Wisdom of a path well traveled

The hidden stories of familiar spaces

Something new! You can now listen to this article (kind of like a podcast) with the audio player below.

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Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I recall these words as I take the same unnamed trail I walk every day, the antithesis to Robert Frost’s mysterious road. I silently greet all of the plants I know by name: sweet fern, birch, tamarack, wintergreen, white pine, on and on, one by one. I know the exact places where the trail will bend, where it will dip and fill with water in the spring, where it will open up and where it will end. I can see in my mind where the wild irises will bloom next year and where the ticks will be the thickest.

There must be something to a road most traveled too, I think to myself.

This morning Marzanna’s icy breath has left its mark on the edges of the wild lands, beautiful and unforgiving. The leaves seem to know, falling more urgently now. It’s an audible thing, like little fairy feet dancing in the branches as the frost-hardened leaves crack and twirl to the ground in pirouettes. Autumn’s flamboyant party is at its witching hour. There is a promise and a curse in the wind. This is no longer a time for living things as the dark creeps along the periphery.

These little shifts on this particular trail feel like a second skin to me now. But it isn’t just the orderly seasonal changes in the landscape that define this familiar trail. There are layers upon layers of life that build up each time I place my feet on its soil.

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Here at the beginning of the trail, I was entering the unmarked path just last week when I heard a voice shout behind me, “ma’am!” Odin had already run ahead as I turned back toward the voice, a bit of apprehension set in my shoulders. These aren’t places where you expect to see other humans. As I walked back to the entrance I saw a man pulled over on the shoulder getting out of his pickup truck the color of sharpened steel. Odin had made his way back to me now, wearily eyeing the stranger as he sat by my side, a low grumble growing in his throat.

“There’s a wounded bear in there”, he proclaims. “The DNR was looking for him, but couldn’t find him.”

“Oh. How long ago was that?”

He hesitated a beat too long. “About three weeks ago”.

I could see he knew I was thinking the same thing he was. If it’s been three weeks, the bear probably healed by now or it didn’t. Things don’t last long in the wild once they’ve been wounded.

Seeing that I wasn’t running for my car yet, he tried another tactic. “There are three big bears back there too. I saw them on my trail cams.”

I saw what this was now. It wasn’t the first time a man saw me in the woods and deemed me helpless. I could have said:

a. There are 12,000 bears in Michigan (more than half the population of bears in the entire European continent). If I wasn’t comfortable with bears in the woods, I wouldn’t be out there.

b. I live about a mile down the road and bears walk through my backyard regularly. They’ve never caused me any trouble.

c. The only time anyone else comes out to these woods is during hunting season. Then they retreat to their homes for the rest of the year. I’m out here every day, no matter the weather or season. While I’m sure his intentions were good, they were misplaced.

Instead I said, “yeah, I’ve seen their track back there”. Because I also know that I am a woman alone in the woods. My tactic is always to neither confirm nor deny their comments.

He stood there a bit confused for a moment. Once he realized I wasn’t leaving, he made one last feeble attempt to save me. “Well just make a lot of noise while you’re out there”, as if every person living in bear country didn’t already know that.

“I’ll keep an eye out”, I say as I turn away.

He climbs back into his truck, probably convinced that he will read in the Gladwin County Record next week that a woman was mauled to death by a bear out by the Secord dam.

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As Odin and I continue on I think about a quote from Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith.

“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.”

There is an absurdity to this notion. Poetic, yes. But a real forest witch would only be so confident walking in such a place because she knows the forest better than anyone else. She knows the rhythms of the land, the signs to watch out for, the plants she can use for survival, when to stay and when to go. But above all, she always humbles herself when she sets foot in a forest. A true witch would know that there is no one and nothing above the will of the forest. She knows when a bit of fear will keep her alive and when intuition will guide her true.

As we walk, the trees open up to a vast marshland to the west. This swampy land is what I believe has kept these woods from being thoroughly logged. I pass by the towering pines that I will visit again in the darkest days of the year to collect resin for my Woodswoman Salve. I relish in their soft billowing boughs as I greet them silently.

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Odin disappears from sight when the trees close in on either side, darkening an already ominous grey sky. Another story weaves its way in as the oaks and the pines swallow me whole. I am brought back to another day along this portion of the path in the depths of winter. Here, I wandered off the trail to see how far I could walk before the wildwood gave way to more marsh.

The snow was deep and crispy as Odin and I trudged our own path through the trees. It was the perfect consistency for capturing footprints in the malleable landscape. Deer paths crisscrossed on all sides along with some fainter turkey tracks and raccoon. Then I stopped in my own booted tracks, my grey Sorels sinking to calf height around me.

Beside my path was another path that looked unlike anything I had ever seen in all of my years haunting the woods. The prints themselves were enormous. The distinct shape of each toe and curve of the instep and heel were pronounced and unmistakable. The strides easily spanned five feet between each step, the formation clearly biped. I stared for a moment before following the path for a bit until it disappeared into another deer trail. I was suddenly aware of how alone I was in that moment. No one comes out to this trail except during hunting season which passed months ago. And certainly no one wanders off the trail this far.

There is more to that day deep in the winter woods, but that is a tale for a dark snowy night. Still though, as I walk through this hollow, trees intertwining their fingers together over my head, I feel his watchful eyes on me.

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Finally the trees thin again until we come to a crossroads. The left fork will take me deeper into the woods, until the trail tapers off at a series of magnificent beaver ponds. There, the thin trunks of aspens are gnawed to points around the ponds, evidence of the hardy water dwelling creatures that live there.

The right fork traverses private land. There is no gate to mark the lines. Things are not so well defined in the forest. Public and private land ebb and flow against one another, making it difficult to know which path to take.

Instead, I walk straight ahead, taking the path that leads to what I thought was a pond. It was here at the cusp of summer that an old woman manifested in front of me. Odin emerged from the water at that point with the stick I had been throwing. She lived in these woods and told me it wasn’t a pond at all, but a natural spring whose depths reached at least 200 feet.

She continued unprovoked to express her disgust in the world for quite some time. In the next breath she told me all about the baby foxes that play in the woods here each spring. I let her talk, thinking of this strange encounter and the inconspicuous pond that was actually a portal, seeping quietly into the bowels of the earth in front of me.

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It is here at this pool of mirrors that my path ends. In total, the trail is no more than two miles out and back, but it is these layers of experiences that enrich and change its definition with each traverse. They are sewn together like individual squares to a hand crafted quilt. Or like holding a prism up to the sunlight and slowly rotating it, each turn revealing a new intangible layer of color and light. Like the trail, the prism is a physical thing, but the experience that it conjures is something transcendental.

We turn around and make our way back to the car now. Odin finds half of a decomposing skull; fur, sinew and all, hiding under the skeleton of a fern. He carries it for a bit. Knowing it will not be coming home with us, he drops it as we pass the twin maples, the car coming into sight. This is a rhythm for him too.

I laugh as we make the short drive home. If we were in a fairytale, this path would make a good quest. The trusty furry sidekick. The foreboding stranger blocking the trail. The mythical beast lurking in the darkest part of the forest. The crone that guards a magical portal. The picturesque woodland, shifting and changing at will.

But it’s not. It’s just a trail I got to know after hundreds of walks through it. Exploring new areas of life is a gift, but to get to know something so intimately can also make all the difference. If we always search for the things that push us outward, we may only discover one side of its face. When we take time to do the same thing over and over, it takes us inward, deeper and deeper into the nature of a thing, of ourselves. Nothing in life is straightforward. There are infinite lessons that can be learned in just one simple mundane act.

The trick to this inward journey is to simply be open. Let the lessons come. It is impossible to have the exact same experience twice.

Tomorrow we will be back on the trail again. Odin and I will walk into the woods, fitting into it like a well worn boot smelling of old leather. A comfort to the senses. Though we’ve been here before, there are so many stories yet to unfold.

Much love,

Val

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An invitation

These inward lessons we learn from a daily lived life too often gets overlooked. Is there a particular path you travel many times over, or a task you perform regularly that has shaped something essential within you?

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