There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast.
~ Paul Scott Mowrer
No doubt about it, walking is a great way to get to know your town--and its people. In this little farm town where I‘ve lived for twelve of the past fourteen years, I’ve never experienced so many serendipitous, agreeable encounters with my fellow Gillbillies, taken in so much of the ever-changing landscape, been privy to so many breathtakingly beautiful views, skies, trees, and slices and snapshots of that life typically gone unnoticed, than I have since I started walking my town. I’ve logged hundreds (at least!) of miles since beginning my training last December--upwards now of 50+ miles a week--and its proven to be the very thing to put a stop to the usual rush ‘n go that often derails my attempts at adopting any sort of zen-like, meditative, mindful living-in-the-moment mantra--and allow me to slow down and take it all in. After all, there’s not a whole lot of multi-tasking you can do while walking. Can’t check e-mail. Fold the laundry. Read a book (you can listen). Knit (ok, so I don’t knit, but if I did, I couldn’t do it). You can only walk. Breathe. Look around. Be there to witness all the snapshots of life that usually pass you by. Turn just in time to see the pair of red winged blackbirds leave their fence post for the skies. Take in the overwhelming sweetness coming from the woods. Wave to Farmer Flagg on his tractor. Greet the neighbor’s dog. Say hello to Susie the Pony. Keep walking. Listen to a little music on the Pod, or a chapter from Mayflower, or Alice in Wonderland, or hit shuffle for a little divination from the iPod goddess: Shivaree’s Goodnight Moon, Police & Thieves by the Clash (oooh yeaaaahhh!), and a little 70’s nirvana, Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing.
I’ve walked past the same fields and stretches of farmland, day in, day out, watching them cycle through the growing season, from their stark, lovely beginnings--when they were filled with the leftover stubs of last season’s corn, dried, dead grasses, and mole mounds, and that simmering energy of that early spring damp--and back into life again, plowed, then furrowed, stately rows awaiting seeds, which, when sown, brought the fields back into that frenzied, uproarious life, filled with the pendulant charm of spring’s first growth. There are the fields that fill over and over again with tall, sprightly yellowish green grasses with burnt umber tops that rise and swallow up the distant barns like a tumultuous sea, only to be threshed, slain, and left like fallen soldiers to lie and dry in the sun. A day or so later, they‘ve been gathered together into tidy rectangular parcels of hay, left scattered here and there only to be taken away.
Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. ~ Edward Abbey
Everywhere there is evidence of industriousness—stacked bundles of fresh hay, new fences being put up, new decks, new gardens put in, the yard junk being cleaned up after years and years of inertia. But it is the Wood Pile that most impresses me--those lovely piles that reek of muscles earned the honest way, of strength and stability, of sweet wood smoke, of an honest day’s work. So many of them stand as works of art, and I envy them for their solidity, their orderliness, the perfect roundness of the ends reserved for later splitting. My piles seem to wallow in imperfect symmetry, clinging to some semblance of balance that allows them to sway and threaten disaster but hang on in some lucky happenstance, an Amazing Race Road Block gone nearly awry.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are things you notice when you go by at a walking clip that you miss out entirely from the zippy confines of your car or bike: the tiny, lovely details of somebody’s garden; the smattering of slugs along the roadside; the preponderance of crows, suddenly, that caw and screech and drown out the sweeter melodies of the songbirds; the trill and silent flight of an overhead hawk; the comings and goings of daily life.
Gill, a semi-suburban, quasi-bedroom community, feels more like a small agricultural town bordering a bigger small city of Greenfield. There are a remarkable number of small family farms that have survived here to continue to offer up foodstuffs that are locally grown and lovingly coaxed from the fertile soil that lines this river valley. The Connecticut River, it seems, is always a stone’s throw away, but because it is a hilly town, with a few higher ridges overlooking the river, it is easy to forget its close proximity, especially if you were driving through, unless the fog had spread its thick spectral magic over the roads, forcing you to drive at a snail’s pace. But take a turn off the Main Road onto one of the smaller roads that lead straight down to the river, and you’ll enter land that seems unchanged in centuries of farming. A few old farms may dot the landscape, and perhaps a beautiful (and much coveted) old family house sharing space along the river with a grove of trees, but for the most part, the perfect rows of corn, or tobacco, or overflowing mounds of squash and pumpkins take center stage. Here there is a sense of yonder when you stand amidst the land, with views opening up all around you. And in other spots, where the quiet of the woods beckons, a comfortable knitted-in feeling pervades, drawing you into the soft shadows that fall amongst dappled sunlight stretching across trees and streams. There have been many times when I have stood and felt the hush and rush of such beauty. There is a sense of history, too, in the land, in the old farm implements that dot the landscape, the old grist mill wheels that people have planted in their yards, the old foundations here and there that evoke an earlier time in the town’s history, when the green was filled with taverns and inns, schools, and stores, and town farmers and travelers clicked glasses well into the night. The Gill Tavern sits where the old Gill Store used to stand, serving up dinners and spirits, and providing a spot where the townsfolk can gather and greet each other and celebrate things small and large, Obama’s election, a neighbor’s homecoming from the hospital, graduation, the Oscars. But the town is quiet for the most part, with few gathering spots other than the Tavern and the small, lively library that sits across the way. It’s hard to see people. There are no real neighborhoods here, where you can step outside and greet your neighbors, where kids can spill out into yards and cul-de-sacs for instant play-dates and self-governed misadventures. Walking, it seems, has been the best way to pop into people’s lives every now and then, remind myself that there are, in fact, people out there, and, out of all the little impromptu chance meetings, to knit together a richer sense of community.
Sometimes, but only a few times, I’ve felt uncomfortable walking about. When the sun dips suddenly and I worry that I will run out of light; when the familiarity that has cloaked me suddenly falls off, and I find myself in a strange place. I’ve walked into and walked past a few big blow-out domestic quarrels, too, and have had to speed up to clear out, give some space, my ears filled with the sounds of shouting that was no doubt used to a more private audience.
Mostly, though, I have felt more and more comfortable in my town as I have walked it, more enamored of its quirky mix of people, its breathtaking beauty, its imperfect charm. Walking, I have found, is the best way for me to get out and see people. Since our closest neighbors live nearly a mile up a dirt road behind our house, or across the street in the big old stone lodge, or down the hill in either direction, there are very few opportunities to say hello in this car-centric culture of ours. You walk from your front door to the driveway, where you climb into your car and shut the door on any opportunities for face-to-face contact. And the long winter months, when people hunker down inside and hole up in front of wood stoves, can be absolutely bone-crushingly lonely.
Walking—even in the clutch of winter—affords me the luxury of running into friends and neighbors and people I didn‘t know but get to know by the sheer act of stopping to say hello--people doing yard work, shoveling snow or hail (!), walking or running or biking, playing with their dog, catching frogs at the campus pond. Walking has, for me, hemmed together those long stretches of roadways that separate us into a smaller, more accessible patchwork of people, farms, lives, a neighborhood of sorts, and with it, the opportunity to stay connected and hook into a decidedly more enchanted flow of life, through which I have happily been a bigger part of that living breathing organism of Gill life, all interconnected and interdependent, flowing through and with each other, those streams and brooks and tributaries flowing throughout town before ultimately emptying into the big river.
I remember one such walk that I took several weeks ago with Daisy. It was a Saturday. I had planned on making lots of swim spots; it was a hot day, and she’s prone to overheating in her thick black coat, so we headed down Main Road from our house, intent on swinging down to the NMH boathouse by the river, where she could jump off the dock and swim to her heart’s content. On the way, we ran into several neighbors just out in their yards, putting in gardens, watering porch plants, playing with their children. If I’d been driving by in a car, I would not have been able to say a proper hello, much less enjoy an exchange of conversation. Closer to the turn off for the river, we encountered a family setting out with a new acquisition: a pup named Cita, who was flying about the leash like a wayward over-caffeinated planet trying to stay in orbit. Daisy and Cita ran about together for awhile before we set out for the dock, where Daisy slid into the pollen-coated water and swam in tight circles before I letting me pull her up to shake and splatter yellow wet across the dock. Up on campus, we said hello to a bunch of people, stopped to get caught up, and then made our way to Shadow Lake, where a friend and his young son were trying to catch frogs. We stayed for a good twenty minutes, Daisy splashing in and out of the pond, lily pads tangled around her skinny ankles, and ruining any chances we had at actually netting one of those bull frogs. In the woods, we had just begun to run the two miles, and beat the bite of the intrepid mosquitoes, when we quite literally ran into a border collie named Max and a woman on her bike. We got to talking, since it was that kind of a day, and discovered that she had walked the Boston 3-Day several years back, when they still had it in May, and a sudden bone-chilling snowstorm overtook the walkers, and hundreds were brought to the hospital to be treated for hypothermia. It is no wonder that they decided to hold the event in July after that!
A full 12 miles and 3 hours later, Daisy and I were at home, and I felt as if I had spent the morning gone visiting. There was a certain residual warmth about it that stayed with me for hours.
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-three today and we don't know where the hell she is. ~ Ellen DeGeneres
And there are things you get to know, things you learn, from walking so very frequently and such very long distances: where the trees offer up cool shade on the really hot days, where the mosquitoes and black flies will swarm, where the good pit-stops are (again, trees), where people seem to want to drive you off the road and where you might not see a single car go by, where you might stretch out along a bridge overlooking a stream, where the psycho dogs live and which ones, tied up or restricted to their underground electric fences or smashed against the door screen, might bark in a mounting, wild frenzy before settling into a tail-wagging love-fete (oh, that would be my dog). That there are a lot of red pick-ups in Gill. That someone seems to drink endless nips of vodka on the ride home and tosses the empties out their car window at precisely the same spot every time. That cars have a smell to them, and if the windows are down, you can tell what someone has just been eating, or smoking. The greasy stench of fast food. The nose-tingling scent of cigars. Juice boxes. Cheese doodles.
The air, too, has been filled with the fragrance of life returning, then blazing, and time passes so quickly, and the warm season is so short here in these northern valleys, that soon the smell of decay will too be upon us. Summer always feels so truncated--by the lateness of springtime’s pendulant arrival, on one end, and at the other, by the premature rush to autumnize and back-to-school everything, beginning, it seems, in early August, just as summer is beginning to sink its hooks into the landscape.
Never was there anything more sweet and satisfying, though, as walking through air this spring scented with the lush, rich blossoms of apple, peach, pear and wild cherry trees opening to the first breath of air, lilacs, black locust, the shad bushes that once heralded the return of millions of fish (and gathering tribes) to the river every May, and meadows ripe with wildflowers and grasses. The trout lilies ushered in a host of spring wildflowers, clover, wild geranium, may apple, that lay straining and scattered along the dusty roadsides and across the leas, infusing the air already flush with lilacs. The succession of colors have been lovely to watch; the yellow sea of dandelions, the bright pinks mixing with the white of the daisies and yarrow, the Indian paintbrush in many colors, and all those I have never found a name for. And now…the milkweed has come up in our perennial garden again, and I will leave it, as I did last year, to cycle through its wonderful stages, the pink globes of small clustered flowers that welcome bees and butterflies, and then, the sudden appearance of pouches and seed purses, and the sticky white sap that runs down the tall green stalks while the winds spread the seed ‘chutes over the land.
We sampled spring’s fare: ramps, dandelion greens, fiddleheads, nettle, scapes, asparagus., and just a few weeks ago, the first strawberries of the late springtime that edged into these few short weeks of summer that never seem to stay long enough, like a bird in constant flight, never stopping to rest or stay, always swooping and searching the tips of ocean waves for food, a constant, restlessness at its side.
There was the familiar pop of strawberry pulled from stem, the fine white bubbles of the spittlebug nymphs, the enormity of the first strawberries, the miracle of the first taste…
There’s something about this time spent in the rows surrendering to the task at hand, the meditative search and rescue of strawberries suffering from too much rain, surrounded by neighbors and strangers alike, that feels like an instant gathering…I’d like to stay all day if I could, awash in conversation and community and the feeling of connection and bounty. But the skies are threatening, the air is humid and buggy, and there is, of course, walking to be done. We make jam, line our pantry shelves with the ball jars bright red , ready to spill some of summer color into the white grays of the coming winter.
And then the rains came. Rain, rain, chilly rain. Torrential rains. Flash floods. Hail that blasted through the leaves and pocked the gardens. Big, booming thunderstorms that sent the dog to simper and pace and take refuge under the bed. The strawberries never quite recovered. Pickers were few and far between, convinced that the rain had made a soggy mess of the patch, that it was not worth it.
Of course, they were pretty much wrong. On my last day of picking, a season, it seems, without last year’s leisurely stretches of picking opportunities, and instead, squeezed into ½ hour slots like some regimented parent-teacher conferences, I expected the worst: soggy rows bereft of any plumb picking, and instead filled with overly ripe mushy wasted berries, rotten to the core. Like all those would-be pickers who stayed home, I, too, was wrong.
Sure, there were many berries so covered in the dusty grey mold that you wouldn’t recognize them as anything being once remotely edible, let alone delicious. And yes, there were plenty that had waited on the stem far too long to be picked, and now suffered in silence, destined not for the expectant mouth of some eager child, or a batch of fresh jam, a pie, or to be sliced, sugared, and heaved into a pile onto some shortcake, covered in whipped cream, and memorialized as the season’s best, but instead for a lonely, gradual decomposition, aided along by the intermittent nibblings of curious, hungry birds, animals, insects. But everywhere in between there were bright red lovely strawberries that caught my eye, clumps of good picking that filled my box in less than thirty minutes, and sent me home with enough berries for another 6 jars of jam.
Sometimes, you forget that there is always an upside.
When the sun comes out after weeks of rain and gray skies, it seems like some blast of life that pulls you from the trenches and refreshes your better sensibility, your spirit. And really, we’ve had so much rain that it’s been tough to feel good, to let out that inner sunshine. Plus, there’s the fact that the slugs are threatening to take over. They splatter the roads and when we walk, there they are, underfoot, unavoidable, disgusting little lumps of sticky smooshed flesh that seem to have been dumped from the skies. They have eaten all our basil, and are starting in on our lettuces and greens. We have discovered their secrets, though: they love beer, and it seems, will do anything for a sip. So, we entice them with low vats of the frothy stuff, into which they clamor and climb and eventually drink themselves silly into such a stupor that they don’t quite get that they are drowning. We’ve been pulling twenty or more of the little fat, frat boy-slugs out of the beer vat every day. Who knew?
The rain has not stopped me from walking. As Charles Dickens once said, If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish. Boy, do I get that. It seems that once you start walking, it is hard not to do it every day. A little addiction. Must walk today else my head will spin. So, rain or shine, I’m out there, chasing pavement. And besides, walking in the rain is good training, to see if my rain gear will hold up, if slathering my feet with un-petroleum jelly before setting out will really prevent blisters when every other step is one that takes me into through a puddle, if my gear, body, spirit can prevail through whatever the weather.
Rain or shine, I have my favorite spots: the quiet of the unpaved, back roads that wind through town forest and farmland, the pooling streams that form falls through old grist mill walls and tumble and roar into the Connecticut, the kitsch and warmth of the Wagon Wheel, a lively, comfortable spot along Route 2, where the people are always friendly and the food is always good, and where I can use a flush toilet…
And the best thing? There is always something waiting to be discovered. To borrow a couple of quotes from John Burroughs, the American naturalist and essayist:
To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
And yet,
I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see. ~ John Burroughs
Some day, perhaps. For now, I am happy to find the time to be able to put some thoughts down before heading out to walk the beat. Hope to see you on the trail.
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