Finding the beauty in the world
NOTE: This is one of a series of things I wrote as part of the weekly Thursday Night Live Writing that I and a group of folks from around the country participate in. I haven’t posted any in a while. So I’m catching up. Here’s one:
The real world is so hard to find these days. Yet it’s there, right there.
It was 70 degrees yesterday. That is news in itself. But it was sunny, too. And my partner and I were deeply immersed in our gardens, she in the flowers, me in the fruits and vegetables (preparing for that day when it’s safe to plant.) I was in weeding the strawberries (a hateful job), trying to isolate those hateful (did I say hateful again) strands of witch grass and Virginia creeper and dandelions. The black flies were now crawling around my ankles; they were weaving under my hat; they were burrowing into the waste of my pants.
It was time to move. It was time to find a mountain.
There were no cars at the trailhead. A sign proclaimed the trail closed but we ignored it. Sorry. Insurrection. If yahoos can take their guns and storm the Michigan State House, I can sneak into a favorite trail and climb a mountain.
To understand the geology and geography of Vermont you must imagine yourself standing in the middle of Lake Champlain looking north and you then realize that the Adirondacks to the left (west) and the Green Mountains to the right (east) are the banks of what was a giant glacier that scoured the countryside. The Abenaki had a different theory; that a goddess slept on the ground and when she stood, the impression she left created the lake and mountains.
The trail starts easy, as they always do, past a marsh that had, for us, birds with unidentifiable calls. We stopped a bit and listened, eavesdropped. Do the birds understand each other? Can one species talk to another? Do they ever have the urge to mimic, to trick, to make believe? Perhaps a woodpecker could masquerade as a finch, a hawk as a robin. How do they laugh?
We walked on.
The woods in Vermont when the trees are juuuuusssst beginingg to bud are gorgeous. The early trees buds are reddish and orange, with the greens following, so on this day the world, the real world, had a nice warm reddish glow. Without leaves, though, you can see so much deeper into the woods, see the new windfall, the wildflowers sprouting from the forest floor. We did not make very fast headway as we strayed from the trail to look at this yellow flower or that blue one or that purple one.
The trail had new obstacles for us; a giant golden birch finally gave up, bringing with it a host of small maples bent under the unyielding weight. We walked around it. There were fresh tracks of deer, foxes, is that a coyote? Not sure. Clearly a raccoon was out and about, it’s fresh clear track from the muskeg down to the spring.
When the trail finally stopped messing around and headed up, up, up, we leaned forward, found a pace, worked a sweat and kept moving. We were topside before we knew it though we both were sweating and had stopped several times for water. At the top, the trail meanders to the left through a grove of bushy young hemlocks and then, like a camera shutter, opens to a rocky ledge and a view to the west unlike many others. Far, far in the distance were the Adirondacks, blue, so blue. The clouds were near motionless, great white, billowing puffs. Below, the valley, dirt roads that you can’t see any other time, the lower ridge lines, slowly making their way to the horizon, almost like ripples in a pond. We lay on the rocks. They felt almost warm, like the breeze, that came up from the south west and gracefully whooshed away the bugs.
There were no sounds.
Except for the birds, playing, singing, talking, making believe; the chickadee now a hawk circling overhead watching, watching, watching for the slight movement below, the careless squirrel or mouse. The chickadee, it’s head turning towards us, then back to the west, flew off, content with what she was.
