from the sleep of habit; see the world; reflect on everything and regret nothing and, finally, let life be its own answer.

I’ve been taking notes, as I often do, and there are many passages I’ve recorded to reflect on later. Here’s one of my favorites:

Montaigne did not brood in his tower, Bakewell writes. “He liked to be out walking. ‘My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it.'”

Every hike, saunter, amble, walk and run I take tells me he’s onto something there.

Capitol Walk

Capitol Walk

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One of my favorite city routes is walking around the Capitol. So at lunchtime yesterday I did what I often do: strolled down New Jersey Avenue with its high-arching trees, skirted the Carillon (named for President Taft’s son, Robert, who served in the Senate from 1938 to 1953), and crossed Constitution Avenue onto the Capitol grounds.

From there it’s a clockwise sweep of the 58-acre park — dodging tourists, watching workers clamber on the scaffolding around the dome, keeping eyes and ears open to the kaleidoscopic scene.

There’s the slow pedaling of the bicycle cops patrolling their beat; the brisk stride of the office worker hurrying to lunch; the lingering saunter of tourists, guidebooks in hand.

At the southwest corner I stop to smell the last roses of summer, still blooming in the Botanical Gardens. The trees there are already orange.

Heading north, I cross the Mall, weave through parked cars, then take a paved path back to Constitution. Only 40 minutes out of the office. An eternity.

 
(The Capitol from the east, before the scaffolding went up.)

Cutting My Losses

Cutting My Losses

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The walks I’ve been taking lately on the Cross-County Trail are not without their lessons, and one of the foremost is learning to recognize when I’m lost. The trail is well marked — most of the time — but on Saturday there was a stone crossing, a sudden turn and — voila! — I was in uncharted territory.

There was a path, of course, but there are many paths in the woods. Some are barely perceptible, the width of a deer (and given the skinny deer we have in Fairfax County, that’s not very wide); others are broad but lead in the wrong direction. The latter is what I was dealing with Saturday. It could have been the Cross-County Trail — except that it wasn’t.

When I’d walked for a while without noticing the distinctive CCT marker, I turned around and retraced my steps. There was a trail that went off to the left, but it was rockier and less cleared than I was used to — probably a dead end. There was another possibility, but it looped back onto the path I was on. I walked all the way back to the steppingstones before I found my error — and it was a big one — turning the wrong direction after I crossed the creek.

Once righted I could immediately tell the difference. The path was sure and springy beneath my feet. I had cut my losses quickly. I was on my way.

Hidden Pond

Hidden Pond

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Today I walked down an old section of Hunter’s Valley Road to twin stone pillars flanking a trail. A few hundred feet down a muddy path I came to a grove of bamboo so thick that light barely penetrated the thicket. It rained hard last night and everything was drenched. Moisture beaded up at the ends of the bamboo fronds and dripped on me as I shoved my way through the foliage.

Once into the enclosure I marveled at the space. A pond, completely hidden from view, surrounded on three sides by bamboo and on the other by banked rows of rhododendrons and azaleas. Fallen leaves and lily pads dotted the surface, and the great shaggy bamboo, weighted by water, hung its head in the pool.

What is it about a hidden garden we find so appealing? Is it the incongruity of something outside and in the open but still out of sight? Or is it the feeling that it gives us, one of enclosure and safety. Whatever the explanation, the place had a magical effect on me; it calmed me, slowed me, made me want to stay.

Learning the Rules

Learning the Rules

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I’ve been thinking about suburbia and suburbanites this morning — about those of us who make our homes in neither the city nor the country but in that place in between — and how we are the product of zoning laws, cheap mortgages and office parks.

I work for a law school but seldom think about how laws and policies have shaped the place I live. Even the open space I praise in this blog is mandated by regulations on density and the percability of soil. The same rules that give us a meadow isolate us from each other.

So what’s a walker to do? Keep walking, I suppose. Because walking knits together the here and now with the then and gone. It also makes me care. And if we are ever to change the way we live we must first care enough to understand how it came to be.