A number of years ago, we were talking with a friend who spent part of each day on local woodland trails. Almost always, her trail time doubled as her dog’s daily walk, and over human and dog years, they explored much of the thousand-acre forest near her house. This was, mind you, suburban Massachusetts, and this conserved forestscape was the largest block inside the Route 495 belt. Those thousand acres packed a lot of wild within, and she kept her dog close to avoid run-ins and needless harrying of that wildlife. Still, anyone who has ever walked the woods with a dog knows that their nosiness can be a great tutor in the unexpected.
Deer leapt up from grassy beds, foxes left their dainty prints to follow; on occasional days, rumor of bear or moose swirled through town, and her dog seemed especially attentive to scent ribbons in the air.
The years — dog and human — went by, and my friend noticed that her dog had begun to slow. Walks slowed to amble. Then, over more months, they downshifted to walk-and-sit; scents became even more attractive, a sort of Sunday paper for the newly retired. What was immediate drew her dog fully; what was around the bend waned in its allure.
“At first,” she said, “I was impatient.” She still wanted to cover ground, get around this trail loop or that one. She tried leaving her dog home for some walks; this made them both sad. They went back to walking, and she let her dog set the pace.
Our friend is also an artist, a painter and a composer of collages, and now she noticed a shift in her perspective. Where her dog spent time, she spent it, too, and she began to see what was there more fully: that oak, bent 20 feet off the ground, harbored a nest; the small vernal pool teemed with spawn; the miraculous paper of an abandoned wasps’ nest hung in curlicues that invited script. She began to gather spent pieces of this forest they walked.
You can guess the rest of the story; perhaps you have a companion one. Her art became inflected and infused with what she saw and found on their walks. The slow her dog had found naturally became her practice, then her art.
The woodland collage made by artist Ellie Bemis, who lives in Concord, Massachusetts. Photo contributed by Sandy Stott
The shift my friend found is, of course, a universal one. If we (and the beings we love) are granted a full lifespan, we will slow. Whatever our forms of resistance. Commonly, we identify this part of life as descent. “It’s all downhill,” we may say, or, taking it personally, “I’m going downhill.” The graph of life’s decline. Sigh.
But each of us is our own Janus, always in the doorway of the present, double-headed, retrospective and prospective. And, even as we slow, many of us with a long trail habit still look and head uphill. We keep on; we sass gravity. Well, “sass” may be a trifle strong, but we do talk back.
Fully aware of the gift given, I set out the other day for a slow “run” on a favored local circuit. The sky-eye tracking my Garmin watch might have been confused by that word, but there in the little enterprise of my body, I knew I was running.
Even modest trail passage tends away from the linear. It solves its puzzles by finding the little low points and flat-foot places; it often slants across slope. Some years ago, when leaping up and down rocks had lost its allure, I began to go up (and down) along the courses water had followed down. Water, I found, is wicked smart about finding its way. I got a secondary sort of trail smartness from these water courses.
And so, on this day, I arrived 2 miles in at the open vista of Crystal Spring Farm’s Blueberry Loop Trail with a tailwind of mild euphoria. Such trail time is a companion form of the writing I aspire to daily. “I still get to do this,” I said to myself. I even felt a little dog-smart. “Oh, thank you,” I said aloud to whatever deity graces this woodland and open barren near home.
Sandy Stott is a Brunswick, Maine, resident, chairperson of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.
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