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November 2013

A wooden fence is all that separates the edge of the trail from a rather steep, and dangerous, drop. The ones who stay within the lines are supposedly safer, but that’s never been the way it really works. I don’t stray far, only far enough to get a better view. Measured risk, defined danger, controlled chaos. Wild abandon can wait until someone else is beside me.

On the forest floor, the last of the fern fronds stays bravely stalwart, not yet yielding to the frosts. Some will see it through the winter, courageous evergreen types, earning nicknames like the Christmas fern, and one can find them poking through the snow. If they’re not ravaged too badly, they’ll be there in the spring, when it starts all over again.

For now they share the wild carpet with pine needles, oak and maple leaves, and myriad mosses.

It looks so calm and welcoming, this cushioned expanse of earth, on the smallest scale, on the largest scale, and part of me wants to fall into it too, to join the delicious decay, to burrow into it like some hibernating creature who can’t face the winter.

Instead, I look in the opposite direction ~ up. Into the boughs, and, beyond, into the sky. Patches of blue through yellow leaves. Into the clouds, into the heavens, into the face of God ~ and I want so fervently to believe.

My time here has drawn to a close.

A blanket of leaves deceptively shrouds the rocky outcroppings, lending the trail a softer aspect that it might usually have. That is but one of the dangers of the mountain. Or the forest. The trickery is real, the traps are dangerous. Around every corner lurks a new bit of treachery, masked by seemingly-harmless beauty. The irresistible call of the siren.

The stone shifts, solid-seeming but all the more precarious because of it. Slippery wet leaves vie with slippery wet moss for the chance to take one down, and the softness they portray is like the most wispy thread of smoke in the fall air.

Like the leaves, sometimes it’s good to fall, to be ripped from the lofty perch of all that you’ve ever known, to be torn from the only high home you’ve ever had, freed and unbound to begin the fluttering descent.

The danger is real. The wind is wild. The warning is dire.

But to keep to the path is the more dangerous choice.

And so, some of us cross…

{To be continued}

Like some other famous upstate New York destinations (Saratoga Race Track as the most glaring example), John Boyd Thacher Park is one of those places I’ve never visited. I’m not sure what took me so long, but the long over-due trip was made a few weekends ago, on a Friday I had off from work. The foliage was just slightly past its peak (though still, as exhibited here, more than brilliant). The park itself had officially stopped charging for the season (there’s no fee to park after Columbus Day). I had the morning – and most of the space – to myself.

I stopped at the overlook first, which seemed a world away from Albany. With the shifting clouds moving swiftly overhead, spotlighting areas of open green fields and fiery-hued forest in alternating swaths of glory. It reminded me of overhead drawings of the land of Oz, everything Munchkin-small at such a great distance, patches of farmland and meandering streams, and the almost-surreal color palette of a Northeastern fall.

At my second stop, I noticed a sign that said all visitors had to stop to pick up a parking permit, and that if no one was at the gate (they weren’t) to go to the visitor’s center. Not wanting any trouble, I made my way there and talked with a friendly woman who gave me a map and an introductory explanation of what the basic trail was like. She warned that the waterfalls were dry since there had not been much rain, but other than that the day was a beautiful one for a hike.

My first official hike. Granted, it was short (barely a mile), and well-tread and well-marked (there were even sections of stairs), but for a first attempt – alone no less (which everyone had warned against), I did all right.

More importantly, it reminded me of childhood days when I would go walking in the woods, far as any trail – marked or unmarked – would take me. I’d forgotten how important walks like that could be. How grounding, and centering, and calming. I felt that again as I started along the Indian Ladder Trail, descending along moss-lined stone and the first blanket of fallen leaves.

The best part of a space like this is the extreme juxtaposition of the most minute, microscopic views of the world – in the lichens and mosses and seeds – with one of the grandest views in the region – of a valley and fields and forest.

It is a humbling feeling. A good feeling. A feeling I’d been missing.

{To be continued}