Welcome, winter

It's the first of the month. Snow arrived gracefully, silently in Canton today. Then it melted. Downtown, the shops were lit up and the trees sparkled with Christmas lights. Welcome, winter in the North Country!

Good Story

The sun was beaming and I was going bonkers inside. I grabbed my book and walked over to SUNY Canton and made a perch in the grass. This fallen oak leaf lay on the trail with a good story to tell.

Higher, Colder, Wilder

Peter and I headed into the Adirondacks for a hike up Azure Mountain. It was our first time there and we were greeted by the breathtaking site full of snow. It was a winter wonderland; the mountain was alive and in transition. From fall into winter. The sound of melting snow dropping onto papered leaves activated the trail on our way up. Tiny rivulets of running water were trapped beneath ice, and the streams formed dark shadows of slipper movement on rock face. The bursts of water swam with hurried ambition, like eager sperm. On top of the mountain the sun sparkled over the tinseled birch tips.

In Wandering Home, Bill McKibben talks about the Adirondacks with neighborly familiarity and respect. Comparing the area to his other home in Vermont he notes that "the Adirondacks are higher, colder, and wilder - people have lived here for fewer centuries in fewer numbers, and have never been able to make farming work for long. And so, over time, huge chunks have been left to rewild themselves, till in places it approaches the primeval."

While driving home, we noticed a sign on a diner door within park limits. It read "This is no park. This is where we work, this is where we live." Surely we - the recreational visitors - were the clueless patrons they meant to inform. Yet weren't we - the recreational visitors - the customers who sustained their small business? The irony reminded me that the Adirondacks are a great wilderness preservation experiment unfolding right in our backyard. Once, the Adirondacks were heavily logged, but those very areas are rewilding now. It may not be pure, virgin, unspoiled forest, but its recycled wildness speaks the language of redemption.

Atop Arab

Wind hums a hollow song in my ears. I notice a low rustle, too. It’s the sound of tissue and paper and crackle. I look in its direction and see rust-orange leaves quaking with equal measures of terror and determination. I know that movement. I can feel it in my upper body. It’s the same quiver of my arms bent in a right angle, hanging from the pull-up bar in the Northfield Middle School gym. My seventh grade biceps thin, taut, shivering with fatigue. Ms. Steffen keeps a slow, growling tempo, “fourteen, fifteen, sixteen…” and I hear my Reeboks smack the vinyl mat beneath the bar. It’s the sound of defeat and relief.

The landing sensation brings me back to my surroundings. I’m glad to be here alone. No Presidential Fitness Exam. No competition at all. I’m lying on the summit of Arab Mountain, a 2,500 foot peak in the northwest pocket of the Adirondack Park in northern New York. The open, rocky clearing is hemmed in by mountain ash, whose exposed branches look tatty on this late October day. A few red spruce cluster together, obscuring a bare naked birch. I prop myself up with one elbow. My other hand acts as a visor to block the afternoon sun and bring focus to what’s below. I’m facing southwest. Mount Arab Lake and Eagle Crag Lake lick the valleys, leaving bright, irregular slurps on the landscape.

The sun is sinking slowly and I notice the shadows have shifted on the gray rock face all around me. They’re just a bit longer, darker.

I stand, stretch upward and take one last gaze at the smoky foothills and High Peaks in the distance. With my back to the setting sun I bound down the mountain. I cross rocky outcroppings, lichen-covered branches and a slurry of mudslides and muck. I’m following a gold snake. We’re both skirting the trail in an attempt to stay dry along the ledge.

My nose catches the dark smell of earth and rot. I spot a cascade of ruffled mushrooms on a fallen tree and note the ovate leaves nestled around it. “Yellow birch,” I guess out loud. The fungus looks like Hen of the Woods, but these edibles usually grow up around oak and maple. Gently tearing a few from the soft trunk, I cup a handful of the cool mushrooms. Their undersides are honey colored and spongy.

As I cross the paved road heading toward my car, four female pheasants edge quietly into the woods not far from the trailhead parking lot. When I start the engine the radio engages. North Country Public Radio’s fall fund drive pushes on and the hosts keep me company as I backtrack 62 to 3, 68 to 56. These strangers’ voices, like the bridges through Colton, the sharp curves in the highway and the houses that line Pierrepont’s only artery, are beginning to feel familiar.

Outside, inside

Fall in the North Country has been exceptionally wet. Outside our kitchen window, soggy maple leaves are puddled, muddled.

Inside, these gingersnaps are just the opposite. They crinkle, they crunch, they crisp and crack! In anticipation of our trip to France this summer, I've been tracking David Lebovitz's blog "living the sweet life in Paris." This is his recipe for gingersnaps, shared by his pals in the Chez Panisse kitchen.

Wildness

This day shall go down in my personal history as the day William Cronon arrived and made an indelible impression on the way I think about wilderness... or wildness. Thoreau said "... in wildness is the preservation of the world." In Cronon's essay The Trouble with Wilderness (1996), he fears that humans' conception of what is and what isn't wild could destroy us. He begs us to rethink wilderness, particularly through an awareness of a "common middle ground" in the wild spaces we already revere, and also the backyard, the garden, the city.

"If wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world - not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both."

This blew my mind.

Cronon is making me look differently at my surroundings. My everyday walk from home to the ODY Library on the St. Lawrence University campus suddenly seems wild and mysterious as a hike in the back woods. Today I started collecting one fallen leaf from each tree I passed on my walk. Just as I might try to identify out there, so could I learn right here.

Grasse River

Leaves crunch underfoot as Peter and I walk across campus. Entering the wooded path just south of town, flecks of light surprise the damp ground and startle the dark canoe shack, our destination. With empty pockets (no cash, no bothersome phone) we push off into the river. Burnt maples and yellow birches hug the way, dropping leaves onto the still surface of the water.

Woodpecker, muskrat. They see us too, and they suspend activity to watch us glide by.

Water-logged leaves find their way to the easy current in the middle of the river. Pulled like sinew, they move together. Are they migrating, looking for a winter home like the five Canada Geese honking above us? I think their intentions are more like ours. Enjoying one last ride in the Grasse, absorbing the sun, hoarding the warmth of autumn.