Driven

“I suppose there are those who would find time spent 

walking in the park an idyll they can ill afford...”

  

By Patrick J. Walsh

A patchwork rain accompanies me on my walk this afternoon, dropping chilly little pin-pricks of pure cold water in my hair and across my cheeks and nose.

I am tired. As I push myself forward through the mist, I find myself wondering at some of the things that drive people in life, and some of the things that people strive toward, in these days that are so often so difficult to understand.

Although it presents no appreciable physical hindrance, the rain weighs heavily on my mood. The dampness conspires with the rapidly approaching darkness to disturb my peace and rattle my bones, as I shiver slightly after every few strides.

© Patrick J. Walsh

"...in the wideness of perspective that is a gift of this 

setting, it often seems that I am not walking alone."

I suppose there are those who would find time spent walking in the park an idyll they can ill afford at virtually any time of year — and least of all in these very short days of preparation and observation that mark the holiday season.

I try to find time to walk in the park even on the busiest days — even when the weather is against me, and the days are appallingly short, and the chill lays heavily on my steps.

Each day, my walk accumulates time and distance, but I seldom consider my daily hike in terms of the investment of minutes or miles.

In a similar way, each day’s sojourn requires both the effort to get to and from the site as well as that which I expend during the walk itself. And again, I pay little heed to the ‘commute’ required, by foot or by car, when calculating the costs and benefits of my daily exercise.

All this evaluation brings to mind my recent re-reading of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” (1854):

“I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.”

I am struggling as I near the end of my walk today. My breath is short and quicker than usual. My progress along the paved road is slow and labored.

The last upward slope before I complete my usual circuit seems somehow steeper than usual. The rain has begun to feel heavier, even though it has not, in reality, increased in intensity or volume.

My thinking has also come full-circle as I draw nearer to the lot where my car is parked. Pondering that which sometimes drives others — and that which drives me as well, in other circumstances — I come to some resolution about my inclination to walk in the park each day.

Memories of this place that I have known so long, and of the people who populate those memories, play an important role in the drive that brings me to the park again and again. And in the wideness of perspective that is a gift of this setting, it often seems that I am not walking alone.

In both the perspective and the experience, I find plenty of incentive to walk, regardless of the rain, or the cold, or the early darkness of the day.

© Patrick J. Walsh

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In the Quiet Part of the Day

"I am aware of the fineness of the texture of the 

scene as I move quietly across the landscape..."

By Patrick J. Walsh

In the morning, the park is quiet. And I am quiet as I walk.

The air is cool, but warming as the day moves forward. The Sun shines with a gauzy benevolence.

There is a stolid indifference to the trees. Not unkind or unwelcoming, they are nonetheless in no particular need of human interaction or indulgence to propagate the quiet dignity they have maintained during the many decades they have stood here in the park.

© Patrick J. Walsh

...there is much that is instructive in 

that part of the day that speaks least...

 

There are birds in the park this morning; the occasional silent shadow in the sky attests to their presence. But they are more quiet than usual. The chill air is for the most part absent of their normal chatter.

Any slight evidence of movement in the air resonates well within the delicate balance of the morning rays and the chill of the season. The wind is but a breeze, and the shrill of the recent harsh weather echoes only in memory.

Gliding across the otherwise placid surface of the pond, a few Canada geese (their proper name, although I freely admit to having always known them as “Canadian” geese from the time of my formative years) seem content in their noiseless idyll.

At this time of year the park is probably a rest stop for the geese as they make their way along the path of their biannual migration. Those who migrate earlier in the chilly season tend to move more quickly through the trip, while geese such as these, taking wing later and thus more exposed to the vagaries of the oncoming winter, spend more time at rest along the way.

The thought of their lingering at this quiet stop along their way is cheering to me as I walk past the edge of the pond.

I am quiet, but not idle. Each step seems somehow more distinct, more clearly measured, than the languid strides of summer. And I am aware of the fineness of the texture of the scene as I move quietly across the landscape of which I presume to be a part, as the morning passes and the day unfolds.

The experience recalls in me some intimation of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; particularly that section that the great essayist called “Sounds,” in which he wrote of “the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard.”

That language of experience seems the only communication of this particular morning, and in its embrace I am gradually aware that there is much that is instructive in a walk in the park in that part of the day that speaks least to the human ear.

It is the quiet that bespeaks the vastness of the experience. Again deferring to Thoreau:

         “…my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a dream of many scenes and without an end… Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.”

And it is as well in the movement from idle observance to the awareness of one’s encounter with the greater world that moves us forward, as surely as Thoreau found his place in life by abandoning his place in the society of the 1850s:

         “What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?  Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?  Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.”

This morning, the park is quiet. And I am quiet as I walk.

© Patrick J. Walsh

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Mystery

“Where there once was solidity to every step, 

there is suddenly a mysterious uncertainty…”

By Patrick J. Walsh

As I wander my usual way through the paths and paved roads of the park near my home, wondering at the struggles of others, I have new appreciation for the majesty and mechanics of even the briefest walk in the park.

So much goes into the simple act of walking. There is the coordination of mind and body, the movement of muscle and bone, the transfer of weight from limb to limb, and overall the delicate play of balance on the carriage — all meshed in the movement of each step, and in one step after another, cascading into the joyous mystery of motion.

© Patrick J. Walsh

They walk with me as I choose my steps; and I am 

more attentive to the best of all that is around me...

And my walk in turn gives rise to so many mysteries whose shape and structure are discernible only in relation to the orientation of my movements.

A rough texture, for example, cool to the touch: with the crunch of brittle leaves beneath my boots, it is likely the bark of a tree; with pavement beneath me, it is more likely the ragged edge of a stone at the side of the road, or gravel; on the grass close by the pond, the rough grasp of reeds that adorn the sodden expanse of the marshland.

Lately my time in the park has been interspersed with time spent in the company of those who, as the result of injury or illness, must cope with frailties that make it difficult to walk freely and easily.

For them, the process of placing one’s steps is an often treacherous exercise in limiting the yaw of each forward motion, from hip to foot, across the entire breadth of every stride. In such a state, a stroll along the uneven paths I ply from time to time in the woods around the park would be a vestibular nightmare.

In that context, a walk in the park would be anything but that which is implied by the colloquialism to which it lends its name.

Subject to the mercurial betrayal of balance on the merest whim of the landscape, or in reaction to the unanticipated distraction of animal or bird or aqua fauna, the diminished  control over one’s movement must seem an enigma beyond easy reckoning.

Where there once was solidity to every step, there is suddenly a mysterious uncertainty; where there was previously ease of movement, there is a heavy sensation of strangeness…

As I walk in the park, I am normally unaware of the mechanics of my own locomotion. Fascinated with the environment around me or taken up with some encounter of one sort or another with the creatures or setting of the place, I move along my way without thinking of the gift of ease of motion.

Even when I trek upward along some sloping trail in the woods, I am aware more of the effect that the grade has on the experience of whatever it is that I am seeing and hearing, rather than the degree of difficulty involved in the journey.

But today, I wonder at the struggles of others. They walk with me as I choose my steps; and I am more attentive to the best of all that is around me, that I might share it all with those who cannot experience it first-hand.

Maybe, in that effort, there is some miracle of transference that might make their difficulties less burdensome, and maybe set their sights on walks in realms more mystic than mysterious.

© Patrick J. Walsh

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Christmas in July… in November

"Scenes emerge from the graying landscape with a sudden breathtaking vividness, only to fade quickly away minutes later, as the daylight dulls and the sky continues to darken."

By Patrick J. Walsh

In the park, it gets dark early now, and the darkness brings an early end to the day.

That small part of the park that has been developed for casual recreational use, carved out of the much larger portion of the 1,538 acres that constitute the total site, is open each day only from eight in the morning to “dusk” — that amorphous shadow hour that moves like the mist through the trees after a storm, as time moves from one season to the next.

In these initial days of the early darkness, there is an unsettling disorientation that disrupts the usual narrative of a walk in the park. Scenes emerge from the graying landscape with a sudden breathtaking vividness, only to fade quickly away minutes later, as the daylight dulls and the sky continues to darken.

© Patrick J. Walsh

Stubbornly holding on to its color, it is a tree out of time...

There is an urgency to my steps. I am thinking forward, anticipating the rapidly approaching Advent season, and the Christmas holiday.

In the sky, the sun is drawing in its light and thinning the warmth of its embrace. I feel the chill of the evening as I make my way along an uneven path in the woods near the side of the road. The ground beneath me is pitted and trenched by the recent rain and snow.

There is a wrenching sadness to the sight of the day’s withdrawal across the horizon, amplified to a nearly unbearable intensity by the heartbreaking beauty of the sight.

The scene is somehow like Christmas in July — oddly askew in this time and place, and yet so familiar and so heartening as to be welcome in even the strangest circumstances.

In the pond, something is stirring in the weeds near the water’s edge. The gangly frame, two thin sticks supporting a puffy ball of feathers, is crowned with another skinny branch that suddenly moves in a half revolution to reveal a long beak and a squeamish eye straining to make out my approaching form in the gathering twilight.

It is the heron, that rare bird, a magnificent sight so seldom encountered when the park is busy with people and their celebrations, when the sunlight stretches into the evening. There is little to distract him now, in the lateness of the day.

With camera in hand, I approach as though I am merely passing by heedless of his presence. I casually begin to snap a series of photos as I wend my way ever so slightly toward him; but he is too smart for my trick. Wary and seeming modestly affronted by my interest, he draws himself up out of the water and glides off toward the opposite side of the lake.

The darkness gathers as the shorter days of winter bring the night early, and as a result of the impact of the annual ritual of setting the clock back an hour to accommodate the shift from Daylight Savings Time to standard time.

As I walk, I am thinking of the time, as the daylight fades.

Standard time first became standard in 1883, as a means of coordinating rail travel. Prior to that time, railroads in various parts of the country utilized different time standards — thus trains in New York, for example, operated on New York time, while the Pennsylvania Railroad calculated the arrival and departure of its trains according to Philadelphia time, which differed from New York time.

As rail travel expanded, the need for a uniform method of setting times for train schedules led to the evolution of standard time and the four North American time zones that are now well established.

In the park, as I walk along the paved road, I am thinking about the ways in which the time and trains of the suburbs translate into the effects of seasons and automobiles in the woods — where the trees pass the seasons like humans pass the hours, and where the plants and animals and birds fend off the effects of human activity, epitomized by the exhaust and heat and noise of the cars passing by on the nearby road.

At one point during my walk, I wander some distance into the woods. In the woodlands’ interior, as I make my way up a formidable grade, there is at the edge of the path a remarkable sight: a small tree still wearing its leaves, resplendent in multiple shades of orange.

Stubbornly holding on to its color long after its taller, tougher neighbors have gone gray, it is a tree out of time, still lingering in Autumn even after the first snow has come and gone.

I want to linger for more than a moment in the company of the colorful little tree, but there is not enough daylight left to loiter in the woods. Even as I make my way back toward the paved road, however, I am smiling at the thought of the bright display of leaves hidden just minutes away from my usual route through the park.

Minutes later, driving slowly toward the exit as I peer out into the gathering darkness over the bright beams of my car’s headlights, I am grateful for the colorful tree and the heron and the last vestige of sunlight on the far horizon — and even for the gloomy twilight whose early arrival so emphatically delineates their essence.

In the first days of the darkness come early, before there is time enough to adjust to the austere discipline of the truncated days of winter, there are still moments left for the appreciation of the transcendent elegance of nature, as she moves heedless of time, from one season to the next.

© Patrick J. Walsh

The Walk in the Park series:

• Another New Winter

• The Calm After

• The Halloween Tree

• At the Table by the Tree

• The Green Among the Gray

• The Family by the Rock

• Soliloquy in Gray

• A Greeting of Flowers

• Trails in the Woods

• The Men

• The Hawk

• The First Warm Day of Spring

• Encounter in Autumn

• A Walk Beneath the Dripline

• A Walk in the Park