2021-09-16 | Victoria
It has been my project, in this year of isolation, to get to know my local park. To check in with it regularly. To learn its moods, its inhabitants, the forks in its paths, its secrets. I started the project in the darkest part of the year that was also the brightest part of the year; a month after the start of the pandemic, when everything in my life seemed to be falling apart, when I had never felt more alone, but also when the world was in the full flower of spring, when everything was growing riotously, when everything was green and bright and new. I started visiting my park out of desperation, out of restlessness, out of a deep-seated need to escape my apartment, to escape the world, to escape myself. When everything was awful, when my thoughts were at their darkest, when I felt at my most alone and my most unlovable, I could get in my car, drive ten minutes, and see something beautiful, something green, something alive. Something that could take me out of myself.
My park is not a large park. There are two paths, two loops of trail. The first is a short, grassy path that cuts through the woods and out around a field of wildflowers where in the heat of summer you can hear the bees buzzing as a low but pervasive hum. People walk their dogs there, mostly. The second trail, the back path, is a narrower track that branches off from the wide grassy path not far into the park, where a fading sign announces the dates for deer management. The path down to the first stepping-stone crossing of the stream is well-cleared and well traveled. People bring their children here to wade, their books here to sit on the bench overlooking the stream and read, their dogs to the water to drink.
After the stream, the track passes through a tunnel of arcing trees like a portal to another world, and when you emerge into the sun on the other side the forest becomes jungle-like, overgrown, so that you have to push your way through grasses and branches and spiderwebs instead of walking. Not many people go beyond that point. At the start of the pandemic I was too tired to wade through the underbrush, too tentative and out of my element in even this small wilderness to think that I might take matters into my own hands and clear the trail for myself. To even imagine that I might have that right. So for the summer I contented myself with walks around the bee-filled prairie, with short jaunts down to the stream to cross its stepping stones, to watch squirrels eat their lunches in the trees above me, to crouch at the edge of the water and watch crayfish amble between rocks while water bugs skitter above them. To lay a blanket down on the rocky banks of the stream and chat with a friend at a safe distance as we stared up at blue skies through green leaves.
I criss-crossed the accessible parts of the park, listening to the birds, standing in silence below the stand of pines near the parking lot, learning the names of the flowers in the pollinator garden, listening to birds fighting in the tree-tops, watching vultures circle overhead. When I was exploring, I didn’t have to think about my job, about my personal life, about the state of the world. There wasn’t room in my head for both the things I was reading in the world and my fear, my anxiety, my loneliness. I couldn’t be present with both my fear and the quiet joy of watching a bumblebee investigate a stand of clover, my self-hate and my laughter at a blue jay scolding me for walking beneath his tree.
It was to the stream that I brought the news of the conclusion of my divorce in mid-August. The court hearing had been held on Zoom that morning, and I had digital plans with a friend to celebrate that evening, but I had the whole day to myself, to commemorate the occasion in my own way. It was a beautiful day, sunny and bright and not too hot, and the tree-sheltered air over the stream smelled wet and green and alive. I sat on the edge of the stream and watched the crayfish and thought until my backside was sore from sitting on pebbles, and in farewell I trailed my fingers in the water, scaring the crayfish, but feeling, in that moment, washed clean of my divorce, of my ex’s influence over me. I left the park feeling lighter when I left than when I had arrived.
When I got home I put in an order for a pair of waterproof boots. I wasn’t ready to tackle the jungle of the back trail, but as the children wading in the stream earlier in the summer had demonstrated so thoroughly, the stream provided an easy avenue of exploration, clear of branches and spiderwebs, if only I had the appropriate gear. A week later, a pair of black rubber rain boots were delivered to my front door, and I tried them on with all the glee of a child at Christmas. A whole new section of park to explore! What luxury.
The second half of the summer shaded into fall, and I got to know the stream itself as I waded carefully, oh so carefully, disturbing the life that made its home in the stream as little as possible, upstream through shaded, pebbled shallows until the stream emerged into the bright sunlight of something between a grassland and a marsh and became too deep for wading, and downstream where the stream ran narrower and deeper, just barely below the tops of my boots, to where a fallen tree had created a deep pool with nearly vertical banks that was again too deep to wade across. Up and down this long stretch of stream I scrambled and splashed, waded and contemplated. I learned where the fish lived, where the bank was too slippery to trust, where the pebbles and the mud had been washed away and the square shelves of shale bedrock were visible.
I watched the leaves burst into a riot of color above my head, and then fall, choking the stream, gathering in drifts in the shallows and forming mats where they were already beginning the process of becoming soil, silt, muck, food for life.
Death walked the small paradise that I’d spent my summer exploring, withering everything it touched, leaching the color out of things even as fall leached the heat from the air—but I had explored as far as I could with things the way they were, with the verdant jungle blocking the back path. Even as the world died around me, even as the darkest days of the year approached, and with them the lonely winter of the pandemic, anticipation mounted in me, a light that wouldn’t be denied. Soon I would get to walk the back path. The next stage of my exploration was about to begin.
I watched the forest denude itself leaf by leaf, watched the grasses and shrubs die back with bittersweet anticipation. Time and time again I scrambled under the arch of trees at the start of the back trail to check the progress of the dying, to ascertain whether the track was passable yet. I checked so often that I became frustrated and stopped for several weeks, limiting myself to visiting the stream and taking other, longer walks in other parks. When I had recovered my patience enough to check again, the week before deer-hunting was slated to begin, I found that finally, finally the path was clear. The back path was ready for me.
Even dressed in greys and browns, the back path is a good trail. It crosses the stream no fewer than four times, and between those crossings it meanders through dense undergrowth, opens into sunny patches of meadow, and then dives into the dark cathedral-like quiet that always seems to gather below stands of pines, and past fence-straight lines of osage orange trees that had at one point been hedges marking property lines, back when the park was still small farms. They drop their strange knobbly tennis-ball colored fruit in the dozens at the end of fall, and even well-after the rest of the path was dead gray and brown, they provided visible pops of color on the long straightaways beneath their branches. The path climbs small ridges and runs along the top of them, giving you a view of the meadows that sometimes spring up on either side of the stream. Songbirds and deer and squirrels are all common sights and hard to miss, but I have also seen birds of prey circling overhead, and on one memorable occasion a large brown weasel trotting along the banks of the stream on important weasel business, not fifteen feet from me, seemingly unaware of my presence. I have witnessed more than one family squabble between groups of crows.
Rain fell. Snow fell. More snow fell. The snow melted, and then more snow fell. And still, I kept coming back. I crunched through new snow, slid across compacted ice. Waded through mud up to my ankles. Walked the path in the rain, in the cold, in the wind. I went out in miserable weather, weather that should have kept me inside, curled up with a book and a mug of tea. But I couldn’t bring myself to stay away. I had seen my park in the spring, in the summer, in the fall. This was another kind of exploring, another kind of pushing back the boundaries of what I didn’t know about my park. The snow is slowest to melt here, along the north edge of the pines. Runoff from the melting snow crosses the path here, just where it dips, so that I have to wade through it. Water collects in the roots of a tree here and is churned into mud where people have walked through it. A tree fell here in the last windstorm and has to be climbed over. The stream has risen so high that all the stepping stones are underwater, so that I have to walk on the stepping stones just to keep the freezing water from spilling over the tops of my boots.
I realized, one day, standing ankle deep in meltwater and watching the drowned grass wave in the freezing current with quiet fascination, that I loved my park. That this was love. This is how you love someone. How you love something. With curiosity. With compassion.
Thoroughly, gently. By watching and waiting and going where you are invited. You love getting to know the messy bits as well as the picturesque. The mud, the dead branches. The fallen trees. The sudden shaft of sunlight that warms your face. The first buds on the trees. The riot of summer. None of it is forever, none of it is static; it’s just another face of what you love. You show up even in the shitty weather, and you don’t judge the weather for being shitty. You just take appropriate precautions, make sure you have the right gear, the right knowledge, to visit safely. You don’t go where you aren’t ready to go, where the undergrowth isn’t ready to give way. But you show up. Again and again and again. You love by seeing, and by knowing. By waiting, and by exploring.
And that if I could love a patch of land like that, surely I could love myself that way. Surely I could approach anger the way I could a rainstorm, sadness the way I could a muddy stretch of path, a dark period the way I’d approached the encroaching winter, a feeling of being overwhelmed the way I had a blocked path. That I could walk my paths anyway, when I felt ready, with the right equipment, the right knowledge, and a curious, compassionate eye.
That maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to run from myself, avoid my own darkness. My messy bits. My imperfections. That I could love those too. That I could look at them with curiosity and acceptance instead of judgment and fear.
I know my park, the good and the bad. The ways it contains life, the ways it contains death. I know that the trail of faded orange flags that leads off into the underbrush leads to a hunting blind. I know where the deep still pools of the stream are, and where the sun shines down almost too hot to bear in the summer. I know the patch of bank where the hunters clean their kills and leave the scent of blood on the air. I know the sound of raindrops on water, on leaves, on the hood of my raincoat. I know the way the leaves seem to glow when you look up and look at them from underneath and the sun is shining.
I know my park, and I love it, love it the way everyone deserves to be loved, deserves to love themselves: in all seasons, in all weathers, for the ways that we change and the ways that we stay the same. With curiosity, compassion, patience, and care.