Part the First:
I’m a walker…I love to walk, or hike or whatever it is you want to call it. Give me several miles of trails or the open road and I’m a happy camper. It’s a time of silence where your own footsteps take the place of a time keeper, where the wind becomes your stereo and the sounds of nature your concerts. It allows my mind to open up and take in all of nature and brings those thoughts from the back of my mind to the fore, until they coalesce into a coherent idea. Friedrich Nietzsche was correct when he wrote:
“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
All of my great thoughts are pulled out of my mind with a great walk.
Anyway on with the tale…
This lesson started on the morning of Saturday July 14, just a few short days ago. The family had gone away to visit Nan and I was left alone, two days and nights of silence, pure silence, no game boys, no boisterous boys, no anything but my own rhythms of life in the house. With all this free time I decided to undertake a joy of mine and once again hit the trails so about mid morning on Saturday I filled the camelback, checked the first aid kit, put the energy bars in the pouch, grabbed the map and hit the road for the local watershed. I arrived at the pull off within the half hour and group of 4 lady mountain bikers where just finishing their ride and had pulled off into the car park next to their vehicles, two of them still on their steeds while the remaining two had already alighted.
"Good Mornings" were exchanged and their jocularity bolstered my exuberance to get on the trail. As I shouldered my small pack and headed for the trail, I could hear their laughter behind me drift away on the breeze as I crossed the road into the shadow of the trail. Rocks, and sandy soil, with a light covering of leaves greeted me upon my return to the woods after my year of convalescing. Ah to be home again on the trail. I could immediately smell the moist air of the woods and the sounds of the forest creep back into my subconscious as I walked further down the trail…a simple 5 mile circuit awaited me and my heart as well as my legs wished to just take off down the trail almost at a run, but that isn’t how one should negotiate a trail well known as one of the most technical mountain biking trails on the East Coast. One must negotiate it with care for to run the trail invites disaster and isolates you from the healing properties of the wilderness as your mind and body acclimate to the silence. Running has its place but not when one is walking...my goal today…two hours on the trail and five miles, I wasn’t going to meet any of them.
One hundred and fifty meters in I was reminded why one doesn’t run on these trails, for there stood a beautiful white tailed doe, her head held high as she heard me long before I saw her. I came to a halt and we looked at each other for a couple of minutes each wondering when it would be that I would move forward another step and force her to run off into the woods. So we waited, her tail twitching in the mottled sunshine - eyes locked upon each other, until she decided that this game was not as much fun as she remembered and with a bound disappeared into the underbrush, the crashing noise telling me she was headed down the draw and then she was gone. No noise, no fleeting glimpses of her - just gone.
Checking my map and finding the blaze on the next tree confirmed I had entered at the proper trailhead so I continued down the tail over several fallen trees; chain marks in them from the hundreds of riders that have traversed this trail over the years. Stepping on them instead of over them I instinctively looked for rattlesnakes before stepping down onto the path heading slightly downhill and following the contours of a spur as is stretched out finger like from the top of the ridge. Down hill I went following the blazes ignoring the side trails - I was on a mission. Reaching the pond at the bottom of the hill I followed the trail around to the right walking along the Eastern shore of the pond until I came to the fire road that meets the trail and turned north back up the draw towards the ridgeline.
My map does not show this pond, but that’s not unusual the USGS topo map is several years old…the trial even older. Regardless I knew in the back of my mind that if worse came to worse, I could always head cross county either due East or West and meet one of the two main roads that bisect the watershed area. Getting lost wasn’t a problem, getting disoriented was, and that was about to happen very soon with nearly disastrous results.
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