Woods Wanderer

With the sun shining brightly through a cloudless sky and temps hitting 50 degrees, I couldn’t resist going for an afternoon hike. I was not in the mood to drive far, so I headed for the Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge. It’s only 15 minutes away.

I donned a blaze orange vest and hat, then set foot on the Black & Maquam Creek Trail. Not long after hiking down the well-groomed main path, I heard gunshots in the distance. Yeah, the deer hunters are out in full force this time of year.

A few leaves still clung to branches, but the trees around me had clearly retreated into dormancy for the winter. Stick season, it’s called here in Vermont. During November, we Vermonters expect the snow to fly any day now. The snow is coming late this year. Oh sure, the mountaintops have been dusted, but the ground is still snowless here in the Champlain Valley – a little longer, anyhow.

At the first trail junction, I turned right, following the trail along Maquam Creek out to the lookout. The creek was incredibly still. Nothing was happening despite several beaver lodges being tucked into the banks. I meandered a lengthy boardwalk traversing a dried-up wetland adjoining the creek, then stepped onto something looking more like a footpath. Upon reaching the lookout, I scanned the surrounding waters for waterfowl. Nothing. Too late in the year.

My mind wandered as I backtracked a little then looped around, following Black Creek back to the main trail. Couldn’t help but think about the changing seasons, the passage of time, and me laying down so many tracks through the years. Life is a long journey, it seems – one foot in front of another, occasionally resting. The destination doesn’t really matter. Sometimes this simple fact is hard to grasp.

Tags: Champlain Valley, Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge, seasonal change, the passage of time, walking

Yesterday I noticed the white wood asters in bloom in my back yard and felt the shock of late summer. Is it really that time of year already? I have just gotten used to running around barefoot, in a t-shirt and shorts. It seems like the warm season idle just began.

Judy and I sat in Taylor Park yesterday, listening to a concert as the sun sank slowly in the west. The air temperature was a perfect 70 degrees and flowers bloomed in the small garden before us while children scurried about. A few hours before that I had lounged in the shade on my patio, feeding a resident chipmunk and watching hummingbirds at the feeders while I read a book. At the start of each day, I open up the house, allowing a gentle summer breeze to waft through our living room. And every day is a good day – even when temps shoot into the 90s, even when it rains. Summertime is a prolonged dream.

Strawberries, a long hike through the shady forest, a dip in a mountain stream, corn on the cob and fresh tomatoes, birdsongs all day long, cotton ball clouds in a blue sky, wildflowers and a leafy green everywhere –– the simple joys of this season just keep coming. Then suddenly there are wood asters, goldenrod, and the shelves of stores are stocked with back-to-school supplies.

Yes, I have noticed the subtle shortening of daylight hours but have chosen to ignore it. Yes, I’m well aware that autumn has its own delights, but I’m not ready to let go of summer just yet. I am still in a summertime frame of mind. And the remaining month of it always feels more precious than the previous two.

The days slip by, the months, the years… I’m at that point in my life where life itself feels precious. I am shocked by the passage of time. Was the last summer camp with our grandkids really five years ago? Has it actually been over a decade since my hike through the 100-Mile Wilderness? Have 40 years gone by since my arrival in Vermont? This all comes as a surprise to me.

Even the long days of summer aren’t long enough. Life is short. There’s no time to lose.

Tags: reflection, summertime, the passage of time

A few days ago, I revisited Fisk Quarry in Isle la Motte, where there are all kinds of marine fossils in full view. Then I stopped by the Goodsell Ridge Preserve to see even more fossils etched into stone over immense periods of time. I’ve been reading a lot of natural history recently and wanted to look with my own eyes deep into the past. After all, seeing is believing.

The fossils didn’t exactly jump out at me. At first all I saw were strange shapes in the rock that seemed more like hallucinations than anything real – projections of my own thoughts onto stone. But when I reached down and touched them, yes, that made them very real.

Gastropods, cephalopods, stromatoporoids, bryozoa – the names of these ancient creatures are as strange to me as what I was seeing. Or at least they were. But if you say such names frequently enough they become commonplace. The brain makes room for them, and for what they represent.

Chazy Reef it is called. Not a reef in the strictest sense, since the mound of life forms that built up there over time contained only a smattering of corals. It dates back 480 million years, and was located back then where Africa is today. The tectonic plates of the Earth’s crust move a couple inches each year, so now Chazy Reef is in Vermont. Pondering that alone is enough to make my head explode.

480 million years… That’s a long time. Back then marine life was all the life there was. Amphibians, reptiles, and land-loving mammals like us came along much later. It’s difficult to fathom that passage of time, and even more difficult to think of the natural world as something much different from what it is now. We take so much for granted. But this world of ours, all the stars and galaxies, the entire universe has been evolving for 14 billion years. And it will continue evolving long after you and I are gone. That certainly puts things in perspective.

Tags: ancient marine life, Chazy Reef, evolution, fossils, natural history, the passage of time

The news is all bad, especially now with the pandemic raging. Judy and I felt it was high time for us to spend a couple days in the woods away from it all. So we packed up our gear and headed for the Breadloaf Wilderness when finally there came a break in the weather, between heat waves and t-storms.

A few weeks ago I scouted the headwaters of the New Haven River, looking for a good place to camp. I found the spot just inside the Breadloaf Wilderness boundary where Judy and I had camped once with our granddaughter Kaylee. That’s where we landed.

Kaylee was 6 the last time we camped here. Now she’s 23. Time flies.

Judy sat on a large rock, taking in the sights and sounds of the wild forest. I sat nearby, writing in my journal. The stream flowed incessantly before us. A squirrel ran across a fallen tree bridging the stream. The sun sank behind the trees before we started dinner. Soon we were staring into a campfire, surrounded by darkness. Where did the day go?

We went to sleep to the sound of rushing water. A little later I awoke to that and the song of a waterthrush. While sitting on the big rock in predawn light, I watched another squirrel run across the fallen tree bridging the stream. I recalled camping farther upstream with my brother Greg back in the 90s, and remembered a dozen other outings in this wilderness area since then, by myself or with others. Time flies.

When Judy arose, I fixed her a cup of hot tea. She had a rough night. Sleeping on the ground is a lot harder for us 60-somethings than it used to be. So late morning we packed up and hiked out instead of staying another day.

On the way out, I recognized a patch of ground beneath a copse of full-grown maples that had been a clearing when I first hiked through here. That was back in the 80s. Seems like a lifetime ago. Yes indeed, time flies.

Tags: backpacking, Breadloaf Wilderness, camping, mountain stream, the passage of time

Following the governor’s orders during the pandemic, Judy and I went off the beaten path, midweek, midday. We went back to Fisk Quarry on Isle La Motte for a short walk. Six years have passed since we last stopped by. Time flies.

This was Judy’s first time seeing the quarry, actually. She stayed in the car during the previous visit, while I raced to the top of the quarry to check out the fossils embedded there. We were on our way somewhere else back then. Can’t remember where.

Fisk Quarry Preserve is part of the Chazy Fossil Reef – a National Natural Landmark located on a large island in Lake Champlain. Chazy Reef is one of the oldest exposed reefs in the world, dating back over 400 million years. The fossils of thousands of gastropods, cephalopods and other ancient marine creatures are embedded in its grey rock. Being there is like stepping back in time. Way back.

The last visit inspired me to write the first chapter of my book, A Reluctant Pantheism. The swirl of gastropod fossils reminds me of hurricanes, galaxies and other natural phenomenon, convincing me that such a thing as order exists in nature. How? Why? Some organizing force is at work, no doubt. God or simply the laws of physics? Either way, I drop to one knee in deep reverence.

Judy noticed it, as well – the incredible passage of time that makes one feel so small and inconsequential. Meanwhile, red-winged blackbirds flew overhead, a pair of mallard ducks swam in the quarry, and turtles sunned beneath a partly cloudy sky. All very much alive, like us, and living in the present. Wild strawberry, pussytoes and other wildflowers bloomed, while the first tree leaves slowly unfurled. Life goes on. Hundreds of millions of years later, life still goes on. It’s humbling to say the least.

Tags: Chazy Reef, Fisk Quarry, fossils, pantheism, the passage of time

With the sun shining brightly and temps approaching 60 degrees, I decided it was time for a walk in the woods. Now that she’s retired and her time is her own, Judy asked if I’d mind her coming along. I told her I certainly wouldn’t mind. In fact, I was thinking to going to the Saint Albans Town Forest, which would be a perfect fall walk for us to do together. After all, it’s short, easy and she hadn’t been there before.

We reached the trailhead early in the afternoon, after Judy had done some work on the end-of-life doula class she was teaching, and after I had done a round of writing and a little work on my book biz. With all that out of the way, we both felt free to take our time. So that’s what we did, meandering along the trail, stopping frequently and hardly breaking a sweat. “Forest bathing” Judy called it in reference to the recent fad. We both found that humorous. We’ve been grooving on nature for decades, long before it became the therapeutic thing to do.

We kicked up a lot of leaves as we walked, now that most of them are on the ground. Evergreen wood ferns, moss and a copse of hemlocks still shouted their greenness into the world, but most of the forest around us was gold, burnt orange and various shades of brown and grey. It’s that time of year, after all – a time when hunters are ready to chase down deer, geese are heading south, and the days are noticeably shorter.

There is something both beautiful and melancholy about the long shadows of autumn on a pleasant afternoon in the forest. The earthy smell of drying leaves is intoxicating, and their color is still dazzling when the light catches them just right, even this late in the season. That said, we all know what comes next. For those of us living this far north who love to watch things grow, that means waiting another four or five months for the growing to begin all over again. Yet the cycle itself – this endless parade of seasons – speaks volumes about the passage of time and our place in it, doesn’t it? That too is beautiful.

Tags: autumnal walk, Indian Summer, meandering, seasonal change, the passage of time

Daybreak. Looking out the window of my study, I watch the dried leaves still clinging to a beech tree rustle in the wind against a dark grey and bluish-white background. The first light illuminates several inches of snow covering the ground. The denuded trees are motionless.

I have been up for a couple hours, printing out a recently revised manuscript, checking email, and reviewing the records I’ve kept of my activities stretching back through the years. The past year has been a busy one, to say the least. Then again, it seems like I’m always busy doing something. I’m lucky that way, I guess.

Whenever I reflect upon past events, I become a little melancholy. It’s not so much a sadness precipitated by any given event as it is a mounting awareness of the passage of time and a sense that things have happened without me fully experiencing them. This is silly, of course. We all live in the eternal present, and despite our best efforts mindfulness can only take us so far.

The past and the present are two different things. We live in the here/now. Our memories are something else – fractured, distorted, piecemeal, selective. There is always a separation between what I am in this moment and what I once was. And yet there is consistency as well. Memory is, after all, what shapes identity.

Sometimes it’s important to stop and think about where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going. This time of year seems like a good time to do that. The Winter Solstice is a turning of the page – the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Before striking forth courageously into the future, one should have courage enough to acknowledge the past and what one has become as a result. This is what I try to do this time of year, anyhow, despite the holiday hoopla. It isn’t easy.

Tags: identity, memory, reflection, the passage of time, winter solstice

The other day I noticed goldenrod in bloom along the roadside. I’ve been seeing it everywhere since, including my own back yard. Goldenrod. We all know what that means. Summer is on the wane.

Each morning I go to the window before eating breakfast, open the shades and announce to my wife that it’s another beautiful day. I prefer sunny days to overcast ones, of course, but this time of year they are all beautiful. Fresh produce, t-shirt weather, everything in bloom – how can you go wrong?

Autumn is also a wonderful time of year, especially here in Vermont. Still I am saddened by the prospect of summer coming to an end. There is still so much I want to do before the big chill comes.

The march of time. Days go by, weeks pass, seasons change. I want to slow it all down, but there seems to be no way to do that. Yesterday I filled a pint container with blackberries for the first time this year. Already some of the best bushes are past their prime.

One day is just as good as the next, I suppose, regardless of the season. Nonetheless, I will try to savor these last few days of summer, making the most of them. That means spending as much time outdoors as possible. To confound myself, I have resumed writing already – something that I usually don’t do until September. And what do I write about? Being outdoors. Go figure.

Tags: goldenrod, late summer, seasonal change, the passage of time

Now it is December. My dog Matika and I walk the Rail Trail early in the morning, leaving tracks in fresh snow beneath a dull sun. Seems like I was doing this not long ago, but the snow geese urgently heading south make it clear that nearly a whole year has passed since I last saw the sun this low in the sky. This passage of time makes me shudder. As I grow older, the years seem to slip by faster.

The trail crosses a small brook partially iced over. In due time, this brook will be completely covered with snow and ice. And yet it will still flow – a muffled trickle reminding anyone who pays attention that the passage of time is relative. Compared to my dog, I live a long life. Compared to this brook, my existence is only the blink of an eye.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that we can never step in the same river twice. While squatting along the edge of the brook, I ponder this. The stream before me rushes incessantly, never pausing. I constantly change, as well, in much more subtle ways. So does everything around me. The whole world is in flux –  the entire universe for that matter. Nothing stands absolutely still.

I continue walking the trail, following a set of tracks laid by someone else a day or two before. When the trail clears the trees and enters a field, I notice that a snowdrift has obscured those tracks. In due time, the boot prints that I press into the snow will also fill in or blow away. Then there will be only my memory of having been here.

These are the reflections of an old thinker, of course. The young live in the present, as do the thoughtless. As I walk the trail, countless others prepare for the holidays, feeling the press of time in a different way. For them, December 25th is all that matters, and the rituals surrounding that day seem eternal. Nature reminds us that they aren’t, of course. Ah, well… I’d better start my Christmas shopping soon, anyway.

Tags: change, flux, Heraclitus, seasonal change, the passage of time, time

Each year my wife Judy and I have all the grandkids over to our house for several days without their parents. We call it summer camp. It’s an opportunity for us to bond with each other while having lots of fun playing games in the back yard, fishing, swimming, and generally goofing around. Towards the end of summer camp this year, we all went for a hike at Niquette Bay State Park. It was something just a little different.

Although I’ve hiked with most of the grandkids before, this was the first time I’ve had all of them in the woods at once. Since they range in age from 4 to 15, it wasn’t easy keeping them together. Maddie, Hunter and Mason were way out front and wanting to go faster. I kept calling them back. Judy and Kaylee (the teenager) brought up the rear with Tommy (the youngest). They showed him where to put his feet when the trail became all roots and rocks. Johnny and I were in the middle, looking around. We were the first to see the garter snake that slithered across the trail. “I like nature,” Johnny commented. I smiled, nodded my head, and said: “So do I.”

It was a hot, humid day. I brought three liters of water for us to drink. We could have used more. My dog Matika drank from the tiny streams that we crossed. She got the best workout, running back and forth between the fastest and slowest hikers, trying to keep everyone together. German shepherds are like that. They don’t like having the pack dispersed.

Everyone enjoyed the walk, yet no one enjoyed it as much as I did. Judy and I haven’t spent enough time in the woods with the kids – Kaylee being the exception. Since the woods are my element, I’m hoping that this will change in the future. But the pack is widely dispersed between Vermont, New Hampshire and Virginia most of the year. Matika has her work cut out for her.

It’s amazing how fast the kids are growing up, how easily the days slip away. Judy and I make a real effort to stay in touch but our work-a-day lives distract us. We’ve talked about taking all the kids camping sometime. During this last visit, Kaylee mentioned that she’s only three years away from going to college. Clearly we had better plan something soon.

Tags: hiking with children, the passage of time