Another Walk in the Woods

My head felt like a Forth of July sparkler with ideas shooting in all directions then burning out one after another. Nothing lasted long enough to ignite the fire of my imagination. Usually on Saturdays I pop out of bed with an idea or two to write about for my Wednesday blog post, but yesterday I had nothing. So I loaded my dishwasher, another Saturday chore---I'm nothing if not predictable---then I headed down to breakfast which others here call 'lunch' hoping the table conversation would spark a topic for me to write about.

Two people living here in my continuum care complex get up at 4:30 in the morning and they were at the lunch table. Guess who gets pressed into service when someone needs an early morning ride to the airport. These two couldn't be any more different from one another. The woman used to be a kindergarten teacher and she's never left that mindset behind of being like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music in charge of entertaining and taking care of the Van Tripp family children. She's our little Miss Mary Sunshine, always ready to lead us in song when it's someone's birthday or pop out of her chair to grab something for a fellow diner. And she seems to enjoy her self-appointed Cheerleader role here in Old People Land.

The guy who is the early riser comes off like the iconic old duffer who yells "Get off my lawn!" at kids and dogs alike. A surly-acting man who pretends he doesn't like anything or anybody. I suspected and his wife confirmed that he's a jokester and his surliness is just an act. But there's certain kinds of humor that works when we're young and have a brighter sparkle in our eyes that doesn't work as well when we're old and have been delivering the same jokes for decades. God bless the spouses who can still laugh and cue the rest of us in on how to react at times like that. But he will do anything for anyone and he has appointed himself the package delivery guy and that's no small favor if you get a box that needs a dolly retrieved from the parking garage to move that package from the mail room to our apartments.

For lunch I had an omelette and ordered a taco salad as a take-out for Sunday and then I got out of Dodge---speaking of tired jokes---because the conversation was nothing to write home about. (Oh, no, please tell me that my brain is not getting stuck on trite phrases!) As writers we're supposed to avoid things like 'back in a flash', 'easier said than done', 'busy as a bee' and my personal favorite ' better late than never'. That last one was put into action when after leaving our cafe and I checked out our newly paved trail in the woods. The trail takes us past beautiful sugar maples and other trees I can't name and it's wide enough that our golf cart can take people from the assisted living and memory care building into the woods. My brother would have loved that. The trail also allows me to by-pass walking by the building where he lived which has been hard to do this summer.

Today it was so quiet in the woods that I pulled my walker over and sat awhile to pretend I was out in the real wildness instead of our tiny oasis smack dab in the middle of a busy city. You would not believe some of the heated debates a few of the residents here have had at the lunch table about getting this trail repaved. It was so broken up that it wasn't safe and it was narrow but several people thought the money spend wasn't worth it. It wasn't even our money. It came from a private foundation whose sole mission is to support this non-profit campus. That didn't stop the complainers who thought we residents should have a say in all improvements made. The debates are endless. "We need the lawn to go down to the lake's shoreline!" "No, we need to keep the natural grasses and weeds for the birds, bees and the butterflies!" By the way, I don't use a walker full-time. Only when I walk outside. I've seen too many black and blue and stitched up faces and other body parts on people who've tripped on the sidewalks around our campus.

Have you read Bill Bryson's book, A Walk in the Woods? It was also made into a movie starting Robert Redford. It's a true story about walking the Appalachian Trail which runs 2,193 miles starting in New Hampshire down through Georgia. It takes a whole summer to hike its wooded, mountainous terrain. I didn't even know it existed back when I might have dreamed of doing it. By the time I learned about it the best my aging body could do was to get on a reading binge about hiking the Triple Crown. "The Triple Crown," according to FKT.com, "consists of the Big Three National Scenic Trails: The Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail. Completing the Triple Crown requires about 7,900 miles of hiking through 22 US States." The culture of the long distance hikers who take on challenges like these trails is fascinating as is any hobby-turned-into-a-passion when you take the time to look under the hood. 

When one of the best known hikers, Heather Anderson, was asked about what she thought about while long-distance hiking she said, "I think about a lot of things. I think about food, macaroni and cheese, hot coffee, ice cream, milkshakes, hamburgers... pretty much anything that's not in my backpack. I think about how bad I smell. And how much I'm looking forward to the next time I get to do laundry and take a shower. Even though it's rather pointless since I'll smell again within 24 hours. I think about the way the sun plays on the water, on the trees, and creates shadows. I think about the birds of prey that swoop overhead. I think about the sound my feet make as they rhythmically strike the trail. I think about how far I have to go and how far I've gone...I think about how absolutely beautiful it is to be out here. And how very lucky I am. I think about what I want to do with my life when I grow up. And I think about how I am already grown up and still haven't figured out what I want to do with my life....And sometimes, I think about absolutely nothing."

Until my husband's stroke when I was 58 years old I never felt like a grownup and I still don't know what I want to do with my life. Maybe that's because we didn't have any kids to force the issue? Being responsible for someone else's life does change you. (Please don't tell JD Vance I said that. He already thinks childless women are to society like barnacles are to sea turtles that can slow them down so the they can't swim anymore and die.) Or maybe I was just too self absorbed to realize I had grown up and that no one has all the answers as to why we're here on earth. I just know I'd like to be like our Cheerleader or Package Delivery Guy who both seem content with the niches they've made for themselves in our small pond of players. Many residents here have taken on self-appointed roles---social director, mayor, florist, management suck-up, food critic, complainer-in-chief and so on.

Whatever the reason I was late in growing up that drive to find oneself is why the hiking genre of books appeals to me. Hikers all seem to be looking for themselves. That's me in a nutshell, looking for myself while living avariciously through the lives of the doers which---come to think of it---is not unlike many of my peers who take (too much?) pride in the accomplishments of their kids and grandkids as if they themselves had gotten the full-ride scholarship or the fancy-ass job title or are on the verge of reinventing the wheel. One day when this kind of brag-fest was the featured conversation at a lunch table I added that I once had a poodle who could do circus tricks. Everyone laughed. Could this be my purpose, to make people laugh when they start taking themselves too seriously? Maybe. One time the Art Professor sat down at the table and said, "Oh, good, Jean is here! I know we're going to laugh when she's here."

Until Next Wednesday.  

 

A Hike in the Woods

I got an unexpected workout over the weekend when a friendly acquaintance I had chatted with on Facebook recently asked me if I wanted to go on a photo safari with her. She’s working on putting together a chapbook of her poetry and needed some illustrations and all I knew about our destinations was we’d be looking for trees, boats, boat houses, churches and a few other things that didn’t sound like they’d take us too far off mowed grass and asphalt. Our first stop, however, was at a near-by Nature Preserve that has as its goal to preserve 63 acres of a rare sphagnum bog and a mature oak-hickory forest and remnants of an oak barrens. I had no idea what an ‘oak barrens’ was until I got home and my friend Google directed me to the Michigan Natural Features Inventory where it was explained that an “oak barrens is a fire-dependent savanna type [forest] dominated by oaks, having between 5 and 60% canopy, with or without a shrub layer.”

We were naïve hikers. We had no idea where or how far the trail went---it could have gone to the Upper Peninsula and we’d still be on it. We only knew the posted rules of “don’t dos” at the trail’s beginning. We didn’t take our water bottles or cell phones and no one in the world---including Ms. Poetry’s husband---knew where we were going so getting lost was not an option in this place where we didn’t see another living creature save for one squirrel. Seriously, how can anyone get lost when six inch blue dots mark a tree every 500 (?) feet, up and down and around the hilly terrain? I wasn’t too worried; I was wearing my 5-Star Emergency Responder that tracks me by GPS so I knew we could get connected to the state police, if necessary. I did start worrying about that possibly, though, when the trail dead-ended at a place where we had to make a decision between going right or left, not knowing which trail will take us back around to the car and which one would take us to the bog we didn’t even know existed until the next day.

It was near that point on our hike when I had to pee but I didn’t have a Kleenex on me and if I had it wouldn’t have been fun packing out a used Kleenex without a plastic bag to put it in. That list of posted rules was quite specific about leaving paper goods behind and I have a healthy respect of the Gods of Rules. So I decided to take a change that my brain was getting a faulty signal from my bladder---happens sometimes---and I kept my pants pulled up. As it turned out, it was a good decision even though it was well over a half hour before we found our way out of the woods. At one point the trail seemed to disappear entirely but at the same time we could see glimpses of the backs of the cottages along the lake. We made a decision to traipse through what looked like poison ivy to me but Ms. Poetry said wasn’t and we headed for the road we knew would be along the front of the cottages. Soon after, we found a friendly man to point us in the direction of where our car was parked at the trail’s entrance and from the humorous tone in his voice, I’m quite sure we weren’t the first ones to chance cutting through private property to freedom---Castle Doctrine and all.

Hunger, thirst and a bathroom call brought us to a tavern out in the boondocks where Ms. Poetry used to go with colleagues when she taught school in the area. She warned me that it’s a dive but I’ve been in far worse. It’s the kind of place where locals hang out to play pool, watch a football game and get an order of frog legs or broasted bass. The woman’s restroom was labeled an eye-rolling “Her-Pees.” When we arrived there was a line of motorcycles out front and when we left they were still there.

We didn’t lack for conversation while waiting for the slow service and as usual for my area of the world, she brought up the topic of religion. On the spot I decided, I’m not hiding from this woman! I straight out told Ms. Poetry that I don’t go to church which I haven’t uttering out loud since my late twenties. I gave her the CliffsNotes version of how I came to be churchless in the City of Churches ending with, “I believe there are many paths to God” to which she replied something like, “I would strongly disagree with that.” Okay, I thought, she seems be open-minded on Facebook so maybe she just wants to discuss theology. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but my voice got a tad icy when I answered that we’d have to agree to disagree on that point and just like that we went on to another topic as if the exchange never happen. Daring to be vulnerable, who knew I could do that so late in life?

All and all I had a good time on a beautiful day, even though neither one of us thought we’d be spending so much time hiking in the woods. And even though it was totally out of character for me to hike without being Boy Scout prepared with a fanny pack of supplies. At least I wasn’t wearing glorified flip-flops like Ms. Poetry was! I wouldn’t want to be her if she gets poison ivy. Flip-flops or not, the outing was a hike in the direction of turning acquaintances into possible friends. ©

Photo Note: The controlled burns in oak barrens are done to reduce invasive species and stimulate the germination of native fauna. We saw signs of burning everywhere and we thought it was from vandalism or a lightening strike. This burning, I learned the next day, took place last spring in the preserve where we hiked.