Hiking in January

"Me thinks that the moment my 

legs begin to move, my thoughts

begin to flow."

Henry David Thoreau

 

Today as I look outside, my window is a doorway to a wonderland.  Snow is dancing downward, condemned by gravity toward the ground as are we all, muting the sound of traffic, delighting children, creating a world different than that which existed a mere hour before.  How is that snow outside makes the world inside the house seem warmer?  Makes blankets seem thicker and more snuggly?  Speaks of hot chocolate or a cup of tea and how each warms the soul as well as the body?  Despite the snow, the world outside seems cozier than it did yesterday when the sun would not shine and the damp from the rain hazed the earth in varying shadows void of color. Tomorrow I will be as a child, eager to get outside to see the changes that have been wrought, but for today, I am content to stay inside, a spectator rather than a participant.

Yesterday there was a decision to be made.  I knew I was going outside, that I would be by myself, but did I want to bike or hike?  I have been doing a bit of both recently ramping up mileage.  A week ago I did the Millennium Trail at Bernheim,   13.75 miles and Jon and I hiked approximately 15 miles at Versailles a few days afterward.  

I have grown to love my hikes, mostly solitary excursions into the forest.  The sound of leaves rustling as I walk.  The pumping of my heart as I struggle up a steep hill, much as it pounds during a hard climb while cycling. The isolation that somehow reminds me of lonely nights riding alone or with a small, intimate group on brevets.   Perhaps because of knowing, deep down, that it isn't real, that the outside world  does exist and is merely suspended, it is special.  It seems momentous somehow, something to be cherished, this freedom. Hiking is something that I won't do in the summer, or rarely, so I head to the Elk Creek Trail Head.  Fortunately for me, I live quite near four of the Knobstone Trail trailheads. 

I am concerned about how muddy the parking might be, so I head for the Elk Creek trail head which is paved.  Putting on my hiking boots and grabbing my sticks, I  head out.  There is a thin layer of water on top of the grass and leaves at the first, but it has not yet caused the ground to grow muddy they way it does sometimes,  mud that makes each foot seem to weigh 10 pounds.  Again I am reminded of brevets and how heavy each pedal stroke can seem near the end of a 1200 K.  Instead, the wet  cleans the mud off my boots from my prior hike.  I think of a particular tree when I was a child that grew along the main avenue.  It was a huge tree.  When I would hug it, my arms would not even go half way around it.  I remember thinking how old it must be, that it was probably there when the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower.  There are no trees that old on this hike.   Our greed, justified by alleged good foresting practice, has robbed us and our offspring of that.  And for a moment, I grieve. 

Nobody is here and I encounter nobody during my short five miles.  I worry about creek crossings, but I am able to maneuver over all but one.  Shifting a few stones into the waterway makes a path across to the other side, a path that will shift and disappear with the next strong rain.  All around me is blessed silence other than those times when I choose to fill the air with my song, a gift I received from God and give back to him.  Oh, I am not a good singer.  I was not blessed with a voice that people would pay to hear, but God filled my heart with song.  I remember singing as I hiked as a child, even then often alone.  

 

Our home was not filled with song as some are, but my brother, Chris, shared his music with me despite our age difference:  Beatles, Simon and  Garfunkle, Bob Dylan, and West Side Story to mention a few.  Looking back, I think he shared a part of himself with  me that he dared not share with the outside world because it interfered with his image of what it meant to be a man.  Deep down, are we all romantics?  I remember my husband confessing to me how much he loved it in the westerns he read when the guy gets the girl. 

 

 

 

And that is the thing about hiking or biking.  It was the thing about running back when I used to run and continues with walking.  Thoreau was right.  When my legs are working, particularly if I am alone, the thoughts are flowing. Sometimes they are silly thoughts, sometimes memories, sometimes problem solving, but they are thoughts I would not have if I were sitting on the couch.   Not all of them are pleasant thoughts.  Some memories hurt and cause repentance.  Some uplift.  Some cause a desire for a new day so that something can being.  But each is a part of me.  And I cannot, at the end of the day, regret that except to wish that I were a better person, should be a better person with all I have been blessed with.  But, as Popeye wisely noted, "I yam what I yam."