Take a Hike
My son, Luke, is 14. We had spent a recent week bickering about the forms of his life, about his need to make an effort to keep track of deadlines and overcoats -- old problems that come back again and again.
He's a great kid and I'm proud of him, but it seemed like time to bear down on those little problems. He pushed back, in the normal teen-age tug-of-war of freedom and responsibility, and it wore us both down and ate up far more time and emotion than it needed to. I sensed he felt the need to reconnect, to get back down to the bedrock of father and son as we experience it. So did I. So we did something we haven't done in too long: We took a hike.
South of the city is a big ranging park you can get lost in, where we've gone exploring since as long as Luke can remember. We've seen it in every weather and season, seen faerie rings in the grass and deer spoor in the snow. Fields follow woods and riverbanks bend beneath rocks piled up to castle-cliff height. You can start out in the same direction, from the same spot, ten times running and never end up twice in the same place.
Early in Luke's life I scouted a feature here that I knew we'd return to. It's the sort of terrain a father needs for the sake of a son: A steep slope leaps up from a creekbed to the height of the park, where it that looks down on the city. Four hundred feet perhaps: not quite sheer, but too steep to walk upright on any of it and often you have to scramble on all fours.
You need a good stout stick and the avail of tree roots. You need to learn which rocks to trust. You need to stay a bit clear of the climber behind you, lest you kick down a stoneslide on him, but you also can help him with a hand out at impassible points.
It's not so steep that you have to prepare for the ascent in advance, but it's steep enough that if you look down it can make you giddy. Success is by no means sure; you just might break your neck, and once you get to the top you know you've done something brute and real in the world. It's a place to recover what can get lost in the balancing act of civilized living.
But that came last. First, we walked along the river bank and measured the depth of the late flood by the weed clusters decked in the tree branches, higher than my head, and saw how the current had scoured down the river banks to the bedrock. They lay clean of mud and old clamshells for the first time since we had been coming there. Two blue herons skimmed up the river silently ahead of us.
We turned up into the woods. The cold had killed the orb-weaver spiders which in August might have made the going unpleasant, and the only one I saw was a tiny hatchling that drifted down onto my jacket while I sat on a log while Luke thumbed through his nature guide identifying a mushroom.
The ground around some trees was black with walnuts and the faintly pissy spice-smell of them reminded me of my own childhood, in Chester County, when walnut trees grew in the woods behind my house. Out here, the park is the only place I know where they are common. I pocketed one and took it home to Amy, but by the time we got there the odor had worn off.
We didn't go up the cliff this time; we made no dramatic ascent. I had sprained my ankle badly a few weeks ago, and it still hasn't healed. I'm beginning to think it will be a pain that I carry for the rest of my years, an intimation of mortality, and that I'll always now be able to foretell a change in the barometer.
Instead, we came at the bluff in a shallower path, through the trees, and then we stood there and looked out and named the landmarks of our town on the horizon -- the old age home, the water tower, the prison. We figured where our house was, by the trees. But we missed and mourned the surest landmark, the big century-old pine that our neighbors cut down one day this spring to make room to park their cars in the yard.
While we stood there, a red-tail rose up the cliff drafts from the river bend below, and banked and planed in front of us. We could look him in the eye and the sun shone full on his feathers. The herons regard us as intruders, but I think the hawks feel rather glad at us, since our blundering in their woods and meadows scares out tasty rabbits and mice. He (or she) watched the riverbank, not us, hovering down the wind till it took him out of our view. We walked down then, but as we did we heard that fierce chiiiiiir, the cry that the car commercials always dub in over the footage of the bald eagle, whose true cry is rather mewling and weak.
We went down the hill -- in its own way as challenging as going up it, but without the "Rocky" moment at the top. You turn your foot sideways, like a hockey skate, to keep from sliding, and as you go down you always keep a stout tree not too far in front of you to halt your progress if you lose traction. Then we crossed the grass back to the car and went home.
He's a great kid and I'm proud of him, but it seemed like time to bear down on those little problems. He pushed back, in the normal teen-age tug-of-war of freedom and responsibility, and it wore us both down and ate up far more time and emotion than it needed to. I sensed he felt the need to reconnect, to get back down to the bedrock of father and son as we experience it. So did I. So we did something we haven't done in too long: We took a hike.
South of the city is a big ranging park you can get lost in, where we've gone exploring since as long as Luke can remember. We've seen it in every weather and season, seen faerie rings in the grass and deer spoor in the snow. Fields follow woods and riverbanks bend beneath rocks piled up to castle-cliff height. You can start out in the same direction, from the same spot, ten times running and never end up twice in the same place.
Early in Luke's life I scouted a feature here that I knew we'd return to. It's the sort of terrain a father needs for the sake of a son: A steep slope leaps up from a creekbed to the height of the park, where it that looks down on the city. Four hundred feet perhaps: not quite sheer, but too steep to walk upright on any of it and often you have to scramble on all fours.
You need a good stout stick and the avail of tree roots. You need to learn which rocks to trust. You need to stay a bit clear of the climber behind you, lest you kick down a stoneslide on him, but you also can help him with a hand out at impassible points.
It's not so steep that you have to prepare for the ascent in advance, but it's steep enough that if you look down it can make you giddy. Success is by no means sure; you just might break your neck, and once you get to the top you know you've done something brute and real in the world. It's a place to recover what can get lost in the balancing act of civilized living.
But that came last. First, we walked along the river bank and measured the depth of the late flood by the weed clusters decked in the tree branches, higher than my head, and saw how the current had scoured down the river banks to the bedrock. They lay clean of mud and old clamshells for the first time since we had been coming there. Two blue herons skimmed up the river silently ahead of us.
We turned up into the woods. The cold had killed the orb-weaver spiders which in August might have made the going unpleasant, and the only one I saw was a tiny hatchling that drifted down onto my jacket while I sat on a log while Luke thumbed through his nature guide identifying a mushroom.
The ground around some trees was black with walnuts and the faintly pissy spice-smell of them reminded me of my own childhood, in Chester County, when walnut trees grew in the woods behind my house. Out here, the park is the only place I know where they are common. I pocketed one and took it home to Amy, but by the time we got there the odor had worn off.
We didn't go up the cliff this time; we made no dramatic ascent. I had sprained my ankle badly a few weeks ago, and it still hasn't healed. I'm beginning to think it will be a pain that I carry for the rest of my years, an intimation of mortality, and that I'll always now be able to foretell a change in the barometer.
Instead, we came at the bluff in a shallower path, through the trees, and then we stood there and looked out and named the landmarks of our town on the horizon -- the old age home, the water tower, the prison. We figured where our house was, by the trees. But we missed and mourned the surest landmark, the big century-old pine that our neighbors cut down one day this spring to make room to park their cars in the yard.
While we stood there, a red-tail rose up the cliff drafts from the river bend below, and banked and planed in front of us. We could look him in the eye and the sun shone full on his feathers. The herons regard us as intruders, but I think the hawks feel rather glad at us, since our blundering in their woods and meadows scares out tasty rabbits and mice. He (or she) watched the riverbank, not us, hovering down the wind till it took him out of our view. We walked down then, but as we did we heard that fierce chiiiiiir, the cry that the car commercials always dub in over the footage of the bald eagle, whose true cry is rather mewling and weak.
We went down the hill -- in its own way as challenging as going up it, but without the "Rocky" moment at the top. You turn your foot sideways, like a hockey skate, to keep from sliding, and as you go down you always keep a stout tree not too far in front of you to halt your progress if you lose traction. Then we crossed the grass back to the car and went home.
