Surprises
Gems, flotsam, observations and coincidence from half a year of walking.
I won't apologize for the lack of writing here these past several months—you aren't paying for it, after all. Making coherent narratives out of day hikes is more difficult than I anticipated. Not much happens, usually, and what does happen is often about the same as what happened last time. There's no plot, in other words; and because I only occasionally and briefly run into other people, there are no characters.
Over several walks a pattern may emerge. Then again, it may not. What distinguishes one walk from another in memory are the surprises, and if surprises fit a pattern, y’know, they would not be surprising.
I was mulling this over late this spring on my umpteenth short-to-middling day hike along the southern edge of Falls Lake, where I go in hot weather and when I'm short on time: close to home, lots of trailheads, pleasant wooded trails. After almost twenty years of regular hiking in the Piedmont the woods here are usually about as surprising as my living room: here and there a different stage of forest succession, and of course the seasons change, but otherwise the same trees, the same background birdsong, the same moss and lichen.
Did I say late spring? Mid-May here is early summer. Warm, humid, buggy—little rotters buzzing around my face, under my hat. Thirsty for sweat in dry weather? rarely have I been so ready to be done with a hike.
A quarter mile from the trailhead where I'd left my car, where the trail opens around a bend into a broad mown strip through tall grass, I saw a flash of blue—not the grayish, partly blue of a bluebird but the jewel-tone all-over blue of an indigo bunting, breakfasting on a worm. Common as they are in the Piedmont I had not seen one in decades. I was thankful, and I wished for more of them: they might have eaten the bugs.
A view of a river or a lake is always new, even from the same vantage. Wind muddles the surface. A surfacing turtle leaves ripples; a boat leaves a wake. Sunlight changes week to week and hour to hour, in angle, intensity and color; the trees whose reflections color the lake change with the seasons. To communicate any of this meaningfully is a job for a painter, not a writer; yet Monet painted the same pond hundreds of times and still was not satisfied. A photograph is a souvenir, pretty but lifeless. The view only makes sense in relation to itself, over time.
The same is true of meeting a person, but that's more troublesome to think about, so forget I said anything.
Walking a path between tall weeds I come on a box turtle, a little larger than my fist, making his way in the same direction. The turtle hears or feels my footsteps, ducks his head, glances back, ducks a little more, and waits. I ease by along the edge of the path. We inspect each other, the turtle wary, head and legs still poking out but ready to withdraw. Something about him reminds me of my dog when he thinks he might be in trouble.
Boots on wet pine straw
Loud enough. A heron flies,
Startled into beauty.
After summer rains chanterelles dot the woods like... well, like chanterelles. Why compare them to something as banal as jewels? Chanterelles should be the standard to which other things are compared.
Sometimes when I walk I make up songs, the sort of old-time songs that had interminably many largely interchangeable verses, like “John Henry” or “Old Dan Tucker,” whose compact form we think we know only because some “folk singer” recorded them after they were already half-forgotten. Everyone who sang them when they were alive borrowed their favorite verses and added their own, and they grew—one has to think, boys being boys—more suggestive, shall we say, as the chaperones drifted away from the dance or the bottle made its way around the fire or the writer got tireder and sweatier and more annoyed by mosquitoes and traffic. Hence a murder ballad I've been working up, and may well keep working up for another thousand miles, because until somebody actually gets killed you can just keep on singing all the way across the Piedmont, inspired by whatever comes along. To wit:
Pretty as a chanterelle,
Eyes like healing crystals,
When she got mad she stormed like hell
And shot me with her pistols.
I’ll keep the dirty verses to myself for now.
South of Smithfield on the shoulder of a four-lane highway comes the unmistakable aroma of hot dogs. Not grilled hot dogs on the Fourth of July, not hot dogs with kraut and spicy mustard from a street-corner cart, but the pure unadorned meat-like smell of long-simmered hot dog soup. Looking around for the source I see the Bright Leaf logo on a cinder-block edifice: I am passing a hot dog factory.
Directly across the street sits the Islamic Center. America, man! If you can't laugh at the ironies diversity brings, you don't have any business promoting it.
Meanwhile, back in town, on a little street above the boat launch with a pretty view of the river, the local theater company is staging The Lion in Winter.
A walking stick left at a trailhead, not forgotten but given forward. Use it, bring it back or leave it where you stop. Sometimes the best community is the one that stays out of your way.
On a long rural road one winter morning a dump truck rumbles past and lets fly something in its wake that is recognizable only later as a wisp-thin clear plastic painting tarp. It leaps into the air as a cloud, and in the artificial wind of automobiles it flutters, billows, forms and re-forms, ever shifting, ever a ghostly almost. As the air stills it drifts downward, flattening, and falls to the grassy roadside among the beer cans, soda bottles, paper cups, plastic bags, Pampers boxes. Garbage. But for perhaps four seconds it might have been the loveliest thing in Johnston County.
At a coffee shop called The Gilded Pear the barista leaves me a message:
Does she say this to everybody? Or is it only that, with my worn-out-of-shape fleece pullover, battered and stained hat, beard, Band-Aid and backpack, I look like I need the pickup? In a place called The Gilded Pear, maybe this time I'm the surprise. Hey, you know—it's all about giving back.
More to come, hopefully in less than another six months.
Email the dirty parts. 😝