Byron Brumbaugh

One structure, two “buildings.”

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

-Groucho Marx

For the past three years, Waldo and I have lived in a 492-unit apartment complex on a 40-acre plot of landscaped land.  There are 22 different structures housing those units, nineteen having two separate “buildings” and three with just one each.  The structures with two “buildings” are a single edifice and the “buildings” each have their own keys for entry, with no way to get to the other “building” without going outside.  Each “building” has its own number for a total of forty-seven “buildings.”  Each “building” has 12 apartments — some are studios, some with one bedroom and some with two bedrooms.

The structures are scattered over the 40 acres on a gentle slope of manicured lawn with islands of trees, bushes and flowering plants.  There are large, old blue spruce, common sassafras, red and white oak, Norway and red maple, flowering dogwood and other trees distributed about the grounds.  There are also thickets of northern white cedar, creeping juniper, hinoki cypress, Canada yew and other bushes growing in piles of red wood chips.  The flowers include rose of sharon, Catawba rhododendron and others I haven’t yet identified.  There are also several large granite boulders of various colors strewn about, no doubt left over from the original construction.  These boulders, the trees, bushes and flowers are spread throughout the grounds in such a way that Waldo and I can enjoy their variety while we wander around the grounds on the half-mile loop we use for our poop and pee excursions.  The grounds are well-kept and a real pleasure to walk in.

The road into the complex is shaped like a lollipop, with the stem divided into an inlet and an outlet drive, separated by an island of trees, bushes and flowers.  The stem meets a circle inside of which are four of the apartment structures.  Waldo and I live on the third floor of one of those that house two “buildings” on the far side of the circle.  It is a one-bedroom apartment, which is plenty for our meager needs, and has a small balcony from which Waldo can scan his realm and watch for interesting things to pass by.

One might suppose that a third-floor apartment would not be the optimum place to have a dog, especially a border collie who requires a lot of activity.  For the first few weeks of his life here, I had to carry puppy-Waldo up and down the stairs because he was afraid of them.  I am very conscious of the limitations of living where we do and I still take him out for walks every couple of hours, so he can get outside and romp for a bit.  But in some ways, it has proven to be more ideal than if we were to have a backyard that Waldo could run around in at will.  Because Waldo needs to be taken downstairs in order to relieve himself, I have to be attuned to what he is doing, much more than I would if he could go outside any time he wants.  I can’t get absorbed in the TV, my writing, reading or anything else and ignore him.  He can’t simply ignore me and go about doing his Waldo thing without asking for my assistance.  Waldo does entertain himself quite well without my help, but he still needs me to take him downstairs every couple of hours or so.  This means we are bound to interact with one another on a regular basis throughout the day.  Our interaction is not continuous, but it is pervasive.  We may not be thinking about each other constantly, but the other is always there in the background of our attention.

I can’t think of a single time when Waldo has come up to me and asked to go out that I’ve ignored him or regretted that I have to do it.  Sometimes I’m in the middle of something and I tell him to wait, which he dutifully does by lying down on the floor and staring at me until I make a move to get up.  When he clearly has to go out, and right now! he lets me know and I drop whatever I’m doing and I oblige.  I don’t complain about it, I don’t get upset that I have to do it, I just do it – in the rain, in the snow, in the freezing cold and in the sweltering heat.  And once I’m out there with Waldo, I truly enjoy it.  Waldo and I have become good friends.  We have synchronized our lives and fallen into a symbiosis that makes us both happy.

If there is one thing that I do think is missing, it is that Waldo has no place where he can run around at will off leash.  There are no convenient, nearby dog parks.  Instead, I put him on a fifty-two-foot leash and take him to a nearby park and let him run wild on the soccer fields.  Add to this the fact that a five-and-a-half mile long paved trail is only one mile away from where we sleep, a trail that is swathed in a natural beauty of wide variety, and I know we’re doing alright.  Waldo gets his exercise, and forces me to get mine, in a garden of sorts, both manicured and wild, that bathes us in beauty.

It is a good home for us.

Where we live.

The Assebet River Rail-Trail map, from Marlborough to Acton.

And into the forest I go to lose my mind and find my soul.

-John Muir

It occurs to me that, although I’ve written a lot about it, I’ve never described the Assebet River Rail Trail in its entirety.  It is Waldo’s and my favorite walk through nature, and it runs from Acton to Marlborough.  It follows, more or less, the railroad bed of the Marlborough Branch of the Fitchburg Railroad, about a fourteen-mile trek in toto.  Its northern terminus is next to the South Acton MBTA train station, a place where the train to Boston still runs.  The Southern-most end is in Marlborough, across the street from where Waldo and I park our car when we go for our walks.  In the middle there is a gap where you have to take to the city streets if you want to walk the full distance – something we have never done.  The southern portion of the trail is five-and-a-quarter-miles long and the northern section runs for three and a half miles.  The gap, of about five-and-a-quarter miles, is supposed to be developed at some point in the future, but at this time, one is forced to take a wandering route along the sides of roads with traffic.  Waldo and I usually stay on the first three miles of the southern portion, although we have walked the full five-and-quarter miles and also the three-and-a-half miles of the northern part.

Our portion of the trail is paved, with a painted intermittent yellow line running in a regular staccato fashion down its middle, and follows a serpentine route through woods and meadow.  Houses are close by in the beginning, but there are bushes, weeds, vines, and trees that separate us from our neighbors.  In the spring, summer and early fall, these plants create a green wall, punctuated with flowers of various colors, insulating anyone on the trail from the enveloping city.  It’s easy to ignore the sounds of cars, lawn mowers and the general throb of urban life and feel that one is strolling through a tunnel of nature, far from the madding crowd.  In the winter, this wall becomes a hodge-podge of intertwined sticks of various sizes — a godsend for Waldo.  There are many different species of plants here, the undergrowth in places dominated by Japanese knotweed, and I’m sure that they all put root to soil through arbitrary accident (with one exception, a small Covid-garden alongside the trail), rather than by the intentional hand of man.  The number of different species is copious and bears testimony to the fecundity of the natural world, left to its own designs.

After a quarter of a mile, the trail crosses Ash Street.  Here the nearest houses retreat from the path — it’s as if human habitation is slowly withdrawing from where we walk.  Oaks, maples, black walnut trees, along with trees of heaven, sumac, white pine and others, begin to dominate.  The undergrowth remains alongside the tarmac where it can still get sunlight, but further away from the trail, the trees dominate and the weeds and bushes become more anemic, then disappear.  After three-eighths of a mile, we cross Hudson Street and, soon after, forest wafts off into the distance as far as you can see, which is limited by the density of the greenery during most of the year.  In the winter, once the leaves are gone, you can vaguely see in the distance, through twig and branch, the surrounding city-scape, but the rest of the year the insulation is nearly complete.

After another three-eighths of a mile, we cross Boston Scientific Way, the entryway to a large corporate entity of the same name, and about one mile from our starting point.  Just past the street is a large open meadow that slopes gently down to Fort Meadow Reservoir.  The meadow is a landfill and has several pipes, two or three inches in diameter, stuck in the ground and topped with a curve that points the opening downward.  These are vents for any methane that may be produced underground, so it doesn’t collect and cause problems.  At the bottom of the hill is a two-laned highway, Route 62, that borders the water.  There are two causeways that cross the reservoir and the wooded hill on the opposite shore is packed with several large houses.  Walking along, looking across the landfill and the watery expanse, one could almost imagine that they were seeing a quaint Maine town on the Atlantic coast on a calm day, instead of a small piece of Marlborough alongside a reservoir.  It is particularly picturesque in autumn when it is bathed in the technicolor display of fall.

Soon after, some one-and-a-half miles from our starting point, we parallel Sasseville Way, cross Fitchburg Street and then follow close by Crowley Drive.  On our right is the fenced-in athletic field of the Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School.  Signs clearly state that it is verboten for the public to enter the grassy expanse, which is a real shame.  Alas, I would love to take Waldo off leash and just let him run at will in all that protected space.  Just past the field, the path continues through thick forest, on both sides, down to a tunnel that passes under the Route Eighty-Five Connector that is the end of Interstate Two-Ninety and the boundary between Marlborough and Hudson.  From there, now having gone more than two miles, the trail continues on in deep woods a little more than another mile to Washington Street, a busy thoroughfare.  Waldo and I turn around and head back just before then, a little more than three miles from our car, to complete our daily walk.

Waldo and I, we love this trail.

Brigham’s Bridge, a farm bridge built with no mortar.

My good buddy.

I enjoy waking up and not having to go to work.  So I do it three or four times a day.

-Gene Perret

When I decided to retire, I closed the chapter on work and moved on.  I have never been tempted to go back to work, even though I really could have.  When Covid hit, I was prepared to work or volunteer, but things never got so bad that I felt I was needed.  I guess not everyone is built to make a decision, walk away from a thing and never wonder if it would be better if their course didn’t yaw in a very different direction, but that’s what happened to me.  The decision was made and I never gave it another thought.

I never even have dreams about the Emergency Room.  I’m sure I suffer a little from PTSD – the trauma and stress was certainly there, but it feels like it was all in a different life, one that is no longer relevant to what’s happening now.  It seems to be more like a story I read once, than a life that I actually lived — interesting, but unreal somehow.  My current reality is all about sharing a life with Waldo, that includes all the mundane daily routines like eating, going to the bathroom and walking, and somehow assimilating everything.  There are still new adventures that I get involved in, like walking with Phyllis and Christine, rafting down the Snake River and a few other things, but mostly I’m drawn to connecting the dots that are the events that happened to me in my life.  Not so much figuring out the meaning of life as just trying to define the story.  And in my writing, setting the gist, if not the details, down on the page.  I can’t think of a better way of spending retirement.

We’re born into this life, a bunch of stuff happens, and then we die.  Maybe our lives don’t, in themselves, have any meaning, but that doesn’t mean that what happened was meaningless.  Maybe the meaning of life is the meaning we put to the life we live.  We get to choose the events in our lives that are significant enough to remember.  We get to draw the lines that connect it all together into some kind of coherent whole.  We choose the plot of what happened, the arc of the story and its denouement. These choices we make tell the story as we choose to tell it and, in the end, the choices we make define who we are and that is what gives meaning to our lives.

At this time of my life, coherence seems to be important.  I made choices, things happened because of those choices and that led to my making other choices.  Seeing that causal chain reaction in some detail is what I mean when I say that I’m trying to assimilate my past. If I can put it all together, I feel like I have grasped what there is to “understand” of my life.  And I don’t mean understand in an intellectual sense.  I mean understand in a spiritual sense.  To be able to hold it all in my mind at once, not as a collection of concepts or ideas, but as a feeling, a contiguous, ever evolving, conscious path of awareness from where I was in the distant past to where I am now.  If I could see that, I think I would give meaning to my life.

So, for now, I walk in the woods and do my best to be aware of the essence of life, to be present in what is happening now.  To get in touch with what is most important about life, that which is happening right now.  To hear the wind in the trees, feel the cold breeze on my face, to see, really see, the life around me as it prepares for the depths of winter and to smell rotting leaves and decaying bogs.  And, of course, to enjoy my life with Waldo.

Waldo is a gift from the gods.  He provides me with the opportunity to revel in love, a kind of love that isn’t intense and frenzied, as sexual love can be, but rather one that is warm and cozy, like a hot cup of cocoa on a cold winter’s day.  He is at the center of my daily routine and a source of satisfaction at the end of every day.  He is with me nearly every hour of every day and that has afforded us the opportunity to bond in a way we would never have been able to if I were still working.  Waldo urges me to get out of my chair, enjoy nature and watch him enjoy being in nature.

Waldo helps me celebrate the flow of the life I have left.

Love this kooky dog!

Ah! There’s a good stick!

Everyone thinks they have the best dog. And none of them are wrong.

-W. R. Purche

Waldo is a little over three years old and we’ve been together for almost three years.  During the time I’ve known him, I’ve seen him mature, learn how to cope with his environment and calm down.  He learned that he needs to stop when he comes to a street crossing and wait until I say, “Okay,” before he crosses.  It has happened that he doesn’t cross the street, despite my giving him the go-ahead, because he sees a car coming that I don’t see.  Border collies are well known for their energy, and Waldo is certainly no exception.  Although he still runs around in tight circles while he’s waiting for me to get ready to take him out (I don’t understand how he does that without falling due to a complete loss of balance and then puking!), he’s not as frenetic about it.  As a puppy, on the rare occasions when he would jerk the leash out of my hand, the retractable handle would wind the thing up and bang on the ground as it trailed after him, and he would be gone and out of sight (like that time in Hudson when I had to chase him down the road in the heat).  Now, when this happens, without cue from me, he stops and turns to look at me as if thinking, “What?  I didn’t do nothin’!”  He even sits, sometimes, until I walk up and grab my end of the tether.

Border collies are well known for being focused.  Most of the time, Waldo’s attention is fully consumed by whatever is driving him at the moment.  It might be a rabbit he’s spotted and he stops dead still, nose stuck out in front, head a little lowered, unblinking and staring at it.  It might be a stick he sees that appeals, most of them do in varying degrees, and he lunges for it, apparently thinking that if he doesn’t act fast, it will get away.  It might be that he is concentrating on moving forward, down the path, at a pace always faster than mine, as if all that matters is getting to the end of the trail.  Whatever it is that consumes him in the moment, it really consumes him – it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.  In the past, when he was a puppy, that was almost impossible to break into.  Now, with a little encouragement, he will “Leave it alone,” or “Come,” or “Go this way.”

This border-collieness might seem a bit disheartening for some.  He may seem somewhat less affectionate than other dogs, like a golden retriever, for example.  Golden retrievers often nudge your arm, looking for a little attention, or come up and put their nose on your thigh, seeking a pat and a scratch.  Waldo will do that in the car, but it’s more because he’s nervous, doesn’t like to be in the car, and is looking for assurance and maybe some anxiety relief.  In other places, he’s off on his own, entertaining himself, except on those occasions when he wants to play.  He seems to be perfectly happy in his own company.

I really like that about Waldo.  It allows me to be content in my own company.  While Waldo is out on the balcony, keeping watch on his realm, I’m inside on my recliner, writing, reading, or watching television.  When we’re walking, Waldo is out doing his Waldo thing, leaving me to listen to the wind, photograph unfamiliar plants and smell the roses.  If one of us wants to play, we approach the other and we’re off pursuing a game of Waldo-stick, or tug-of-war.  That lasts for a bit, then we’re back in our own worlds again.  If I feel like I want a little doggy affection, I go up to him, give him a hug, talk to him lovingly and give him a scratch or two.  He responds with a wagging tail; he leans into me and maybe nibbles at my clothes.  That done, we’re off on our own again.

I couldn’t ask for a better companion.  He’s there when I want him and off on his own when I need me-time.  I’m there for him when he needs me and I leave him alone to be Waldo the rest of the time.

It took a while for our rhythms to synchronize, but we are now in resonance.  All it took was patience, close observation of each other and an interest in learning from the other what they needed and desired.  Now, Waldo truly is the best dog.

Ever.

Come on! Get a move on, would ya!

Fort Meadow Reservoir in fall.

When you arise in the morning, think what a precious privilege it is to be alive, to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

-Marcus Aurelius

It’s late morning when Waldo and I start out on the rail-trail today.  The days are colder, but not so cold that I have to dress in my parka – yet.  Still, I would have had to wear a jacket, if we had gone earlier, and I knew it would be warm enough I could go in shirt sleeves, and not freeze, if we waited.  It is now a tolerable 54 ℉ and a little chilly, but after a couple of miles, I will generate enough body heat so I’ll be comfortable.  It’s a little warm for Waldo; he seems to thrive when the temperature is in the low forties, but you wouldn’t know it to watch him.  He’s out of the car and bounding down the path, soon pulling at the end of the leash.  I only know that this temperature is a little more than he would prefer by past observation — he will have his tongue hanging out before we finish.

In about six weeks, at the winter solstice (December 21), the sun will be only 24.1 degrees above the horizon when it is at its zenith in Boston.  Now, it is nearly noon and yet it is still close to the horizon.  That means that shadows are long, despite the fact that it’s the middle of the day.  The sun shines obliquely on the trail, the trees, the grass and Waldo and me.  That makes the day cooler, but also less glaringly bright.  Fall days are beautiful, with bright reds, glorious oranges, and still some vibrant greens, but the lighting that shows off these colors is less direct, more subtle than in summer.  The shadows give everything more depth and contour as well, showing off the texture of an oak’s ridged and riven bark, or the grain in a weathered old plank on a rail fence.  This effect disappears on days with overcast skies that erase shadows, and everything seems very flat.  Once snowfall has covered everything, the reflected light from the icy whiteness also aids in removing shadows.  But today, it’s nice and sunny, the ground is clear and the visual texture of nature is palpable, adding to the artistic flair of autumn’s technicolor display.

The leaves of more and more trees are turning color.  The sumacs have gone past their bright red phase and are turning a dull brown.  Birch trees have already lost most of their leaves that are now yellowed and cover the ground.  Many of the maples have turned red or orange, although there are some trees that still sport greenery.  If you look carefully, you can find maple leaves that are in the process of turning.  Between the veins, the leafy flesh that fills that space, the venule, is bright red, yet the part of the leaf abutting the veins is still green.  The contrast in these colors, bright red next to vibrant green, is very striking.  I’ve seen birch leaves that have a more gradual color change from red, to orange, to yellow, then to green, all in a fractal-like pattern, that are gorgeous.  Many mighty oaks still hang onto much of their green, stubbornly in denial of the coming winter.

There are also white pine needles on the path.  They aren’t there because of fall — after all, they’re conifers.  But they’re not impervious to a strong wind and we had quite a storm, a nor’easter, a few days ago.  The pines themselves stand tall and green, seemingly unaware of, or perhaps uninterested in, the colder temperatures.  Yet their organs of photosynthesis are all over the ground like those of their cousins, the deciduous oaks, maples, sumacs, birches and all the rest.  Mother Nature exacts a price for her change in seasons and leaves and pine needles are fodder for her cannons of cold icy winds.

My attention shifts to Waldo, who wanders along the way, searching out every morsel of experience he can find – all the sights, smells, sounds, textures and even (yuk!) tastes on show before him.  It makes me wonder why I never noticed, really noticed, what was always there right in front of me all my life.  Only in the past few years have I been completely open to experiencing the beauty all around me.  Then I remember.  It’s like what Moat said to Jake Sully in the movie, Avatar, “It’s hard to fill a cup that is already full.”  My cup has always been so full, my attention turned elsewhere, my mind engorged with the demands of the moment, that I had little psychic energy for anything else.  Now, all those other things, career, bank account, things I own, superficial interpersonal relationships — the bread and butter of life in your twenties and later, seem so unimportant, almost irrelevant.  I am eternally grateful to Waldo for providing the impetus for me to find the world as it is.

And I now get to do it every damn day.

Big-tooth aspen leaf in late fall.

CUBA! How the hell did we get to Cuba?

Only those who are eager to get lost in the wilderness of life’s beauty can find a meaningful life.

-Debasish Mridha

We walked two more legs of our BCT trek, about a week apart.  The first leg was around fourteen miles long, going from Ashland to Sherborn, and the second about twelve miles, going from Sherborn through Medfield to just south of that town.  Christine was able to join us for the first part, but it was only Phyllis, Waldo and me for the second.  This country, about thirty miles or southeast of Boston, is rolling hills, forests of mostly oak, maple and white pine, with bogs and meadows in the low places.  The temperature on both days was cool, but not so cool there weren’t any mosquitoes.   There were way too many mosquitoes.  I lathered myself up with some Ultrathon, a cream developed by the military that contains DEET, but is not absorbed through the skin, and they weren’t too bad.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, we often get a little lost before we finish the trek of the day, a delay that usually costs us a mile or so and sometimes up to an hour, and the trip from Ashland to Sherborn was no exception.  At one point, we did a double-take at a license plate on a car that was parked along a street where we walked.  The plate plainly said, “Cuba” above the usual string of numbers that license plates have.  Now, that is definitely lost!  We never found out the story behind the car, but were definitely amused by the find, enough to take a picture.

Most of these walks are very pleasant.   I especially like the jaunts into the forests, climbing up and down the hills, making our way through the exposed tree roots and large rocks.  Phyllis really likes the boggy areas, particularly where someone has put elevated wooden paths through the muck so we can be in the mire without being in the mud.  Christine likes the beach but is game for just about anything and Waldo, he loves it all.  As long as the path has a stick somewhere nearby, he’s good to go.

On the second of the two trips, Phyllis and I were particularly amused by two BCT markers that appeared on the same tree.  About a foot apart and both just above eye level, one marker pointed to the left and the other pointed to the right.  Now how could anyone possibly get lost with obvious directions like that?  We resorted to using the online interactive map and found our way okay, but even this ploy is wrought with difficulty.  The map shows a satellite view of the ground around us with a blue pulsating dot where we’re located on the image.  In good times, there is a thin red line that represents the trail that is overlaid on the satellite view and, if we’re on-trail, passes through our blue dot.  Not infrequently, however, the red line either fails to come up, or it disappears altogether if we expand the image to get a better idea of what’s going on.  The trail is so serpentine that it is often necessary to blow up the image so we can tell just which way to go.  Somehow or other, we are always able to get back to our car, even it means we have to stumble an added mile or two to do it.  Like Phyllis says, though, “Where’s the fun if we don’t at least occasionally get a little lost?”

Waldo, heck, he knows exactly where he is.  He’s right here, right now.  Always.  And, since he has no goal, he can’t get lost.   As long as there is a trail to be trod and plenty of sticks to move around, what does it matter where he goes?  In his experience, no matter which paths we take, or what we confront, all trails lead to home.  I sometimes wonder if he finds that rather magical.  Sometimes, I find it kinda magical too.

At the end of our second walk, we round a corner in the street we’re on and find our car where we left it in an unimproved parking lot just south of Medfield.  Our next trek will take us just north of Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play.  We’re getting ever closer to our final destination, Kingston Bay, Duxbury, but that is still many miles away.

Arriving home, Waldo plops over on his side, as he is wont to do, and, after catching his panting breath, is standing at the bedroom door, asking to be let in to go take a nap in his crate.  But he doesn’t fool me.  I know for a fact that all I’d have to do is say, “Wanna go outside?” and he would be up on his feet, impatiently trotting around in circles, eager to hit the trail, any trail, one more time.

Me?  I’m grateful I can put my weary muscles in my beloved recliner and lean back.

Yeah, I was a little lost today, but now I am so found.

Well, it’s clear which is the right way to go…

Follo9w the yellow brick road!

Always hold fast to the present.  Every situation, indeed every moment, is of infinite value, for it is the representative of a whole eternity.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The sun is up!  And Waldo and I are out and about.  That’s our default condition, I suppose.  Christine texts me in greeting, wanting to know what Waldo and I are doing.  I answer, “WWW,” which covers it pretty well and has become a standard response.  Today, we left in the morning, around 8, and we invite her to join us, but she’s busy doing other stuff – she’s one busy woman.

Waldo’s trotting up ahead, at the far end of the leash, sniffing and picking up sticks.  I do my best to relax my attention and widen my sensory sweep to include as much as I can – everything happening around me I can see, hear, feel or smell.  It’s amazing to me how much I usually miss, just because I’m not paying attention.  What is right there in front of me, when I do pay attention, is wonderous, indeed.  Today, everything is still so very green, except a few of the leaves that are starting to turn.  The birch trees have lost many of their leaves and cover the trail with a yellow blanket that reminds me of the Yellow Brick Road from The Wizard of Oz.  The oaks and most of the maples still carry much of their verdure proudly and the contrast of yellow trail beneath a green umbrella, having just a touch of red and orange, is magical.  It makes me feel like I’m waltzing through the Garden of Eden.  Birds are singing and bugs are buzzing, making the experience seem more immediate and alive.  The smell of moist earth from the nearby ponds, and the musty odor of decaying leaves underfoot gives depth to the ever-present now.

Paying attention to what’s happening around me gives my life a sense of wonder and magic.  I remember a time when I was idly watching out my airplane window as the airliner I was in flew above some wispy white clouds.  I have often seen the shadow of a plane on the clouds below, but this time, the sun, clouds and plane were positioned just right and the shadow was surrounded by a beautiful rainbow halo called a glory.  Something similar, called a brocken spectre, can, on rare occasion, be seen by climbers on the top of a mountain when they look at misty clouds below them and the sun is low and behind them.  I’ve been on the top of many a mountain and never seen a brocken spectre, but the glory I did see.  Once, I was flying a Cessna in Nevada through some virga (light rain that falls from the sky, but evaporates before it hits the ground) and a rainbow appeared that was a complete circle!  It hung there, right in front of us, and then we flew through the center of it!  On the top of Kilimanjaro, I saw nieves penitentes – rows and rows of short vertical sharks-teeth of ice, all aligned parallel with the wind.  These only appear at the peaks of very high mountains where the temperature and air pressure are low.  And, right here on the rail-trail, not so long ago (as described in a previous blog), I noticed steam venting off wet wooden fence rails, leaving a misty rooster tail across the path, emblazoned by the golden light of a low early-morning sun (I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a name, but I haven’t yet learned what this phenomena is called).  It all is so wondrous and beautiful.

But things don’t have to be rare to be appreciated and adored.  Back, many years ago, when I was scuba diving, I would descend eighty to one-hundred feet to the bottom and spend a whole tank of air just looking at what was around me within a nine square-foot area.  Rainbow-colored tube worms, lumpy abalone, an awesome variety of coral, sea anemones, and schools of fish are all part of the kelp forests off the Southern California coast.  I just had to move my gaze a few inches and I would see something new.  Adjusting the buoyancy compensator so I effortlessly floated a few inches above the bottom, I could watch what was there in a small space and be totally entertained until my air got low.

The same thing is true of the places where Waldo and I walk.  If I just pay attention in detail to the common everyday things around me, the trees and bushes, the squirrels and chipmunks, the flowering plants and weeds, the birds and bugs, the rocks and earth, all in a wonderous variety, I can be absorbed in fascination.  I don’t have to be an entomologist to be awed by bugs, an ornithologist to be wowed by birds, or a geologist to be interested in rocks.  All I have to do is open my senses and let the resulting experience into my stream of consciousness.  The fact that I can do that at all is magic.

I love to watch the way Waldo, once his paws hit the trail, joyously falls into just that frame of mind.

He gives me a fine example to follow.

There’s still green here.

Phyllis and Waldo on the trail.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

-Haruki Murakami

Phyllis, Waldo and I pick up where we left off on the Bay Circuit Trail in Callahan State Park, Marlborough — about eight weeks ago.  Christine is otherwise involved today and won’t be joining us.  The map I have indicates that we will be walking about twelve miles to our next stopping point in Ashland.  The trail takes us through more of the park to the west, then down along the eastern shore of Sudbury Reservoir and finally ends up next to Mill Pond in Ashland.  Much of it is in wooded areas, and some is along streets and highways.  It’s a perfect day for a hike – the temperature is in the high sixties, the sky is clear, there is little wind and the previous night’s rain has mostly soaked into the ground.

So far, we are a little past halfway on the BCT and it’s starting to look like we may have some difficulty finishing it before the first snow.  I do not want to walk through the woods with more than about three inches of snow on the ground; it’s just too much work.  With that in mind, we decide to walk the twelve miles even though we’ve been off our feet for a bit and are a little out of shape.  The spirit is willing, I just hope the flesh isn’t too weak.  Ah well, as Christine would say (quoting Navy Seals), “Embrace the suck.”

The fall is a great time to walk in the woods.  It’s cool, most, but not all, of the mosquitoes are gone and the ground is firm and still snow free.  There are muddy wet spots in the low places where we have to negotiate our footfalls along downed logs and rocks to avoid sinking into the mire (of course, Waldo could care less), but they aren’t many.  The trail starts out narrow and winding, but, as we get to the reservoir, it widens and straightens out into something a four-wheeled ATV could easily follow (although they are verboten).  The trees are mostly green still, with only a smattering of yellow and red leaves.  It’s late September and in years past, this would be the time for peak colors, but global warming has changed all that and things don’t get really colorful until well into October these days.  There are still plenty of dead leaves, left over from last fall, laying on the ground, and only a few of the recently fallen.  The weeds and undergrowth are starting to retreat a bit, but in the woods, there isn’t much of that anyway – they just can’t compete for the sunlight they need because it’s shadowed from the ground by the trees.

Waldo trots along, up at the forward end of the leash, as if walking on these trails is what he was meant to do.  Maybe it is.  His heritage may be one of sheep herding and farm work, but he has spent most of his life out walking through nature on various trails.  If he were working for a shepherd, even if he really liked it, he would still be performing a task required by some human.  Out here, I pretty much let him go where he wants and (mostly) do what he wants.  I just try to keep him out of trouble, out of the mud (as much as that’s possible) and away from danger.  He spends his time reacting to whatever instinct urges him to do, driven by something that is totally canine.  He is answering the call of Waldo, not the whistle or call of some homo sapiens.  I love to watch him just be a dog.

I, too, have learned how to be free floating out here.  To synchronize my stream of consciousness with the constantly shifting currents of nature around me.  To change what I put in my mind as the mood strikes me.  Oh, my mind is still consumed by human ideas and current events, and Phyllis and I spend much of our time talking about them, but it’s all free association and I’m not trying to solve some problem or other that’s besetting me.  One of the great things about retirement is that life doesn’t deluge me with things that must be done – not nearly as much as when I was working.  Now, I spend much less time responding to the whistle and call of other people and more time just following my inner navigator.

We do take a moment, here and there, to snack on what we brought along and, of course, to water Waldo.  Even with the pauses, my back hurts before we finish – enough so I have to stop more frequently than usual and stretch the muscles.  But I can make do and we arrive at our destination, deliciously tired and ready to go home and rest.  It turns out, after some wrong turns and backtracking, we walked fourteen miles in seven hours.  Next trek will be another twelve miles, or so, down to Sherborn.

We just won’t wait eight weeks until we do it.

It’s not just Waldo that carries poles!

Through the tunnel after dark.

Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?

-Garth Nix

We, Waldo and I, have returned to our old haunt, the Assabet River Trail, in Marlborough.  I wish I could say that everything has gone back to the way it was before I left, but it has not.  I was away for a total of ten days, six days on the river plus travel days and a day visiting my younger brother, Stuart, in Montana, and I didn’t do the usual six-mile walk on any of those days.  “Use it or lose it” has taken on a whole new dimension of meaning for me in the past few years and the lack of exercise during just that short period of time affected my endurance.  I can still walk six miles without too much trouble, but it really wears me out.  When I get tired, it affects my posture and my back starts hurting.  It usually starts in my low back, then travels up to my upper back and neck.  It’s all muscle pain and goes away quickly with rest, but it does make the last two or three miles a chore.  It will take a week or two, but I will get back to the way I was.  These days, I lose my endurance fast and it takes more work than it used to for me to get it back.

Even so, I still enjoy daily answering the call of our trail, being out in nature, watching Waldo explore and romp, and it is a real thrill to see him having so much fun.  He, for sure, didn’t go on any long nature walks while I was gone and the first time we were back at it, he charged off to the end of the leash as if shouting, “Oh boy!  Oh boy!  Oh boy!”  He really loves being out on the trail and, as they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder.  I know he is very happy to be back.

Another thing that changed during my absence is the temperature.  God turned down the thermostat a bit and we no longer have to walk in the early morning in order to avoid the heat.  We can leave later in the morning, or, as happened today, even wait until the afternoon before we start.  Life got in our way today and we didn’t hit the tarmac until just after five PM.  The temperature is in the high sixties, it’s overcast, and there is only a light breeze.

Although there hasn’t been any hard freeze yet, the leaves on a few of the trees, mostly sumacs and maples, have begun to turn.  There’s even a scattering of fallen leaves on the ground.  The weeds and undergrowth have begun to shrivel and turn yellow and there is a plethora of burrs that reach out and grab Waldo’s fur.  It doesn’t help that he likes to wander off into the foliage and even roll around in it.  Recently, I’ve had to pull and brush the damn things out of his coat when we get home – a real treat when he’s wet from frolicking in wet grass.  Fall is coming quickly and is not far away.

As we walk along, the shadows grow longer and the light becomes more orange.  At some point, after sunset, the shadows disappear altogether and everything becomes dimmer.  There is still plenty of light to see by from the twilight sky-glow caused by refraction of the sun’s rays in the upper atmosphere, but the overcast makes it less than what would be there on a clear evening.  In just a few minutes, it is quite dark.  My eyes have adjusted to the slowly waning daylight and I can still make out the vague shapes of the trees and bushes to the side of the trail.  Although I do have a small flashlight in my pocket, I don’t need it.  Waldo, being mostly black, has become almost invisible – except for the white tip of his tail sashaying back and forth behind him as he lopes down the trail.  His night vision is better than mine, of course, and I can’t tell that the dark affects him much at all.   Maybe it’s hubris, but I feel perfectly safe out here even in the dark.

It’s not all darkness.  In places, like the Fort Meadows Reservoir overlook, the foliage opens up and I can see the night lights of human habitation reflecting off the water.  At street crossings, there are four, lights pull back the curtain of darkness and light up our path.  There is also an occasional house or building, here and there, that have outdoor lights giving us a better idea of what’s around us.  I have a head lamp I could bring with us, but I really don’t see the need.  There is something peaceful about walking along with your dog in the dark.   Morning or night, tired or not, with or without back pain, it is good to be back in our routine.

And we get to do it all over again tomorrow – though maybe during daylight.

Night lights over Fort Meadow Reservoir.

Floating down the river, for the most part, is quite peaceful.

The end of a melody is not its goal, but nevertheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.  A parable.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

For six days, we floated down the Snake River through Hell’s Canyon.  Hell’s Canyon…  That’s a real misnomer.  It is so peaceful down there.  No roads, no cars, no planes overhead, no lawn mower racket and only a rare other human being (and they, too, were there for the peace and quiet).  The only disturbance was the occasional jet-boat powering its way on the water.  Other than that, we were bathed in the serenity born of bird song, plopping oars, river gurgling, chucking chukars, pleasant conversation and the warm glow of late summer sun warming us through deep blue skies.  It’s not easy to get to, but once you’re there, it’s a place truly worth enjoying.

The ancient Indians must have thought the canyon had spiritual value.  There are places where stone cliffs are still blackened from ancient fires.  Many are next to artful displays of pictographs, now faded by the passage of as much as 10,000 years.  Early stone-age man, perhaps even Clovis People, stood there and painted red and black (other colors may have been there, but are now faded and unseen) sawtooth lines and various geometrical figures of unknown significance.  They, too, must have felt the sacred nature of the place, special enough to draw them there past the difficult trek through the rugged country.  Looking at the traces they left behind, I couldn’t help but try to imagine what life might have been like for them.  To try to feel what it was like to be an ancient hunter-gatherer trying to survive in that country and take time out from life’s struggle to leave a message behind that said, if nothing else, “I was here.”  Indian tribes are still in the area, the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) and Shoshone mostly, but are not now in the canyon itself.

The white man tried to use the Snake as a water artery leading to Boise, Idaho, and points east, but failed due to much of the river being unnavigable.  A handful moved into the canyon to try to farm on the few flat spaces that would allow cultivation, but this proved not to be economical.  Miners burrowed holes in the rock, looking for the big strike, but were frustrated by the minerals being too rare to justify the expense of ripping them from the Earth.  Mother Nature herself put up obstacles that modern man couldn’t plunder as if to say, in good Tolkien fashion, “You may pass, but you shall not stay!”  Now, the US Government owns the land and preserves it, as much as is possible, as a nearly pristine wilderness.

And it came to pass, that on the sixth day, we, too, had to depart from this land and return to life in the twenty-first century.  We pulled the rafts up onto the boat-ramp just south of Asotin, removed our gear from the drybags and boarded an old mustard-yellow school bus for the ride into Asotin.  It took a while — the road winds around through steep hills next to the river.  In Asotin, Ron got his truck and took us back to Pullman.  On the way, we stopped at a museum in Lewiston, Idaho, the Lewis and Clark Discovery Center, and learned more about their adventure in this part of the country.  We also stopped at the Jack O’Connor Center – a memorial to a man who lived and ranged in the area, hunting big horn sheep.  He also hunted in Africa and had many trophies mounted on the walls of the center.  I’ve never been much of a hunter, although Bill and Gary were in their younger years.  My idea of hunting uses a camera rather than a rifle, but it was interesting to see the culture once more that I was exposed to in Ethiopia in my youth.

The real treat came once we got to Pullman.  A shower!  I had been rinsed many times over the preceding six days, but to soap up in warm water and wash away all the sweat, grime and green-river residue that had accumulated after almost a week was bliss.  We went out to dinner at a local pub, Rico’s, had a few beers and a good meal.  That wasn’t so special, though, as America’s Rafting Company provided us with beer and good food on the river.  The shower was the thing.

Next morning, we said our goodbyes – until the next adventure (yet to be defined) and boarded planes for home.  Phyllis and I arrived in Boston in the afternoon and parted ways.  I got in my car and drove to North Andover to pick up Waldo.  It was dusk when I knocked at the door of the house where I left him.  I heard a “Come in!” and pulled the door open.  A ball of black, tan and white fur let out an excited whimper and lunged at me, wiggling his whole body in proper Waldo fashion.  I tried to grab him and give him a hug and a pat, but he wouldn’t hold still.  Then, in proper border collie style, the “been there, done that” demeanor, his attention went toward the outside he could see through the open door and we left.  We got in our car and drove the hour it took to get home.  Once there, we ate, took a walk around the grounds to make sure nothing had been moved from its proper place.  Waldo confirmed it still smelled the same.

Yup, this is home.

Boat ramp, near Asotin — the end of the trip.