Byron Brumbaugh

The rain has just started, more is coming.

Forever — is composed of Nows –

-Emily Dickinson

It’s wet and rainy today.  Not the kind of rain that comes down in sheets, soaks through my boots and clouds my glasses with wind-driven beads of water that run down the lenses, but more of a light drizzle that, over the two plus hours it takes us to do our trek, gets my rainsuit thoroughly wet, but I stay relatively dry.  Waldo’s hair is soaked to the skin, but he only shakes it off every half hour or so.  Visibility is just slightly impaired and the temperature is in the low fifties, so it’s not cold at all.  Except for the rare jogger, dog walker or dedicated exerciser out for their daily constitutional, we are alone.  Tuning out the spatter of raindrops on my clothes and ignoring the sight of the constantly falling misty rain, everything is remarkably still.  Insects have packed it in for the season, rabbits and squirrels are holed up somewhere dry and birds have either gone south or decided this isn’t the day to venture out for a flight.  I put my gait on automatic pilot and leave Waldo to do his Waldo thing at the end of the leash.  With nothing else to do, I can’t help it, my mind wanders and I’m soon thinking more about emergence.

I’m struck by an entertaining thought.  If human consciousness is the emergent property of lots of interacting neurons adapting to their milieu, what would the emergent property be, let’s call it the Uber mind, of lots of people interacting with one another?  I don’t think you could call this Uber a super-consciousness because that would suppose there would be significant overlap between what we experience as consciousness and what Uber experiences.  I would think it would be as difficult for us to imagine what Uber’s experience is like as it would be for a neuron to guess what our awareness is like.

The emergent quality of nature, let’s call her Gaia, might have qualities that are at least as difficult for us to understand.  In the movie, Avatar, the writers invented a guiding force of life, on the planet Pandora, they called Eywa.  The natives, the Na’vi, could speak directly to Eywa through the Tree of Souls – a tree that they could use to get “hardwired into” Eywa.  Here on Earth, we are all part of nature and we interact with all other parts of nature.  Maybe if we thought of Mother Nature as Gaia, something similar to Eywa (I’m sure that was intended by the writers), the paradigm shift would be insightful.  Maybe Gaia doesn’t have a human personality, or maybe she doesn’t have intelligence, the way we think of intelligence, but she does “speak” to us and we don’t need a Tree of Souls to “hear” her.  All we have to do is pay attention.

I open my awareness to the world around me; today, the slanting rays of a winter sun ooze diffusely through clouds, mist and the bare branches of trees, to shine weakly on dead leaves that cover the ground.  Looking at all this in an unfocused sort of way, I can get a sense of something bigger, Gaia in her entirety, rather than my usual narrow perception of nature being merely a collection of trees, bushes and so on.  Gaia “speaks” to me as obliquely and indirectly as the winter sun shines on the ground.  If I’m willing to still my constantly running mind and my never-ending internal dialog, and just listen, look, feel, taste, and smell what’s happening in the moment, I can sense how she affects me.  I feel a cold breeze chill and numb my face, see the tan and beige sleeping forest and fields with their skeletal dormant remains, listen to the droplets of drizzle hit my rainsuit, smell the musty, rotting dead leaves at my feet and I react to it all.  My reactions are more feelings than thoughts, something precognitive, yet profoundly moving.  The texture of what I experience is constantly shifting, flowing, like a river.  It’s nuanced and subtle, yet prolific and deep.  If I dwell there, in the world of how I feel being emersed in Gaia, rather than run away to somewhere more intellectual, I learn something important from what she “tells” me.  Something that cannot be expressed in language because it is precognitive, yet has a profound impact on my experience.

Waldo breaks my reverie with a gentle tug on the leash.  We’re almost back to the car.  I turn to him and report, “Well done, Waldo.  Another day, another six miles.”  He wags his tail and makes for the car and home.  Uber or no, Gaia or no, we are here on the rail-trail.

Being aware of that is what’s most important.

At first, it’s more of a mist than a drizzle.

A piece of our little bit of nature.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

-William Shakespeare

Waldo and I are finally back to our almost daily routine of walking 7.5 miles (six on the rail-trail and 1.5 for poop and pee).  Once again, we’re going down the rail-trail, rain or shine, hot or cold.  We missed those days where Waldo came home full of burs from the weeds he insists on burying his face in, we missed hearing the black walnut fruits falling to the ground with audible thuds and we missed watching the Japanese knotweed wither and die in long hedgerows a short distance off the path.  But now, we see daily the entirety of our piece of New England forest as it snuggles into the last throes of its winter hibernation.  Except for the autumn olives, that seem to have noticed a change, but are still in denial of it, nature looks very much like winter has come and firmly ensconced itself on the landscape, even though it’s still a few days before the winter solstice.  All that’s missing is the snow — the forecast says that’s coming next week.

I look out over the trees, what’s left of the bushes, the grasses and mosses and all of life out here and I’m struck by how it all fits together so tightly.  In places where grass doesn’t grow, moss does. Even lichens grow on rocks where nothing else will.  Where trees don’t rob the ground beneath them its share of sunshine, bushes and weeds flourish.  Ferns and mushrooms have their place, as do the mammals, birds and insects.  All of nature fits together almost seamlessly — like those stone Incan walls in the Andes where huge rocks have been fit together so well that a piece of paper can’t be forced into the cracks between them.  And yet no one is designing or directing the final form that nature takes.  It is truly a case of emergence, an example of the whole being more than the sum of its parts.

Emergence, which occurs when an entity develops properties its composite parts don’t have, has many examples in nature.  Ants building their tunnels do so without direction, yet the final design, a well-organized colony, results from the communal effort.  Starlings fly in huge shifting clouds whose shapes undulate and pulse as if an integrated unit, yet no single bird is in control of what they do.  Economies grow, thrive and take on a life of their own, yet no one is in control and none can truly understand them.  Even human consciousness can be seen as an emergent property of the brain’s neurons.

The human brain has around 86 billion neurons.  Each neuron has several axons that connect it to other neurons.  These neurons are not exactly the same and they interact through their axons.  Through these interactions, the states of the neurons adapt and change, allowing for human consciousness, an emergent property.  No neuron can be conscious, it simply doesn’t have the complexity to allow for consciousness.  Yet, somehow, these same neurons, through all of their interactions, produce self-awareness, intelligence, creativity and all the aspects of the human condition we call “thinking.”

Mother Nature is another system, more complex than the human brain, because, after all, she includes all of our brains.  As I walk down the trail, I am acutely aware of nature’s trees and grasses, mosses and bushes and rabbits and squirrels.  I don’t see them all, individually, but I know they’re there.  I know it because I see the results of their presence – a harmonious chorus of life that would not be able to sing the same tune if any one of them were missing.  Yet, there is no conductor.  Nature has so many more parts, and so much more diversity than a human brain, all interconnected and interacting, each able to adapt to its environment, that I can’t help but wonder at the emergent properties she may have that we just haven’t yet figured out.

Waldo and I are connected.  There are only two of us, not much diversity there, but we interact and adapt to each other.  If I were to guess as to the emergent property of our little bubble of existence, I would call it a sense of family.  A sense that there is something between us that is greater than the sum of Waldo and me.  A feeling that there is Waldo, there is me and there is us.  There is a difference between the two of us as a unit and each of us individually.  At the very least, that comes with feelings of belonging, caring, compassion and love that is not there, one without the other.

In the same way, we are all part of nature.  To a much greater depth and extent than the case of a human brain, there is complexity to life on Earth and it has emergent properties, some, we are not aware of.  But some, we are.  We should never lose that feeling of belonging to nature, respecting it, loving it, being awed by it and caring about it.  After all, like the moss and the grass, the trees and the bushes, the rabbits and the squirrels, the birds and the insects, we all have our place.

We all belong to each other.

Covid garden in winter, without snow.

Can’t see the forest floor for the leaves.

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of evolution.

-Carl Sagan

The forest floor is thick with the orange and tan of fallen leaves. They gave up the sugars and nutrients they manufactured during the warm months, to be stored in tree roots for the coming winter, and are now shed.  On the ground, they lay to slowly decay and add whatever organic material that’s left to the general milieu of the soil where it will be reused in coming seasons.  There are a few verdant plants still left – pines and cedars, mostly.  But there are also some leafy plants with their greenery still attached – autumn olives, wintercreeper euonymus, garlic mustard, greenstem forsythia, callery pear, Siberian elm, morrow’s honeysuckle, Alleghany blackberry, and even a Norway maple or two.  These are mostly rare and you have to keep an eye out for them — except for the autumn olives.  I never realized there were so many, until all the other foliage fell to the ground, revealing the now easily noticed olives shining their life through all the dead remnants of life.  I’m amazed any leaves have survived the cold temperatures we’ve recently had, yet, there they are.

I’m reminded of how homo sapiens sapiens was nearly wiped out some 70,000 years ago.  Mitochondrial DNA analysis shows there was a genetic bottleneck that occurred back then, with only around 1,000 pairs left on the entire Earth.  But humans are nothing if not tenacious and adaptable and here we are today.  Whatever the cause of the near extinction event was, disease, meteors, climate change, or something more exotic, our species passed the test and eventually became dominant.  How different the world would be today if all people died out back then.  It makes me wonder…

Suppose all the hominids were wiped out millions of years ago.  What species would take our place today?  If there were no bipedal apes with opposable thumbs to evolve large brains, would another species have done it?  Hands are not a requirement for massive amounts of gray matter, look at dolphins – some have bigger brains than humans.  Yet dolphins have not become a dominant species, even when you look only at marine life.  Maybe they are smart enough to know better?

Crows can use tools, although rudimentary ones, and they have very dexterous feet.  And parrots can speak and communicate with human language quite well.  Could they have evolved in place of humans?  What would the world be like if intelligent birds evolved instead of us?  Would they need roads since they fly almost everywhere they go?  How would their buildings be different?  Roofless?

Maybe “intelligence,” meaning the kind of “superior” thinking humans do, was not so much a niche that would be eventually filled by some species, but rather a fluke caused by a rare combination of environmental pressure to evolve with a coincidentally malleable available genetic substrate.  It’s possible that if hominids weren’t around to evolve, no species would eventually develop what we think of as intelligence.  After all, small-brained dinosaurs were dominant on the planet for hundreds of millions of years.  Is “intelligent” life inevitable or merely a freak accident?

I look over at Waldo.  He’s sniffing the berm and looking for a stick.  Could dogs have evolved to be in our place?  They’re smart and I see no reason why they couldn’t evolve to be smarter.  Waldo uses mostly his mouth to pick things up, but when he’s playing ball, he grabs it with his fore legs, curls his paws around it, almost like hands, and his claws grip the rubber almost like fingers.  And although they don’t particularly like to, dogs can balance upright on their hind legs.  Why couldn’t they evolve hands with opposable thumbs and walk on two legs instead of four?  Think of it, instead of movie theaters, maybe they’d have large sniff-o-ramas with a perfusion of odors instead of projected images.  Maybe they’d have street vendors selling a vast variety of sticks in addition to meaty treats.  I’m sure it would be, for us, a strange and interesting place.

But, nevertheless, here we are.  I am what I am, Waldo is what he is and the world is what it is, with its cyclical seasons, dead leaves and all.  I feed Waldo, provide and care for him and walk with him in Mother Nature as she has become.  I play with Waldo, enjoy his companionship and observe and appreciate the world around me.

I kinda like the way things turned out.

Not the best camouflage…

The first snow of the season!

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.  Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow.  Let reality be reality.  Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

-Lao Tzu

As I write this, the first snow of the season is falling.  It’s ten o’clock at night and Waldo and I are out on our last poop and pee walk for the night.  It’s 33℉, so the flakes are large and fluffy.  There’s almost no wind and they float gently down like puffs of goose down.  It’s only been snowing for the past half hour or so, so the accumulation is, so far, only about a half inch.  That’s just enough to cover the ground with a mottled, lumpy, white quilt — each patch bordered by scant green blades of grass and bits of brown fallen leaves poking through the whiteness.  The forecast has the snow changing to sleet, then rain, in the wee hours, so not much, if any, of it will survive until dawn.  But, for now, it covers the quiet end-of-day stillness in a soft blanket, swaddling all as if tucking it in for the night.

Waldo is prancing around, pulling at the end of the leash, trying to get the last bit of romp out of what’s left of the day.  He nuzzles the snow, no doubt looking for the right stick to carry, then charges out front and does a four-pawed slide just before slamming into the end of the leash.  After lifting a leg on a convenient nearby bush, he glares through the dim ambient light at a lump of something that just might be a rabbit.  He stares intently at it, without moving a hair in his sable coat, then approaches slowly, stalking his prey in a crouch.  Once close enough to see what is what, he straightens and moves off at a trot, realizing it’s nothing but a rock.  I could have told him the rabbits are all snuggled in their warrens, waiting for the weather to turn, but he wouldn’t listen.  Where’s the fun in that?

Although there are a few cars passing by on the streets, we meet no one else out in the snow.  The other dog “owners” have, no doubt, already done their last doggy-duty of the day, finishing before the storm hit.  Waldo and I don’t mind the cold, though, and like to be out in the falling snow.  I like it because it seems so peaceful and calming, but it’s come too early and I’m not yet prepared for it.  I feel cheated.  Because of my pinched nerve, I lost two months on the rail-trail – in late summer and early fall.  Sure, I witnessed those seasons on the apartment grounds, and it was quite beautiful here, but being back on the trail and witnessing how so much has changed (the temperature, the leaves in the trees and on the ground, the dying back of the undergrowth and now, the snow), I feel left behind — like Mother Nature moved on without me.  I was in absentia for far too long.

You know, no matter what happens in life, time rolls inexorably onwards, not caring a whit whether you’re present and aware or not.  Revisiting places once familiar and never forgotten, causes pain.  The pain of something lost.  Lost because there are events that live now only in your memory.  In their place is something new that feels somewhat foreign.  Once I came back to the trail, the forest seemed familiar, but not the same.  The dense greenery of late summer suddenly morphed into the colorful pastel hues of fall with a discontinuity.  It is all pleasant enough, but it feels like a non-sequitur.  What I observe now just doesn’t fit smoothly in with what I left behind.  There’s a gap in my experience of then and now like I was beamed into a sham replica of what was.

And now it’s snowing.

Waldo is out front, walking back and forth in S-turns, nose next to the ground, as if on a wide-area search for his next best entertainment.  The snow is wafting around him and slowly settling in piles behind.  The white blanketed ground has a beauty all its own, and he is into it.  He’s right.  The best thing to do is to enjoy what is right in front of me, instead of lamenting something that is not, even if it might have been.  If you can’t be in the place you love, then love the place you’re in.  Waldo is an ace at that.  I pick up a handful of snow and craft it into a loose ball.  I toss it at Waldo and it explodes into cloud of dust on his back.  He turns and looks at me as if to say, “What?”   I kick some snow at him and he lunges playfully at me — butt and wagging tail in the air, forelegs planted on the ground, a bright glint in his eye.  This soon evolves into a game of “Herd the Border Collie,” in a fog of flying powder.  Alas, he has skills, speed and agility I don’t have.  No matter, we don’t keep any kind of score and it’s win-win for fun.

Ah, the winter has its own delights to share.

It seems strange that all this snow will be gone tomorrow…

The pines are still green. The rest, not so much…

The reason a dog has so many friends is that it wags its tail instead of its tongue.

-unknown

The days have turned cool, with highs in the low 50s and the lows in the high 20s.  Most of the leaves have fallen to the ground, leaving their trees with bony fingers reaching up into the sky.  The undergrowth has died back except for a few hardy vines that still display some meager greenery.  Squirrels are out in large numbers, gamboling loudly in the crisp dead leaves.  There are either more there, or I can see more of them because I can so easily hear them and they can’t hide so well without the screening foliage.  There seem to be fewer birds around, judging from the lack of song – most must have already headed south.

Waldo and I are still here, though, trekking along the trail, watching the season slowly progress.  Waldo is happy as ever, as evidenced by his wagging tail.  Whenever someone, or some other dog, approaches, he is particularly vigorous with his posterior appendage, swaying it around on one side, then the other, until he gets close, and then his entire caboose is oscillating with a purpose.  I’m pretty sure that’s his way of letting others know his intentions are friendly and not aggressive – sort of like how people will greet each other with a smile and a handshake.  But it makes me wonder, why did dogs evolve that particular bit of body language to telegraph their lack of evil intent?

I’ve read that many believe the handshake was created, in prehistorical times, as a method to show that those clasping hands don’t have any weapons in them and are of no threat.  More recently, tablets from Babylon, made 3,000 years ago, have been found bearing an embossed picture of two rulers shaking hands, so it’s been a thing for a very long time.  If this behavior is really so well thought out, though, it makes me wonder if it isn’t learned, instead of instinctual.  Facial expressions, as far as I know, have pretty much the same meaning across human cultures – a smile means the same thing to everyone.  So maybe facial expressions in humans are instinctual.

A dog’s wagging tail can also bear the meaning that they lack harmful intent.  Not because they can’t hold weapons in the wiggling part that’s the last to go over the fence, but because they can’t lunge aggressively while thrashing the thing about — it would throw them off balance.  They clearly use many different kinds of body language to show the lack of intent to cause harm, including not baring their teeth, not making loud aggressive noises, like growling, holding their head low and assuming a relaxed posture that doesn’t presage an attack.  I doubt any of that is learned, though.  It seems to be universal among dogs and similar animals and I’m pretty sure it’s instinctual.  Funny thing is, our ancestors had tails, yet I don’t think people have any residual impulse to shake our vestigial tails and butts when we’re meeting friends or if we’re happy.  Maybe I’m wrong about that, though.

Other animals that have tails, like birds, don’t seem to have the same impulse to shake them.  Of course, their ancestors evolutionarily separated from ours and those of dogs, many hundreds of millions of years ago, so maybe tail wagging was a later development.  More advanced, so to speak.  As far as I know, birds don’t sniff each other’s butts either, but it’s hard to think of that as advanced behavior.  Yet, I would be willing to bet that, if tail wagging is instinctual, then it has some evolutionary advantage over not wagging tails.

I’m guessing that dogs, like people, being social creatures whose survival was improved by joining together in groups, needed some way of signaling to each other that they desired harmless interaction with each other.  Interaction that enhanced their bonding together.  Then tail wagging wouldn’t have any direct survival advantage, but was just a convenient means to that end.  It’s thought, for example, that 80 percent of the time when people laugh, it’s not because of something funny.  It’s because they want to telegraph that what they are saying or doing is not intended as a threat — laughing reinforces socialization.  Maybe tail wagging in dogs does something similar.

Or maybe we’re all missing out on a hidden pleasure that dogs know so well.  Just maybe the joy of meeting a friend can be enhanced by shaking your booty as you do it.

What the hell, it’s worth a try…

Feelin’ kind of all alone…

Follow the yellow brick road!

Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly.  They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar.

-Delia Owens

A carpet of yellow and tan leaves covers the tarmac of the rail-trail — oak and maple mostly, but there are also, in places, birch, aspen and black walnut.  The colorful quilt softens footfalls, but it also adds a crisp rustling to the sound of passing feet and paws.  There are so many dry and brittle leaves on the ground off-trail that it’s easy to hear a miscreant squirrel as he bounds through the undergrowth.  The trees from which the leaves fell still have some left, even a few that are green, but their bony skeletons are definitely poking through the foliage.

Looking out over the landscape across a clearing at Fort Meadow Reservoir, I can see lumpy vistas of green, yellow, orange and red undulate off into the distance.  A hard freeze has yet to come, but we have had temps in the early morning of 32℉.  That’s cold enough to start the arboreal shedding, but not enough to completely denude the deciduous trees.  The green I see now is largely due to conifers, trees that during the summer are completely overshadowed by their leafy cousins.  Today is warm, by fall standards, with a high of 69℉.  It’s the kind of day that you can enjoy while being in your shirtsleeves and yet still be immersed in all the splendor the season has to offer.

I’ve always liked the fall.  To me, it feels like a time of resurgence, a reawakening — even more so than spring.  Many plants and animals are on the verge of hibernation, but in my early years, this was when my life began anew after a summer hiatus.  School started again, with the promise of new things to learn and do.  Social activity increased as more people moved into my circle of interaction.  With all that, new opportunities arose for adventure and exploration.

I remember one fall in particular.  I’ve always liked the idea of flying an airplane.  This started when I was about 6 years old.  My brother, who is three years older than I, built plastic models of WWII airplanes.  I would hold them by the fuselage and pretend I was piloting them in swooping dives, gracefully curving banked turns and vertical climbs.  I knew about ailerons, elevators, rudders, flaps and propellers.  I understood, to some degree, how and why they worked and how to use them.  I knew about thrust, drag, lift and weight.  I knew and understood that the way to land was to fly onto the ground.  I intuitively grokked what it meant to fly a plane.  And I yearned to actually do it.  Then, in the autumn when I was fifteen, an opportunity arose that I could not refuse.

I had a job working in a grocery store, putting fruit and vegetables out on the stands.  For $1.00 an hour.  Shortly thereafter, the minimum wage law took effect and my wages jumped to $1.06 and hour.  Not much, but enough that, over many weeks, I had some saved.  With that money burning a hole in my pocket, I heard, I don’t remember how, that the biology teacher in my high school was a flight instructor.  So, I waited outside the door to his classroom until class was over and approached him, saying I wanted to learn to fly.  He was very accommodating and shortly thereafter my experiences in flight began.  He would pick me up, a couple of times a week, at 6 in the morning, and we’d go fly, then go to school.  I immediately fell in love and now, at 73, I have a lifetime of wonderful memories to peruse.  That was truly a wonderful fall to remember.

Nowadays, I walk with Waldo on the rail-trail in the autumn.  It no longer offers up the same kind of new opportunities to expand my life’s experiences as it used to, but the ebb and flow of time, punctuated by the change of seasons, persists.  Mother Nature pulses with seasonal change as the year progresses and the difference in my life from one to another is less dramatic than it used to be.  But still, just because of my history, I think the calendar year should begin with September first, not January first.

Waldo, I don’t think knows one season from another.  But I do think he enjoys walking out here without suffering the heat of mid-summer, or the freezing cold of the winter.  It’s hard to tell for sure, what with his tail wagging and nose to the ground in hot pursuit of God-knows-what in any season.  When I think about it, I suppose every day provides ample opportunity for new experiences for him.

But, to me, fall is somehow still something special.

Somebody has jumped the gun and is decorating pine trees a little early…

We’re back!

I am not a human being.  I am a human BEING.  Just be.

-Shannon L. Alder

Waldo and I are back to walking six miles on the rail-trail – finally.  We worked up to that slowly: we walked two miles, rested a day and nothing was worse, then three miles, rested a day, four miles, rested a day then five.  After not having walked very far for eight weeks, five miles really wore me out, so we rested two days and still no adverse effects.  I still have pain when I lay down and try to sleep, but nothing new.  Now I just have to get the steroid shot in my back and we’ll slowly work back up to six miles almost every day.  Despite being worn out after the longer walks, it felt good to be getting back into our routine.

It’s pretty obvious Waldo is feeling it too.  He’s much more animated, without being frenetic, even doing only the two miles.  On the longer walks, he’s back to doing his Waldo thing in the woods.  He loves it out here.  I can see it when we get home too.  He’s less demanding of my attention, pulls less on his leash on the rail-trail days, but is still a little desperately energetic on the off days.  It’s not as bad as when all we did was walk around the apartment grounds, but he is definitely more relaxed after a rail-trail day.

Autumn changes are speeding up in the woods.  It’s a pleasure to watch the evolution of the season from one day to the next.  Many trees, mostly green at first, become more and more yellow, orange and red as the days go by.  There’s more rain now too and the leaves have begun to blanket the ground with a quilt of riotous fall colors.  Even though the trees and undergrowth are losing their leafy insulation, we’re still pretty well sequestered from city sights and noises.  Walking along the gently curving path, I can’t help but feel that Waldo and I have somehow gotten stuck in an eighteenth-century adventure story, like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, or maybe The Last of the Mohicans.  It would not take a great stretch of the imagination to believe that, if I looked closely, hiding amongst the Japanese knotweed or under a dense patch of sensitive fern, I might even get a glimpse of a curious fairy, or a gnome peeking behind a toadstool.

I enjoy these walks in nature the most if I can get myself into an open state of mind where I am only a perceiver of whatever happens.  Not a cataloguer, nor an explainer, but merely an observer.  I do my best to let the moment wash over me like an ocean wave rolling onto a beach, then soaking into the sand.  Trying not to force what’s experienced into a cage having bars of preconceived definition or understanding, I just sense whatever happens and avoid putting any “meaning” to it or even labeling it.  No lines are drawn around parts of creation, claiming this is this or that is that.  No judging is allowed, not good versus bad, nor even red versus green, nor warm versus cold.  I just let it be what it is and let it flow as it might.  The wind doesn’t blow through the leaves in the trees, then cool off the sweat on my skin.  Birds don’t sing and insects don’t buzz.  The leaves aren’t red or green or yellow, in fact there are no leaves at all.  Instead, something magical and undefined occurs; I’m bathed in an entire experience en toto.  All that other “thinking” stuff can occur later.  In the moment, I just soak it all in.

As you might imagine from reading previous posts on this blog, I don’t find this an easy thing to do.  I love to try to ideate about what happens in the now and find a way to put those ideas into my world view, connect what happens in the moment with what happened in the past through the medium of science, rationality and logic.  I pigeon-hole what I experience and do my best to squeeze that little box into a library of similar boxes that fill a library.  A library that is my conception of what makes up the Universe.  But the Universe is so much more expansive and vast than anything I could ever put into my puny brain.  Even that small part of creation that is right before my nose contains more nuance and detail than I’ll ever be able to sense, let alone remember.  But I can, with some effort and for a short period of time, stand before reality in utter and complete awe and wonder.

Does Waldo experience the world like that in every moment of his life?  I think not.  Behind those brown eyes of his, I sense a consciousness, somewhat foreign to mine, but not so different that I can’t perceive its presence.  I’m sure he puts what he smells into categories and draws connections and inferences.  I know he has a good memory and I also know he can problem solve pretty damn well.  That suggests some kind of conceptual thinking.  But, at other times, I also catch him lying down on his balcony, surveying his dogdom, calmly and quietly, as if in deep meditation.  I think he would understand what I’m trying to say.

We both love just being in nature.

The less said, the better.

Back at the rail-trail — at last.

The Greek word for “return” is nostos.  Algos means “suffering.”  So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

-Milan Kundera

Well, Waldo and I made it back to the rail-trail.  As soon as Waldo is out of the car, he’s tugging at the end of the leash.  I can almost hear him say, “Oh boy!  Oh boy!  Oh boy!”  And then he’s across the street and in the bushes, sniffing his heart out.  I look down the path and I’m immediately smitten by the idyllic autumn colors and the beckoning allure of a country path.

We’re not walking far, just a couple of miles, but we’re back.  I feel a certain and definite nostalgia for the place.  Not because we’ve been in these woods so often, not because Waldo and I have invested so much time and effort here, not even because we enjoy its beauty — there are many trails we’ve been on that display their own beauty.  I’m drawn to this trail because it’s our trail.  Over the years, we’ve established a bond – I know many of the plants and animals by name: red, black and white oaks, staghorn sumacs, and black walnuts; various types of mosses, ferns and grasses; eastern gray squirrels, eastern chipmunks and New England cottontail rabbits; red-tailed hawks, red-bellied woodpeckers, and northern cardinals; even gypsy moth caterpillars.  Waldo and I have made friends with the trees, bushes, weeds, animals and even insects.  And now that we’re back, they all seem to be greeting us with smiles and murmurs.  It may be my imagination, but Mother Nature even appears to have dressed up for the occasion — showing off mottled gowns of bright green, yellow and red, besparkled by splotches of autumn sunlight piercing through the canopy.  We’re back home.

When at the ballpark, Waldo gallops as hard as he can, for as long as he can.  It’s as if he has a frenzied head of steam built up that he has to release.  Here, he is still very energetic and runs at a fast trot from interesting twig to smelly glob of I-don’t-know-and-don’t-want-to-know what.  The difference is that along the trail, he is engaged.  He may not know and could care less about the names of what he senses, but he interacts with everything.  Smelling most of what he confronts, watching some, listening and feeling what’s going on around him and even tasting and eating some of it (there are certain leaves he likes to eat).  In his own way, Waldo has made friends with our trail too.

I don’t think I’m anthropomorphizing when I say that Waldo prefers going on our walks to just visiting an open field off-leash and letting ‘er rip.  He may need to get that border collie energy burned out of his system, but here, he’s living the dream.  There is so much variety and stimulating temptation.  Every foot of ground has something different to explore and experience with whatever sense he can bring to bear.  His tail is up and wagging and there’s a bounce in his step as he flits with vigor from one object of interest to the next.

Today, the air is cool with the slightest of breezes.  The sky is cloud-free and sunlight falls soft in pastel hues that illuminate in technicolor without making you squint.  Patches of shadow dance on the tarmac in sync with the whispering wind in the leaves.  It’s still quite early in the fall, but, already, many tan and yellowed dead oak, maple, birch, sassafras and walnut leaves lay on the ground.  In a few weeks, there will be a carpet of color covering the trail making it look like the yellow brick road in Oz.  But, for now, there is just a suggestion of that which is to come.  There’s still a lot of green up in the trees with only a dab here and there of yellow and orange.  That, too, will soon change and in a month or so, the trees will become skeletal shadows of what they were.  Much has changed in the time since our last visit, but it remains so very familiar, just the same.

My leg hurts a bit, so I make us turn around and head home.  Waldo follows a little reluctantly, I think.  My pain is still tolerable, but I don’t want to overdo and suffer a setback that will keep us away even longer.  The worst of the pain still happens at night when I lay down and I can only sleep for a couple of hours before the ache wakes me up.  I don’t want to make that worse, either.

Once home, Waldo’s much more sedate and satisfied than he has been for almost two months now.  The difference is palpable.  I, too, feel a blissful, calming fatigue.  My muscles seem to tell me that it’s time to rest, yet not with an urgent need, but more of a welcomed appreciation, like a full stomach after a gourmet meal requests a nice siesta.  Legs up, I lay in my recliner with an audible “Aaaah.”  Waldo is out laying on the balcony, peacefully surveying his dogdom.

Both Waldo and I are grateful to be on the rail-trail once again.

We missed this place.

Sassafras tree.

Autumn leaves shower like gold, like rainbows, as the winds of change begin to blow.

-Dan Millman

It’s mid-October, as I write this, and the trees have only started to change color.  It was only a few years ago, no more than a couple of decades, that in late September, the vibrant colors of fall would flow out over the land like a dawn-colored quilt, full of yellows, oranges and reds.  I vividly remember flying, that time of year, a small Cessna at five thousand feet over New England to witness a mottled, undulating sea of color, stretching out in all directions as far as I could see.  But no more.  Now, we have to wait until the end of October to witness Mother Nature show off the splendor of her fall, leafy gown.  In so many ways, the effect of global warming is showing its effect.

Waldo and I are still constrained, largely, to walking around the apartment complex.  The trees here are somewhat different from those alongside the rail-trail.  The grounds have been horticuluralized, according to someone’s idea of landscape beauty.  I like their choices, they provide more variety, but they are not exactly what nature would have chosen.  There are still plenty of tall oaks and various types of maples, but there are also rarer species, like sassafras, dogwood, yew, juniper, cedar and cypress, in abundance.  Most of them are still green, although some are starting to convert to Kodachrome.  The dogwoods are now deep red.  There is a large red maple that has caught fire and the Norway maples, usually a dark shade of Sacramento green, have turned a brown/maroon hue.  I wonder how the rail-trail has changed.  It’s been five weeks since we’ve been down there.

Waldo’s changed some too, although that has nothing to do with the season.  He’s always been full of verve and is eager to go, but now he feels the need to run as fast as he can, as permitted by the length of the leash.  He pulls harder and is a bit more frantic to go out.  I can’t walk that far, but I can get away with walking more often.   Still, it doesn’t seem to be enough.  He’s just not getting enough exercise.

So, I take him to a fenced-in little league baseball field and let him off-leash.  Most fields have no trespassing signs on them, I just found out that this one does not.  Once on the field, he immediately runs up to the fence and then gallops at full throttle along its entire length.  He does this over and over again, always in a counterclockwise direction, until he can go no more.  It’s good for me because I neither have to walk nor even stand.  I sit in the dugout and watch him go.  After a while, he comes over to me and lays in a patch of shade, panting heavily.  I give him a few minutes of rest, then I stand and wander out onto the field, encouraging him to follow and get it all out of his system.  Waldo gets up and follows.  That’s all it takes and he’s back at the fence-line and off again, full-blast.  This is obviously something he really needs.

After an hour, we get back in the car and go home.  Later in the day, I have to take my grandson to soccer practice, so while that’s going on, Waldo and I walk around the edge of the field nine times.  That also takes an hour and is just about two miles long.  All in all, that’s more exercise in a single day than we’ve had in over a month.  I just hope I don’t pay for it tonight and tomorrow…

All that activity must have done Waldo some good, because, on our last poop and pee walk before we go to bed, Waldo is much calmer and less frenetic.  He’s out at the forward end of the leash, romping and pouncing, but he’s not pulling nearly as hard as he has been.  He’s a happy dog tonight.  I just need to keep this level of activity up until we can return to our usual haunt.

The good news is, it looks like I’m not going to need surgery.  Sometime in the coming weeks, I’ll be getting a steroid shot in my back.  Given the fact that the oral steroids I took helped as much as they did, I’m quite hopeful, as is my physiatrist, that the shot will take care of the problem and I’ll be back at my normal level of activity shortly thereafter.  I’ll have to start slow and increase the distance we walk gradually, but we should be back to where we were after a couple of weeks — along with an occasional visit to the ballpark for the heavy workout.  Just maybe, we’ll be back out there amidst Mother Nature when she is finally ready to flout her autumn beauty.  I don’t think Waldo cares one way or another about all the colors, but I am very sure he’s ready to get back on the trail.

God knows, I am.

Now, that’s what I call a red oak!

We don’t walk far, but where we walk is pretty.

There I was, fog so thick I couldn’t see the instruments.  Only way I knew I was inverted was my flying metals were in my eyes.  But I knew I was really in trouble when the tower called me and told me to climb and maintain field elevation.

-Anonymous

It’s 58℉ and raining.  All day.  It’s the kind of rain that drizzles, gets you wet, but doesn’t pound at you with watery buckshot as if Mother Nature was blasting tiny water balloons your way.  There is next to no wind and no lightning.  This is the kind of weather I used to like to fly in, during my flying days.  In pilot speak, it’s 2 miles visibility with a ceiling of 600 feet, which was the minimum that the company I used to rent Cessnas from would allow me to fly in.  The temperature is warm enough that the chance of picking up ice is negligible and the winds are light enough that there is no turbulence to worry about.  I would leave from one airport and fly to several others in the area to “shoot approaches.”  That is, come in to a runway as if I were going to land, then go around, without even a touch-and-go, and move on to another airport and another approach.

In order to be able to fly, legally, in instrument conditions (weather conditions that require the use of flight instruments), one has to maintain proficiency by flying a certain number of hours and approaches by reference to instruments only.  Usually this means simulating instrument conditions by wearing some kind of vision limiting device (a hood or special glasses) that allows the pilot to see only the instrument panel (an additional safety pilot is required who can maintain a lookout for other planes).  But when the weather is “bad,” you get to practice in the real thing, and Mother Nature usually has other interesting circumstances to throw your way that you have to deal with.  Anyway, this is done in the clouds and rain on instruments only – there is nothing to see out the windshield or windows except a dense white fog.

There is a real beauty to the experience.  It’s also very cerebral, and challenging, what with concentrating on dials, needles and GPS readouts, deciphering their meaning and manipulating the flight controls in an appropriate manner in response.  Then, in the last few minutes, the plane pops out under the clouds, you can see the Earth six hundred feet below, and, voila, as if by magic, right there in front of you, exactly where it’s supposed to be, is the runway stretching out in a long straight line, ready to accept you to her tarmac bosom.  At that point, you put the “balls to the wall” (a pilot’s way of saying “pedal to the metal”), climb back into the clouds and go to the next airport for another type of approach.

But that was then and this is now.  Now, I’m walking the apartment grounds with Waldo, in the rain, because my leg still hurts.  I’m afraid that if I walk further than about a half-mile, I will make it worse and have a setback in healing whatever is causing the pain.  So, no rail-trail – yet.  My leg hurts a little more when we’re done walking, but the worst part is lying down and trying to sleep.  There’s something about the position that makes my leg throb bad enough that I’m awakened from whatever sleep I can get, after only about two hours or so.  I am so ready to put all this behind me, to pop out from under the overcast caused by whatever it is that ails me.  When that happens, I’m going to look out at the rail-trail, stretching out invitingly in front of me, welcoming Waldo and I back to stroll in the woods, the moss, the ferns, the grasses and everything else that awaits us there.  And there is no way in hell I’m going to climb back into those clouds for another go ‘round.  I’ve had more than enough.

Waldo prances around, chasing sticks and stalking rabbits, tail wagging, obviously having a good time.  But he’s not getting enough exercise.  He needs to get out there and walk, for six miles, twelve miles, or even sixteen.  At least occasionally.  I can tell because he pulls more vigorously at the leash and is asking to go out every two hours or so.  I do what I can to satisfy his need to burn off border collie energy, but it’s not enough.  He, too, is ready to return to our former lifestyle.  Sigh.  “Waldo,” I tell him, “no storm lasts forever.  We’ll be back to our old haunts soon.  Be patient.”  And he seems to be.

More patient that I am, maybe.

We even have a sassafras tree out back.