The narrow road to nowhere

A haibun sketch of a walk through the woods on the cusp of autumn.

Lately I have been reading the work of the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, specifically his travel writing, which combines prose narrative with haiku in a form he called haibun. Apparently haibun has made a minor resurgence in recent times, which I did not know but cannot find surprising—in the age of the internet, what hasn’t made a resurgence? I don’t know what people are doing with it now; I only know Bashō, and I am still only halfway through his most famous work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But I have played around with this kind of thing before, and I had thought of writing some poetry as part of my own travel sketches along the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.

Taking Bashō as a guide, I decided to write this week’s entry as haibun. What follows is a sketch of a six-mile hike along Falls Lake. I have struggled to find anything new to say about the lake; the poems released me from that struggle. (I have made a couple of other hikes recently and struggled with writing about them, as well, but they demand a different solution. I will come back to them.) Note that my poems are not haiku; they are not anything in particular. For the time being, I am just playing.

---

A cool, gray morning. A storm is on the way, but it will not arrive for some hours. People are walking their dogs before the deluge. A large damp blond, fresh from the lake, quivers at the sight of someone new and poises to charge but heels at a grunt. “He’s so friendly,” the attendant human mutters in apology. I tell them it’s all right, and the dog leans up for a smell, licking the back of my hand before falling quickly back in line, apparently satisfied. Why waste an opportunity for friendship, even one so fleeting?

Soon after I hear the scratching snuffling muttering and occasional sharp correction of a small pack under voice control. They come in sight, a motley jumble of fur and spandex, muddy paws and wet running shoes. With varying needs of persuasion they clear the trail and wait for me to pass.

     Above a green finger of lake,
     Four dogs sit, scratching
     Their haunches on dry leaves.

The trail runs some distance above the lake, but here and there paths lead to the shore, some well-trod and welcoming, some held in place by tangles of roots and rocky outcrops. I try them all; I am not in a hurry. On a sunny day the lake is a wavering mirror of the world, but today it only takes on the character of the sky and the trees, alternating silver and gray-green as my vantage and the wavelets permit. Above the treetops clouds loom violet like distant mountains.

Where sun reaches the lakeside rocks and sand flowers peek between the spurts of grass. I found purple false foxglove with its pale speckled interior, which my field guide calls gerardia; but that is too like giardia, and to call a flower by something so near the name of an intestinal parasite seems wrong. Then again, the book says that this flower is parasitic on grass, so perhaps my delicate sensibilities are misplaced.

The trail turns aside at little creeks and follows them upstream to narrows before crossing and returning. I am glad of wooden bridges but prefer the rocky fords, where I can see the rocks beneath the current and watch the minnows dart in and out of crevices.

     The lake reflects the world beyond
     To conceal what lies beneath,
     But the stream has no secrets. 

At the mouth of a creek, in a flat of muddy shallows, three young children walk on the trunk of a fallen tree and poke in the water with little nets. They wear boots and rain jackets, bright blue and red, and they have the easy, lightly squabbling interactions of siblings. I follow the creek upstream, and when I return on the other side they are still playing, and still no adult is in sight. Maybe they walked from a house uphill of the lake, or maybe their guardian is on shore and less garishly dressed. They are safe enough together, and I am glad that no one stands over them, telling them what they ought to find with their nets. They are just playing.

     Bright-clad, perched along an olive log,
     Three birds fishing in the mud.

I come to a section of forest recently burned, where trunks are charred but erect and the underbrush is dead tangles. Elsewhere longleaf pine forest is tended and managed with fire, but these trees are mixed pine and hardwood, and the pines do not appear to be longleaf. A lightning strike, or a careless hiker?

The forest floor is all shadows of gray and brown, but high above my head the light still filters through green leaves. Look up, and it is as if nothing happened.

     Summer rules the canopy
     While winter reigns below.
     Tragedy divides 
     What it cannot conquer.

A storm has brought down a great white oak, and smaller trees with it. The trail disappears beneath the carnage, and I have to move aside some underbrush to find a foothold.

A stand of hollies, twisted by whim or by vines, appears to dance. In a darker mood I might find them menacing. The trees are silent on the matter.

Out of nowhere a doe leaps and bounds across my path, crashing out of silence and then back into it, stopping some distance away to assess the danger. We watch each other for a minute or two until I grow tired of the tension. Hoping to pass her I step gently along the trail, but not gently enough; in a flash of white tail she is gone. Wisely so, I acknowledge, for it is bow-hunting season, and though unarmed I am no herbivore.

     Predator and prey, we will
     Ourselves to stillness
     But cannot will ourselves to peace.

Civilization appears. A sign on a stand asks my name, officious in its formality but powerless to compel obedience, a tin-pot dictator of the woods. Inside is a notebook in which hikers have written their names, the number in their parties, their zip codes, and how far they are walking. It is pleasant to see the names and imagine the people who have shared the trail, but the zip codes remind me that this is not about community but accountability. Without money there can be no parks, and without accountability there can be no money, and so I will be a good bean and consent to be counted. My presence is hardly a secret. Still I wish that I had a trail name: pseudonymity would equally serve the needs of bureaucracy and better serve the curiosity of the next hiker to page through the notebook.

Without maintenance the woods will swallow a footpath, yet packed down by much travel a road may survive for decades. Near where an old roadbed crosses the trail—a road older than automobiles, that was never improved into compliance with them—lie the rusted remains of a car. The flipped car is a landmark on trail guides, but in truth there is little to see here, and walking west you might easily pass it without noticing. Beneath the frame broken glass and upholstery springs suggest the machine’s rotted flesh, but there is not enough left now for even a bird’s nest.

At last the trail emerges onto a road still used as a road. Bayleaf Church Road ends here, by a facility of the state parks system, and this trailhead is my destination today. It is time to head back. But seeing the light of the lake to my right I follow what remains of the road out of the woods and onto a pebbly shore, where I find that the road does not end at all but only disappears into the water in a tumble of broken asphalt.

I believe I can see on the far shore where it emerges, only a dimple in the treeline. Past that—I learn later, from maps—lies a cemetery where the gravestones date from the nineteenth century, and a short road called Old Bayleaf Church Road that runs into NC 98. What once connected that road with this one was lost when Falls Dam was built and flooded the Neuse to make the lake. Lest I might think of diving in after it, a sign warns me off: SWIMMING PROHIBITED.

     At journey’s end, though lines still show
     The narrow way, the road
     Crumbles, leading nowhere.

I turn around, and go home.

Notes and further reading

My copy of Matsuo Bashō’s poetry is The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, translated and with an introduction by Nobuyuki Yuasa (Penguin Books, 1966).

The car is believed to be a 1951 Hudson Pacemaker and is not, therefore, the car wrecked in the tale of Sisyphus of the Eno, which was a Thunderbird.

On Flickr, Dean Jeffrey has an album of photographs of Ghost Roads of Falls Lake, where you can see what Bayleaf Church Road looks like on the north side.