Woods Wanderer

Every once in a while, I get this urge to wander aimlessly through the woods. Don’t get me wrong.  I like gliding along a well-worn trail as much as the next guy.  But sometimes I have to leave the trail and walk that ragged edge between knowing exactly where I am and being lost.  I find it quite instructive.

A second-class dirt road took me to a height of land where I could access the main spine of the Cold Hollow Mountains.  After parking my car in a logging yard, I followed a skidder trail halfway up the nearest mountain.  Then I followed an ATV trail to the summit.  On the south side of that summit, the ATV looped back towards the road and I had a choice to make: either follow the ATV trail where I didn’t want to go, or set forth into the trackless forest.  The next summit was about two miles south.  I checked my compass then stepped off the trail.

Hiking a trail is sweaty work; bushwhacking is harder.  I tramped through the woods, following a compass bearing due south, hoping to find a game trail along the way.  No such luck.  I followed a set of fresh moose tracks for a while but lost them in a wetland that suddenly cropped up.  It sprawled across the saddle between the summit I’d just hiked over and the one I was headed towards.  Wetlands aren’t easy to navigate, not even relatively small ones like this one.  I read the vegetation and muddled through it the best I could.  Then I started climbing the next mountain.  About ten minutes into the climb, I tagged a game trail following the remnants of a woods road that was at least half a century old.  It crept laterally up the side of the mountain, so I changed my compass bearing.  Yeah, land navigation is tricky that way.

I stopped for lunch halfway up the mountain, resting on a rocky outcropping that sported a fair view of Jay Peak and other mountains to the northeast.  My dog, Matika, helped me drink the better part of my two-liter water supply.  That and the dark clouds blowing in from the northwest forced my hand.  So after catching my breath, I headed back the way I’d come.

Every morning, the newspaper reminds me that a major financial crisis is still underway. What was a national problem is now a global one, and no one’s quite sure what to do about it.  Every pundit keeps to his or her philosophical traces, of course.  The liberals blame the current mess on evil corporations, and the conservatives blame the liberals for gumming up the free market system with their meddling.  Meanwhile, the average guy on the street wants to pin it all on a handful of greedy bastards.  Truth is, the global economy is a big, complex system and no one is really in control.  We want our fearless leaders to navigate us through this mess, but confidence sags when they slip back into the kind of partisan bickering that we’ve all heard before.  So we listen, wait rather impatiently, and hope they’ll come to their senses.

I missed a landmark on my way down the mountain and had to radically adjust my course in order to reach the saddle between the two summits.  It was a humbling experience, certainly, but at least I had sense enough to abandon the game trail I’d been following, admit my mistake, and change direction.  I was greatly relieved to tag the familiar wetland and slowly ascend the first summit.  I congratulated myself when finally I stepped onto the ATV trail.  Then I eased back to the parked car.

If my dog had used her keen sense of smell, I could have relied on her to find my way out of the woods.  But she was oblivious to her surroundings – too busy chasing chipmunks back and forth to even know how close we’d come to being lost.  It’s for the best that she remained oblivious.  I didn’t want to follow her anyway.  It’s better that I had to navigate on my own, thus keeping those skills up to snuff.  After all, you never know when you’ll suddenly find yourself off the familiar and well-worn trail.  This happens more often than any of us are willing to admit, and it’s never wise to rely too heavily on the aptitudes of others.

Tags: bushwhacking, globalism, land navigation

Is the environment currently undergoing revolutionary or evolutionary change? I sat down this morning to answer this rather provocative question but drew a blank. So I did what I usually do when thoughts and words don’t come easy to me. I stepped away from my desk and went for a walk.

A few miles outside town, I parked my car at an overgrown turnout and tramped into a stretch of woods I’d visited before. I followed a logging road until it turned sharply eastward, then bushwhacked north from there. That’s when I realized I had forgotten my compass. I continued bushwhacking north, anyway.

The occasional glimpse of a beaver pond on my right kept me oriented, but I was a little concerned about missing the trail that would eventually lead back to the logging road. I was navigating by memory and that’s always a dicey proposition. Just then I remembered a gap in the old stone wall running east-west through these woods. I could pick up the trail there. Finding that gap would be tricky, though. I didn’t know this area that well.

A few vaguely familiar landmarks cropped up along the way: a half-dead maple tree, a soggy crease in the earth, a huge boulder. None of these things had been on my mind when I stepped into the woods, yet somehow I recognized them. Together they led me to the gap in the old stone wall and then to the trail. Amazing. I couldn’t have done better with a map.

That is how evolution works, I think. Wild nature winds through the material world and, by virtue of trial and error, eventually gets to where it needs to be. Nature itself has memory, reaching beyond the memories of the countless individual plants and animals in it.

When great change occurs, it occurs suddenly, so we are tempted to think it is the result of some obvious set of circumstances rooted in the present. But we aren’t seeing the big picture. That is why humankind has a hard time grasping the causal relationship between, say, the burning of fossil fuels over the past two centuries and global warming. We expect things to develop in a time frame that we can readily comprehend – one corresponding to our lifespans. Yet sometimes it takes many, many years for things to reach fruition. What we perceive as a revolution in nature, a dramatic event, is but a snapshot in a long, drawn out evolutionary process.

The great changes we are seeing in the world around us these days were set in motion generations ago. Consequently, it’ll take a while to set them right. And to do so may require a significant change in our own way of thinking and doing things.

I picked up a game trail on the other side of the old stone wall and tagged the logging road shortly thereafter. The rest of the outing was an easy walk back to the car. Funny how some part of me knew the way through these woods even though I had no conscious memory of it. Still, I’ll make sure to carry a compass the next time I go for a hike.

Tags: bushwhacking, change, evolution, global warming, the environment

Yesterday I went back into the Green Mountains to regain some semblance of sanity. A series of events, largely out of my control, kept me away from them for over a month. That’s way too long. A great weight lifted from my shoulders the moment I stepped out of my car and into the woods. I looked around long enough to notice daisies, buttercups and tall meadow rue in bloom nearby, then shouldered my rucksack and charged up the logging road. My dog, Matika, was already twenty yards ahead of me – no doubt as glad as I was to get back to the wild.

A mile up the logging road, I tagged the Basin Brook. I followed it into the green infinity without as much as a deer trail underfoot. When the brook forked, I took the tributary leading back to a series of beaver ponds that I had visited a few years ago. There I would put the collapsed fly rod in my rucksack to good use. But first I had to reach those ponds. That’s easier said than done, as any seasoned bushwhacker will tell you.

The Vermont woods are lush this time of year. The extra rain they’ve seen recently has made a lot of plants and animals happy. Mosquitoes greeted me while I flailed through thick entanglements of hobblebush, but I was happy enough tramping across the forest floor, listening to the stream’s song and breathing in the dank smell of a wet forest. For a few hours, I was off the grid. And that’s a feeling you can’t buy at your nearest superstore.

Matika was a knot of exuberance, running back and forth through the woods just to be running. More than once she leaped over blowdown only to land chest-deep in a mud hole. She didn’t care. When I crossed the brook, she bounded past, splashing me in the process. I think she did that on purpose.

It took a couple hours but eventually I found that old beaver pond I’d fished a few years back. The newer ones below it had broken and drained, but the old one still held firm even though there was no indication that any beaver still lived there. From the beaver dam, I waved my fly rod a few times and landed a fair-sized brook trout. I didn’t let Matika wade into the pond so she sat on the dam looking rather bored while I fished. She pulled sticks from the dam and chewed on them until she caused the dam to leak. That and the gray clouds overhead cut my fishing short. No matter. I had reached the pond and, quite frankly, that was all I really wanted to do. The pond was just a destination – something to aim for while wandering around the woods for a day. The way I see things, it’s all about the journey. The destination doesn’t really matter.

I bushwhack through life. Show me a trail and I’ll follow it for a while but not forever. I’m not a big rules kind of guy. Some people live their lives in a box; others think outside of the box; I can’t even find the box and don’t know what I’d do with it if I could. So I go into the woods on a regular basis, finding there the kind of meaning and purpose that most people find in credos, scientific facts or sacred texts. I walk streams, hike trails and generally wander about the woods, looking for insights into the real. I’m rarely disappointed.

The hike out was easy – downhill for the most part. When I got back to the car, I realized that I hadn’t seen another human being all day. Just what the doctor ordered. Matika climbed into the back seat and slept all the way home. I basked in the glow that always follows a day spent outdoors. Returning home, I hooked myself back into the grid. But I’ll be out there again soon. I hope to return to the woods before my mud-caked boots have a chance to completely dry out.

Tags: bushwhacking, fly fishing, Green Mountains, hiking with dogs, the wild, Vermont