“An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”
- Henry David Thoreau
It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a dog along, either. When not chewing household items into unrecognizable shreds, dogs remind us of simplicity, and the importance of stopping to smell the smells every now and then, so to speak. Yesterday morning, I was lucky enough to pause in a little scrub pine grove as champagne snowflakes fell during a sudden squall. Houston was tracking rabbits, their darting movements suddenly frozen, and wonderfully legible in the crust that had begun to harden atop last week’s snowfall.
Snowfall, with its tendency to dampen and insulate sound, produces a unique and transcendent stillness. I stopped to listen, because we are offered lessons like this a million times each day, but rarely possess the necessary patience to wait to be taught. Little wisps of sound drifted into earshot–flakes alighting on the dried leaves of young oaks. The oaks have paused for the winter. Come spring, they will resume their ascent, up from the understory to the roof of the forest, such as it is here in the sandy pine barrens of Cape Cod.
There in the suddenly loud silence, I began to notice the contrasts. One age of a forest giving way to the next, last year’s leaves nourishing the promised green of spring. What to make of this peaceful, alternate offseason reality we manage to superimpose on the landscapes that will teem with summer visitors a few months hence? Is it tragedy or bliss?
All the way home, Houston and I followed the tracks. Rabbits, who usually cover these grounds fleeting and unheeded, left the history of their foraging along the edges of the brush. When the temperature plunges to the single digits later this week, their prints will be frozen into a primitive script and preserved beyond their rightful time, yielding up their secrets to those with the patience and the mind to decipher them.
I’ll save these thoughts for another walk, if for nothing else than to warm my insides when the dog dallies too long in the execution of his business, and the winds make unreasonable demands of my exposed flesh. It’s time to the head back to the house, so I return the woods to the animals, who have undoubtedly been eyeing me from the brush, wondering if I will ever leave.
