Stone Riley's Blog: Stone Riley's Shoebox - Posts Tagged "hiking"
A Roughly Tended Woods
(C) 2017 by S.Riley
This year I was old and it was rainy, so I celebrated Earth Day after the sun came out, alone and one day late, in the 90 acre woodland of our bucolic small old Massachusetts town.
I chose the most convenient spot to walk, not the big tangled berry thicket in the tall trees out behind our house. Instead, I took the car out to a corner of the woods just down our road, which was the Boston / New York postal rider's trail 250 years ago, but now leads past our neighbors' modest houses and the Polish cemetery. Just then there comes an inconspicuous sign in a little spot where you pull off sharply down the roadway's bank then brake and park and stop the engine.
It is a roughly tended 90 acre woods, challenging or even dangerous for a geezer who's gone wobbly around the knees from a winter's close confinement. Even here, in a corner of it designated for the public to go hiking, the trails appear to be simply dragged out by a tractor now and then.
These trails are wide but rocky where they are not mud. They give you curious ways to stride, first down to a big broad green algae pond utterly alive with darting insects and rotting trees fallen in, then round about to the surrounding low ridges of sunlit pale ghostly gray boulder field glacial moraine, a skeletal form of land whereon the trees and shrubberies grow thin.
I have come to love this beautiful and puzzling place. Global warming drives me mad with sorrow. Here there is a plague of ticks.
My habit of this lifetime is to urge children and their parents out toward Nature. I've done that countless times. Now it feels as if the outdoors has betrayed my loving trust.
Further north, up in New Hampshire where we go visiting sweet friends often, there the ticks are killing moose – yes even great moose – the huge wild cattle in their woods. Winters were formerly waves of frigid searing cold that killed the bloodsucking bugs in their hibernation. Now with worldwide climate change winters have become just seasons of cool wet heavy snow. In New Hampshire now, moose with ticks thick as fur on them stumble from the woods and die.
There are not near so many ticks as that with us here, but quite bad enough to worry. Their bite can bring disease, a disease of painful agony that stays for years. Last week we found one on our daughter's kitchen table, brought in on someone's shoe I guess, then climbed up and scampering across like a tiny spider till I crushed it, there with her little children in the room. I feel the outdoors has betrayed my trust.
I have prayed and dreamed on this before. Right now it's night but in the morning I expect to drum and sing and read the cards then write. If I were smoking ganja in these years, I'd take a pipe out to our backyard shed and do the drumming there. I cannot say some other god besides my god is doing this, pretend some other god has interposed itself between my god and I. Nor do I see sufficient cause for blame here in my self.
Back at the car below the road, an hour gone, I inspected my strong old walking stick very carefully for ticks and laid it in the boot. Then all the rest was checked: my scalp and ears, my clothing, arms, legs, shoes.
This year I was old and it was rainy, so I celebrated Earth Day after the sun came out, alone and one day late, in the 90 acre woodland of our bucolic small old Massachusetts town.
I chose the most convenient spot to walk, not the big tangled berry thicket in the tall trees out behind our house. Instead, I took the car out to a corner of the woods just down our road, which was the Boston / New York postal rider's trail 250 years ago, but now leads past our neighbors' modest houses and the Polish cemetery. Just then there comes an inconspicuous sign in a little spot where you pull off sharply down the roadway's bank then brake and park and stop the engine.
It is a roughly tended 90 acre woods, challenging or even dangerous for a geezer who's gone wobbly around the knees from a winter's close confinement. Even here, in a corner of it designated for the public to go hiking, the trails appear to be simply dragged out by a tractor now and then.
These trails are wide but rocky where they are not mud. They give you curious ways to stride, first down to a big broad green algae pond utterly alive with darting insects and rotting trees fallen in, then round about to the surrounding low ridges of sunlit pale ghostly gray boulder field glacial moraine, a skeletal form of land whereon the trees and shrubberies grow thin.
I have come to love this beautiful and puzzling place. Global warming drives me mad with sorrow. Here there is a plague of ticks.
My habit of this lifetime is to urge children and their parents out toward Nature. I've done that countless times. Now it feels as if the outdoors has betrayed my loving trust.
Further north, up in New Hampshire where we go visiting sweet friends often, there the ticks are killing moose – yes even great moose – the huge wild cattle in their woods. Winters were formerly waves of frigid searing cold that killed the bloodsucking bugs in their hibernation. Now with worldwide climate change winters have become just seasons of cool wet heavy snow. In New Hampshire now, moose with ticks thick as fur on them stumble from the woods and die.
There are not near so many ticks as that with us here, but quite bad enough to worry. Their bite can bring disease, a disease of painful agony that stays for years. Last week we found one on our daughter's kitchen table, brought in on someone's shoe I guess, then climbed up and scampering across like a tiny spider till I crushed it, there with her little children in the room. I feel the outdoors has betrayed my trust.
I have prayed and dreamed on this before. Right now it's night but in the morning I expect to drum and sing and read the cards then write. If I were smoking ganja in these years, I'd take a pipe out to our backyard shed and do the drumming there. I cannot say some other god besides my god is doing this, pretend some other god has interposed itself between my god and I. Nor do I see sufficient cause for blame here in my self.
Back at the car below the road, an hour gone, I inspected my strong old walking stick very carefully for ticks and laid it in the boot. Then all the rest was checked: my scalp and ears, my clothing, arms, legs, shoes.
Stone Riley's Shoebox
A poet writing essays. Why the title? You know you keep a large size shoe box with all those creative ideas and suchlike stuff scribbled on the back of electric bill envelopes?
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