nature

One More Hike Before the Storms Come

/ japfth / 4 Comments

After a breakfast with friends at Cracker Barrel, CJ and I ran some errands for a while. Upon arriving home, she asked, “You going hiking?”

“I am.”

“Okay, love. Have fun.”

“I will.”

I already had a pair of hiking boots on, so all I had to get was something to drink, my iPhone for pictures, gloves, my neck gator, and a wool hat.

Securing my gear, I stepped off and headed into the woods.

I began on my favorite trail, one that leads to one of the creeks. I walked under the oaks for a mile or two. Acorns and sticks popped under the soles of my boots. I stopped regularly, looking for deer. I knew they’d spot me long before I spotted them.

At last one of the creeks came into view.

I sat down on some of the flat stones in the creek and just was. All was quiet. Occasionally the winds would pick up and the leaves would dance and shuffle on the forest floor.

I snapped a couple of pictures with my iPhone.

Deer prints were pressed in the sand. Green mountain laurel grew on the banks. The winds picked up a bit and I could smell scents carried by the creek. The tall thin pines rocked back and forth, back and forth, with the winds. I sat for a few more moments on the stones. Just being.

After some time passed, I thought it wise to head back towards home. It would take me at least an hour to get back via the trail I chose. Up, up, and up. The trial was clear, though, and I could see a long way into the woods and the hills. I stopped regularly to enjoy the views with which I am so familiar.

The mountain ridge was to my back now. I was headed north towards home.

When I exited the woods the road came into view. A fellow hiker, a woman, was dressed in a blue puffer jacket, tan gloves, and burgundy hat. She watched me and I watched her. As we passed each other going opposite directions, it became clear she was in her happy place, too.

“Doesn’t it feel great out here?”

“It does,” I said.

“I just love it,” she said.

“As do I.”

When I finally arrived home, CJ warmed me a bowl of potato soup. I sat down and ate, took Lady out to pee, watched the cardinals on my birdfeeder, and hugged our son. He was gaming online with some of his friends.

I went to my library and began preparing to upload a lesson for the saints for tomorrow. Since our area is likely to get hit with pretty heavy rain and eventually ice, I was thankful I had taken the time to feed my soul in the woods, on the hills, and down by the creek.

Home now, full of warm potato soup, and Lady is in her chair beside me as I study in order to teach and upload a video. My cup is full. Let the storms come. That’s just part of it all. But there are moments like these, too, and I remain grateful.

Notice

/ japfth / 2 Comments

Only an hour of light remains. Today, of course, is the first day of a new year. And just as almost every other day if I’m home, I walk our family dog. He’s a male German shepherd, brown, gray, and black, several years old (not exactly certain how many years, though, since my family rescued him several years back from a shelter in south GA). I could go on and on. He’s special to us, as fellow dog lovers will understand. Anyway, he’s brown, gray and black, muscular but with a belly (I feed him too much), ears that make visitors think we have a wolf, and a keen nose. We typically walk down and back on the blacktop lane that runs in front of our house. Nothing special about today. It was just three thirty to four thirty on another Monday afternoon, and I opened the door to step outside with my dog.

Brewster’s black nostrils alerted him to the four does immediately behind the back porch of the house. They stood with their eyes on us, and their long gray ears pointed skyward like hairy pyramids. Their lean muscular legs were the identical colors of the forest floor, which was covered with crisp oak leaves down from the gray boughs above. The deer stood in silent intense motionless energy, eyes black as oil pools, watching.

“No, Brewster. Let’s go this way,” I whispered to him, and he headed to our usual route, disappointed I did not let him chase them. But on the way down the driveway, he turned his head back three times to the deer behind as if he and they exchanged a mystery or truce.

When we got to the top of the first hill, new timber had fallen on the left side of the lane. A rotten pine with holes from woodpeckers was wedged between the limbs of an oak twenty-five feet above our heads. And the wind was sending haunting sounds through the gulch below the road to our right.

Brewster marked his typical spots as I followed behind him with the leash in my hand. When he scared gray squirrels scurrying for the oaks, he’d chase them enough for them to look down on him and me from the trees, waving their tails in alarm, and barking at us till we passed on.

The January wind was as cold as I had ever felt in GA. My Columbia fleece top left my neck exposed and I reached to turn up the collar. I wanted to keep moving, but Brewster continued to stop and sniff what seemed like every few steps. He buried his nose in the frigid downed limbs, and pressed his snout in the brittle brown leaves, then scraped them back with his paws as if he were a buck marking territory.

How many times had we walked this way? Countless. But today, I noticed how green the moss growing in the shaded spots near the blacktop was, and felt the wind sting my ears and neck, and watched my shepherd chase the squirrels up the oaks again, and listened to the fallen pine wedged in the oak send haunting sounds tunneling down the laurel canyons. I did not think of news, schedules, of politics, but only of these sights and sounds, of today’s winds, of the particular ways the moss here reminded me of the felt on the billiard table my father had in our basement when I was a boy in high school. I thought of how watching the eyes of deer makes one feel small. I witnessed mystery, order, and providence in a walk with one’s dog.