[Note: This is a reposting of my blog originally posted on July 8th, which I then accidentally deleted. CJC]
Every July, I head back into the classroom to teach in a one-month immersion program for incoming first-year students. The teaching is great, but I want to use this week of blogging to write my way out of the classroom, protecting a bit of writing time.
By writing time, I mean hiking time. And by hiking, I mean energetic stomping around in the woods. I'm a novice. My outfit is a mishmash of hand-me-downs and sale items: ankle-high black Boggs; black Outdoor Research Rocky Mountain Gators, caked in mud, that reach to my knees; thin black silk long underwear for tick protection; secondhand LL Bean shorts (hiding awkward holes in the crotch of the long underwear); blue tee-shirt from Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe; green baseball hat from the Teatro del Lago in Frutillar, Chile. I wear my brands into the woods, advertising to no creature that cares.
I start out early, take my dogs, avoiding the trail heads with even one parked car. As I make my way up the first ascent, strands of cobweb graze my face and arms, evidence that I'm the first human setting out on the trail.
Orientation: I live in the southwestern-most corner of Vermont. Our short dirt road abuts the lower edge of the Green Mountain National Forest. Just before stepping in the woods, you can see Mt. Greylock (at 3491' the tallest point in Massachusetts) to the south. Our west-facing deck addresses the Taconic Range, which marks a piece of the border between New York and Massachusetts or Vermont. In stick season, we can see 180 degrees of the crest -- from South Williamstown, Massachusetts to North Petersburg, New York. Even in summer, through dense foliage, I can trace the long, curving line where crest meets sky.
I keep this crest line in sight. The road I drive to and from school parallels the range. From the car, I count the ridges and hollows: Halifax Hollow, Lincoln Hollow, Ellis Mine Hollow, Frost Hollow. As I cross the border to Massachusetts, I know the Snow Hole is due west about three miles, up a couple thousand feet. (More on the Snow Hole in a couple of days.) From my office window I see the same range.
By writing, I also mean thinking -- and unthinking. I always have my journal with me, but I rarely take it out of the knapsack. Brian Teare writes about "en plein aire poetics," writing as he hikes: "phrases taken down without stopping interleave with more fully realized passages written during a pause in the walk, the interplay of fragments and full stanzas a kind of mapping." I adore this essay. When I reread Teare's method, I fantasize about doing the same.
But then I’m in the woods, and it's all I can do to rid my mind of my head, lowering myself into my lungs, letting quads and knees do their work. This is the unthinking. Scrolling through emails, lists, affronts. Seeing again, for miles, the man and his baby, face-down in the river. I see the thought, label it, let it go, or try to. Repeat.
It takes about five miles of hard breathing, wild azalea that smell of night-blooming jasmine, pellucid grosbeak song, two German shepherds panting, uncountable trees. The goal is not to forget or deny the world beyond the woods. The goal is to let the day's mind do its harrowing work, aerating, aerating, until bodily sensation takes over.
"The logic of dryad, of hamadryad is speech into speechlessness," writes G. C. Waldrep in his remarkable poem, "Common Prayer."
(See Feast Gently, Tupelo Press, 2018.) This is the poem that put "harrow" back at the top of my word hoard. A refrain: "The forest is not a biddable place. Comes the harrow." That harrow, in Waldrep's singular, searing vision, is prayer. "Prayer is a harrow. No iambs or incentives, no cherubim, no majuscule illumination." And the forest absorbs such intercessions. "Beloved, whispers the paper birch, and then continues in its insensible tongue. We, rapt, grasping at its supple branches, choose to hear Beloved, beloved, beloved."
I savor the irony -- that the poem brings me through language to speechlessness, "this weaving into immanence." Loving this poem, I puzzle over it. "Theft is structure," Waldrep writes. "In the forest, theft is accomplished without reference to the senses. Xylem, phloem, photosynthesis. Ligature, fold. Theft is structure." Baked into the tree's form is the give and take we call living. Design governing in a thing so small.
"Theft is structure," he repeats. "The forest is not a biddable place," he repeats. "Whispers paper birch and nightingale, the mistral and the sparrow, frail anemone. Comes the harrow," the poem ends, as if calling to itself, unwilling (unable?) to resist its own bidding.
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