Tag Archives: New England

Immersion

The little plan took hold during some days of visiting throughout southern New England. Why not, I thought as the miles slid beneath our tires, use a few free hours in Concord to retrace favorite trails behind (west of) Walden and then rinse off the heat and dirt with an immersion. Once seeded, the idea grew to promise – because the 29th would be my birthday, it would be a present to self.

A few minutes past three, I set out from Bear Garden Hill, tracing the Sudbury on my right, headed for Fairhaven. Beech leaves spot the trail, their yellow light rising from the ground. Then up under the Fairhaven cliffs, their jutting rock still a surprise after all these years, and on toward the pond. From atop the westside bank, the greeny waters are flecked with gray from the changing sky – the recent infusion of summer air is giving way to fall’s return and the wind has shifted to the northeast. Walden’s water is, as Henry Thoreau proposed often, most beautiful.

Another day, another hour, but always beautiful water.

Another day, another hour, but always beautiful water.

Even though I made my immersion vow during an 80-degree day that begged for its cooling, and now the temperature would be hard pressed to nudge 70, I reaffirm my plan. To warm for it, I run on, rounding the pond, climbing over Emerson’s Cliff, checking on the beavers in the bog south of the pond and trailing on into the Lincoln woods. By the time I return to the pond, I’m hot, and I shuck off my shoes and shirt before the cooling wind can take my heat.

The water is bracing cool. Here, on the southwest side, the bottom falls away quickly; a few steps bring me to chest level, and ducking myself pondward takes me out over my head. I float, feeling my body’s contractions, its heat seeping out, its muscles registering surprise. I can’t achieve an easy float for sky-watching, and so I ease back to shoulder-level water. There, I stand and watch the wavelets play across the eye-level surface. An envelope of water warms around me; I relax, slip toward reverie.

What wakens me is a jostling. Its enough to test my balance, and it takes me a few seconds to realize that the larger wavelets are rocking me. I watch a five-incher approach. It curls slightly; it mimics its larger sea-cousins. The trough drops the water-level to my neck, then the crest rises to my chin, and, sure enough, the wave moves me.

I begin a game of guessing the wavelets’ force, noting soon that the trough behind the first wave draws me to the second wave, whose force then feels magnified. A beech leaf surfs by. I am completely immersed in my reading of this water and the play of wind across it.

Even here at September’s end, with its sense of departure and imperative about “several more lives to live,” Walden is a whole world.

Trees for the Forest

I’ve spent much of my summer nearly past amid the trees; I became more mindful of this during a recent paddle on wide open waters near Maine’s Isle au Haut (pronounced locally, Isle a Ho). Most of the islands in this area are dense with forest, mostly spruce, birch and few white pines, and, when I pulled in for a rest stop on Wreck Island, I stepped from under a wide ocean sky into a close, lichen-papered room of dark woods. Pale green bearded-moss filtering the light hung from the trees; my eyes had to jump open a number of f-stops to see. A thin trail wound off to the right, and, for a minute, I watched it expectantly. Wreck Island is, however, now inhabited only by deer and assorted smaller animals, and so I was really peering down a trail and waiting for the past to arrive.

Spruce-capped Islands

Spruce-capped Islands

That past, in the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s, saw very different islands, first claimed and then inhabited by a mix of farmers and fishermen and soon shorn of their trees, which went for fields, buildings, boats, heat and, as the 1800s wore on, pulp. Photos from the 1880s are recognizable only in the shapes of the islands. Such shearing of woodlands was, of course, familiar to Henry Thoreau in Concord also – that long-farmed landscape was cut close, which undoubtedly helped Thoreau treasure those patches of swamp and woodland left untouched. But to find deep woods, Thoreau had to travel to interior Maine.

As I paddled amid the islands, I thought about the microcosm of regeneration each represents. All but a few have full heads of forest-hair, and the interiors of those forested islands have reverted to the timeless suggestion and mystery of woodlands. On one tiny island (Potato), the heart-shaped hoof prints of deer pointed to who lived there now. The regreening of New England has been much noted (over 80% of our region is now forested), and, as the trees and forest thicken annually, woody anomalies keep reappearing too – a mountain lion in Connecticut (DNA sampling said he’d migrated from the Dakotas), a moose on Rte 128, bears in backyard trees. Now, ironically, the most shorn of landscapes can be found in the vast clear cuts of Maine’s interior, where only narrow “beauty strips” of trees separate those who paddle the rivers from the dazed, cut-over square miles of former woods.

New Trees above the cove at Wreck Island

New Trees above the cove at Wreck Island

Thoreau liked to count the rings of trees and learn the outlines of their stories during the good years and the hard. Counting the trees of this summer outlines a story of regeneration that Henry Thoreau would have nodded at and liked.

Little Feats

Note: no quotations from Henry Thoreau in this post, but I like to think a similar spirit suffused his mountains.

The other day, while small-stepping along the trails that lead to and from Walden, I got to thinking about footwork. A lifetime of trails has kept me reasonably adept at the juggling cadence needed for New England trails and their studding of rocks and roots, often disguised by leaf litter. But it was a sharp downhill that triggered this running meditation.

Not long ago, I’d heard from a younger friend who runs mountain trails. I’d asked for a report about a loop I like, and I had gotten back a detailed account of a daylight-long ramble. At its close he wrote, “the last five miles go by pretty quickly with a bomber descent off Flume and a flat mile out to the road.” ‘Bomber descent,’ I thought as I short-stepped down the sharp, forty-foot drop off an esker; ‘no way no way no way no no way…’ – this one-syllable no-mantra set up with my stepping.

All of New England’s mountains genuflect to their northern shaper, the glaciers, gone to water for now, but likely to cycle back at some point. The upended, frost-split rock is their residue, and everyone who visits our uplands must contend with its odd angles.

As boy turned loose for the first time from parental supervision, I began to stride and run through the White Mountains. I was seventeen; I was in a hurry. Beyond each summit was another, and that was where I wanted to be.

Rock-strewn Way

Rock-strewn Way

Memory’s scrapbook holds images from a summer day moving north along the ridge that joins Mt. Washington to Mt. Jefferson; I am with a 17-year-old friend who is new to these hills and their jumbled trails; I am his trail-tutor. “Look,” I say, eyeing the half-mile descent of Mt. Clay’s flank, “it’s more fun to run this.” I don’t think so,” he replies, and he starts down in a stolid fashion. “At least take my pack,” I say, and he returns, shoulders it (only a day pack) and turns downhill again. I watch him grow steadily smaller.

The amperage loose in my system has me edgy, which is another way to say sharp. I see my first five steps and figure the rest will appear. They do. I land on various edges, listen to the hollow clunk of my boots and odd knocking stones, and when I can’t find my next step immediately, I do what my mountain-running counselor taught me at fourteen – I “go up.”

“Going up,” jumping higher when you see no landing, may sound counterintuitive, but it works. In those few airborne seconds, you find your next step, even if it is a thin edge of stone; and then you quick-step on. This is rock-dancing, and in that era of life that was my way.

Up There - Franconia Ridge

Up There – Franconia Ridge

That memory leads to appreciation for the ways our walking changes over time. And so, even as I walk and shuffle the same trails as my younger friend and my younger self, I leave the bombing to them and dance now in short steps. They are my little feats.

Post note: surely, when you consider the ground Henry Thoreau covered on his walks and in the hills, he too must have “danced” or “bombed” some of his descents.