Thoreau Farm

I am some 60 minutes into my run in Estabrook Woods on this way-too-warm day, the last one of a winter that never happened, and as my fatigue deepens, I’ve turned my mind to the will needed to step smoothly, to ease along. I’m trying to cohere at a point when the whole running project wants to collapse, its wheels bouncing away, its resolve losing air. My eyes are set steadily on the trail six feet ahead, reading it for stones and good landings. Perhaps it is only that I am moving and caged by my own will, but I sense other motion along the left peripheral edge of vision; adrenaline juices my system, and before I can think, I’ve already upped my speed – I am getting ready for flight. All of this is over in under a second. As my next step falls, the gray shape on my left – crouching wolf? ready cougar? – resolves to rock; my chemistry settles. And I run on at my deliberate and deliberative pace through what must be one of safest stretches of woodland in the world.

Stone or Cougar?

Still, as I run I begin to recall other moments when unexpected shapes on the periphery of vision have brought on similar spikes of startle-juice, when I’ve been suddenly ready to go, or to have a go. And this gets me wondering about the gallery of threats hung deep in my biology, the pictures passed down along the long evolutionary chain of ancestors so that we might survive in our wanderings out from Africa, or out from town. There must be a series of shapes associated with threat that I take with me every time I run in the woods…or along the veldt.

A few years ago I recall reading an article that proposed a positive reinforcement that has kept whatever genetic structure is behind what we call attention deficit disorder, or ADD, alive in us. As a teacher, I’ve long wondered about the roots of this scattering of attention, often at its height just when we ask daily for focus…on this passage of reading, for instance…or on these reductive equations. You, we say to students, must master these words or figures; put everything else aside. And they try. They want, after all, to succeed; they really do.

But, the article’s theory said, perhaps evolution’s wiring has another idea, and it can be found in the word I’ve just used, “aside.” Once, deep in our prehistory, perhaps when we were all still gathered in Africa, it became clear that both our curious natures and the need to find the resources of open territory would lead us out from our original continent. But walking out of Africa would be no easy journey. It would be walking in a dangerous world, one where threat – that sabertooth tiger, for example – might be right along side the trail to be taken. Who then would lead us outward? The theory proposed that we would be/were led by scouts and shamans, who were often selected for their ability to see – it must have seemed a preternatural sort of vision – what most missed, especially along the margins of vision. Those who could see aside, who could spot the peripheral rustle in the brush or conjure some vision, would have been among our leaders. And they, as leaders, would have gotten the best food, the best mates; their genes would have been selected for the next generations and passed on.

What we bring with us when we go walking or running surely shapes what we see and feel when we’re trying to get “out there.”

Note: I am well aware of the torment that severe ADHD causes and by no means want to diminish its effects.  It does, however, strike me that in its milder forms it may foster the sort of awareness that helps us see in deep woods.

Gray October, and a cool mist-rain is being wrung from the clouds; the legendary seasonal sparkle that shoots color into the sky is absent. It is a perfect day for running, however, and I go slap-footing along the tarmac on the way to the woods.

The trail that runs out to Fairhaven Bay ambles through high white pines and a mix of oaks, maples and beech trees. Today, its packed dirt is water-dark, and under the shroud of the forest canopy, I enter a world of half-light. It is either dawn or dusk; I’ve run to an all-day margin of light along the river’s edge. I bend my concentration to picking out roots and stones poking through the litter of pine needles and fallen leaves. Such fall running over cloaked ground invites a fall.

All runners know that a tense upper body produces a lurching franken-gait in the legs; the whole enterprise of moving forward tends toward stumble. I wonder if I should be here.

That’s when it happens: the speckle of dropped leaves begins to glow, especially the yellow ones. It is as if I am running over the pelt of a huge leopard, albeit one where the spots are the light instead of the darkness. The gray above and around me intensifies, and the ground pulses with light, and along that ground everything is evident. I feel that some kindly custodian of the woods has switched on the footlights. My shoulders relax, and my stiffening neck straightens; my hands, which had been lifted, ready for an imagined tumble, drop too and begin to swing in rhythm with my feet. And with rhythm comes reverie, a rivery feeling of ease and good will and attention. I am paying attention without having to work at it because I am seeing each lit leaf.

I                am                 running                 simply                simply               running;

each            leaf            is            glowing            simply            simply            glowing.

Last Tuesday evening we walked to Concord’s First Parish church to hear writer Robert Richardson and painter Lincoln Perry speak about their collaboration on a new edition of Henry Thoreau’s late-life essay, October or Autumnal Tints. The book is its own excursion of beauty, its writing and watercolors both transcendent. And it is a convenient size for carrying out into the woods, an idea implicitly encouraged by a final section called “Personal Leaves”: “We have left room for a few leaves of your own choosing,” they write, and instructions for preserving those leaves follow.
What caught my attention as Richardson read from his accompanying essay that evening was Thoreau saying this: “We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, and then we can hardly see anything else.”

Each yellow leaf. As I run in the dark woods, I can hardly see anything else.

A little later in his essay Richardson writes, “Absolute attention is prayer, said Simone Weil. Thoreau would have understood.”

Just so.

Note: Richardson and Perry’s edition of October or Autumnal Tints is published by W.W. Norton and available at the Concord Bookshop, The Thoreau Society’s Shop at Walden Pond and elsewhere. It is a perfect seasonal companion.

The shadow is small, but for a long time I’ve been attuned to any darkness that crosses the ground or water in front of me. And so I glance up and see the flickering wingbeats, the erratic glides, the glow of orange outlined in black. This is the third monarch to cross above me in the last few minutes, and, as it diminishes, then vanishes into the southwest, I begin to wonder.

Monarch Aloft

It’s been five boat-miles on a day when we have run under the seam of two weather systems – to the west, blue sky; to the east, clouds of varying thickness and height, the tail-end of the cold front that passed over last night. So the light has been superb, the water painted with colors from grey-green to lavender and blue (these to the east). We have been spectacle for seals – curious periscopes, they’ve often bobbed not far away  – and by now overhead upwards of a dozen monarchs, migrating one by one to the southwest, perhaps picking up the front’s early modest breeze from the north, though that has faded quickly. On French Island – our landing point for the day – as I water the bushes, I keep hearing a fussy sound, and the leaves of the sumac shake and rustle. Finally, a warbler shows herself, the pale yellow throat and olive head going brown. For some reason this sighting and closeness make me brim with happiness; out on the bay, it is high tide.

We lift our boats down to the water, put on spray-skirts and PFDs and point for home; it lies now to the northeast across calm water. This will be a leisurely trip. And still, every few minutes, a small shadow appears, aiming at the brightly-colored imperative that is Mexico. The southwest, I think as I press my paddle through the autumn-clear water, was also Henry Thoreau’s favored direction, the one he chose often after letting the compass needle of his intent settle before setting out on his daily walk. But for Henry the southwest was the direction of the future, the way forward in a linear sense. For these small kings of the air it is the way to their winter home, its air-soft path worn by countless generations.

I feel the tug of separation as my paddlestrokes send me forward; I am on a different route. Yes, I turn toward home almost every evening; my days are circles. But I see my life as a line aimed out at some unknown point. On a good day, it feels like a progression, perhaps a rolling forward of a daily round. And still, I look up in wonder at the certainty of each little shadow cycling the other way.