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.

Possibilities of Place

Possibilities of Place

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Since Sunday’s hike I’ve been doing a little research on the Cross-County Trail, Difficult Run and the watershed. I’ve learned about ongoing projects to manage the streams, to keep them healthy with drainage and tree buffers.

I’ve learned about the flooding that often occurs in the section I hiked a few days ago. Most of all, I’ve learned about the communities of runners, walkers and bikers who have traveled these trails before me.

I’ve read stories of single-day marathons, of Nordic pole-walkers, of runners wading waist-high across streams when the water tops the fair-weather crossings.

What these tales have in common is a sense of adventure and discovery. There is awe of the natural beauty, of the possibilities of this place.

Payday

Payday

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It struck me yesterday as I was walking that it was the last day of the month — payday.

Like many people, I’m paid electronically. The money enters our account without a sound. No envelope opening, no bank teller tabulating. A silent acquisition.

This is a wonderful convenience and not something I want to change. But it means I seldom celebrate the wage-earning aspect of my work, the fact that every month a comfortable sum is exchanged for my toil.

So today I’m celebrating — with a silent cheer.

Six Twenty-Eight

Six Twenty-Eight

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I’m learning a little more about Metro’s new Silver Line every day: where to stand on the platform so  I can transfer easily downtown; how to negotiate the confusing, multi-level garage; and, this morning, how to avoid the garage entirely.

There’s a free parking lot near the Reston Wiehle station, actually a series of parking lots. I’ve known about them for years — they were originally intended as park-and-ride lots for bus riders — but it suddenly dawned on me that they’re just a couple blocks from the new Metro station. Maybe they’re not open anymore, maybe they’re reserved — or maybe they’re a way to save $4.85! 

Today was the day to find out, so I left the house a little after 6, pulled up to the lots about 6:20 and found … pandemonium. Cars pulling in, cars circling, cars like vultures searching for carrion. I tried one section of the lot and found it completely full, then headed back the way I had come in to explore the other side. It looked tight. Most spots were taken but there, off to my left, wasn’t that an opening? Yes! It was! I pulled in quickly before someone beat me to it.

As I was walking to the station I fell in step with a fellow commuter who told me that this lot “always fills up by 6:28. Those cars there are the last ones that will find spots.”

Why 6:28 and not 6:29 or 6:31 I never learned, but the man seemed quite sure of himself. A full lot by 6:28 a.m.? Why not?

Walking to the Potomac

Walking to the Potomac

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Yesterday a hike from Colvin’s Run Mill to the Potomac River, eight miles round trip on the Cross-County Trail. The river is the trail’s northern terminus and you have to work a little to get there. Floods have taken out part of the gravel walk along the stream and there’s a stretch where you must clamber over rocks or turn back. Combine that with two fair-weather creek crossings and I used up my courage quotient for the day.

The destination was worth it, though, walking along the roiling waters of Difficult Run as it makes its way to the river, plunging and skipping over rocks, through channels narrow and deep. (Hard to believe it’s related to the rivulet that meanders through my neighborhood.)

And then coming finally to the Potomac, the orange and yellow kayaks glimpsed through the trees, Maryland on the other side. The stateliness and otherness of a river. And a walk that made the destination matter.

Changing of the Guard

Changing of the Guard

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The small peeps of the hummingbird have given way to the eponymous “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” of that small bird. The chickadees will be with us all winter, and if last year was any indication, other birds will crowd the feeder and suet block: cardinals, grackles, woodpeckers, maybe even a bluebird or two.

But I’ll miss the hummingbirds, their aerial displays, the way they dive-bomb each other, claiming all the nectar for their own. I’ll miss seeing their tiny outlines as they perch on the wire of the tomato cage. Who knew they could perch?  They seem the very embodiment of perpetual motion.

Now they’re whirring their way to their winter destination in Central America, propelling their impossibly tiny bodies across the Gulf of Mexico fortified with nectar, insects and what I can only think of as hope.

Usefulness

Usefulness

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“I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being virtually useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”

Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

I’ve just started reading this book, which is a meditation on solitude, a history of wildfires and fire control in the American West, and (at least in part) a paean to Aldo Leopold, the great conservationist I discovered a few years ago. It’s written by a guy who sits in a tower looking for wildfires in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico.

Talk about dreams of escape — this is certainly one for me. Purposeful, sporadic work, enforced alone time, the splendor of creation. But for now, my secondary landscape will have to be the one I create every time I lace up my running shoes and step out the door.

Walking is for me a way to be “useless in the calculations of the culture” so I can become “useful, at last, to myself.” Walking is also low-tech. It produces nothing, consumes little. But it is rich in what matters most: the time and space in which to observe, think, slow the wheels of time.

Rain Power

Rain Power

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I don’t love the rain but I do appreciate its force and manner, the way it reminds us of elemental things, of topography, for instance.

My neighborhood is laced with the tributaries of Little Difficult Run, and when showers are heavy these timid trickles become raging torrents. I’ve seen bridges lifted off their moorings and deposited downstream. I’ve seen small lakes form as creeks flood their banks and become rivers. I’ve seen trees topple, their roots torn from rain-loosened soil.

Today’s deluge is not enough for that. But it’s enough to make me remember.

(Before the storm.)

I’m Stumped

I’m Stumped

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On one of my favorite, most well-trod routes, I start on the street and end up in the woods. The last part of my walk winds through the “Folkstone Forest,” a straggly stretch of trees that lines the road and leads to the common land meadow.

It’s not a forest in the classic, fairy tale sense, but a neighbor has gone to the trouble of printing up a green sign that says “Folkstone Forest” and hung it from a branch, so who am I to contradict?

The little trail I take is lined with fallen logs and dignified by a small plank bridge. But by this point in my walk I’m ready to be home. The playlist is winding down, the work is waiting. So of course it’s then, when I’m not paying attention, that I run across the tiniest little nub of a tree stump.

Can I tell you how many times this stump has tripped me up? Too many to count. So now I look for it. I check out the smooth dirt path for the aberration, the knob. It’s become a game for me, to find the stump before it stumps me. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. The stump keeps me humble.