hiking

Hiking the peaks in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, it’s easy to see how glaciers and rock and time have shaped the northern landscape where my family lives, once-upon-a-time channeling immense grooves into the earth and strewing the territory with boulders. Clear, deep lakes – tantalizing for swimming – lie in these cuts.

Maybe it takes the sweeping vista of a mountaintop view over immense valleys, coupled with the immediacy of childhood, to place time in that perspective of distance juxtaposed against the immediacy of the here-and-now: our world was shaped and formed by ancient movements, and yet we go about our day-to-day lives as though the past was merely story, an anecdote over lunch’s cheese and mesclun sandwiches.

Yesterday, my 11-year-old, dutifully and non-too-cheerfully starting out on yet another hike, came around a wooded bend to the base of an immense boulder where she gasped with pleasure. Scrambling up the rock, she found herself stranded at a steep pitch on crumbling lichen. Afraid, she edged to the trail again, summited, then later feared again, seeing stormy clouds rolling in from a distant horizon, foreboding lightning and thunder.

I can’t help but think that’s an encapsulation of time: the radiant pleasure of a child swimming in a lake and discovering one tiny shell on the sandy bottom and the real presence of an electrical storm moving in. All that in one day: and then the journey back home again.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

– Cormac McCarthy

Lake Willoughby, Vermont

In this yellow autumn, the girls and I hiked down through Sterling Gorge, a short hike above water tumbling through the narrow cut of rocks. At the trail’s bottom, the stream evened out, and sunlight dappled through leaves. The hike down had been chilly and somewhat dark, shadowed by hemlocks, but the spit of gravelly sand along the stream was light-filled. I had woken that morning feeling as though I had fallen down a flight of stairs, the bones in my back and hips mere pieces strung together with the jangling cord of my vertebrae.

I lay on a fallen birch log and watched sunlight flash in shapes over the running stream, thinking how we’re all just bits and pieces of bodies, water, sparkling sunlight, gritty sand, my own bones and flesh and flowing blood, ever moving, shapeshifting, evolving, turning from this to that.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

— Robert Frost

Woodbury, Vermont

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

The Kingdom’s Rocky Peaks

Fall Hiking