The trail is full of life.
There is an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.
-Chuck Palahniuk
It’s been over six years that Waldo and I have been out here walking on the Assabet River Rail Trail. We have tread on this tarmac nearly daily, thousands of times (no exaggeration). The cumulative distance we’ve walked here is close to 14,000 miles, six miles at a time. That’s roughly 4.5 trips from Boston to LA, more than half of the distance around the Earth at the equator. I have worn out six pairs of boots, and God knows how many pairs of socks. We know every bend in the trail, the names of most of the weeds by its side and have a personal relationship with a few of the trees. Wherever we are, I can tell you how far it is to either end of the trail, in both miles and minutes (walking at our pace). I carry on conversations with some of the birds and I’m even friendly with some of the rocks. Waldo and I, we know this trail well.
To quote Geoffrey Chaucer (not, of course, an exact quote, as he wrote in old English), “familiarity breeds contempt.” One might think that, after all those thousands of miles, walking on our trail has become monotonous. That it has somehow become boring. This is not so. Oh, we both love going new places and seeing and smelling new things, but we don’t tire of our usual jaunt either. As I’ve mentioned in these blogs before, things are always changing out here; no two walks are ever the same. That change might be at the pace that grass grows, but it’s there, if you look for it.
More than that, even after all this time, there are still parts of nature that I haven’t noticed before. There are weeds I haven’t speciated yet, insects I haven’t identified and birds I haven’t been able to connect with their song. In addition, each tiny part of nature has its own story to tell. Stories that are written in its zoology, botany and biochemistry. Fascinating details like the geophysics of the rocks and the physics and astronomy of the changing seasons. I’d never be able to grasp it all, even if I knew every branch and pebble.
William Blake wrote,
To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
It’s not just the size of the palette that’s used to paint what is all around us that’s worth noticing. Each stroke of the brush has in itself a near infinite variety of nuance, science and beauty. An entire lifetime could be spent just paying attention to the smallest of details, the tiniest seed on the ground, and one would still never run out of new things to experience.
So, no, Waldo and I, despite how much we love to explore the unknown and look and smell in places we’ve never been, we never tire of being out here on our trail. Waldo snuffs about and searches for that new delicate and finely finessed bit of pee-mail that he hasn’t sniffed before. I look around and wonder at the variety and detail of life that surrounds us.
Today, Waldo is trotting down the trail, sniffing at fence posts and weeds. He walks under the bushes and rolls in the grass. He picks up sticks, carries them for a while, then leaves them wherever they fall. He lifts his leg and leaves messages for whatever dog follows where we’ve been. The entire time, his step is lively and his tail is wagging. There is not the slightest suggestion of ennui in his behavior.
As for me, I’m noticing that the size and distribution of the plants alongside the trail is different this year. There is the ever present hardy Japanese knotweed, as always, but there are also other plants that aren’t so numerous, or large – and some that aren’t as prevalent as in the past. The moss and liverwort that was so healthy and plump in the past, is present, but short and flat. Then there’s the common burdock. That’s the stuff that has large burr balls, when it goes to seed, that get caught in Waldo’s fur with a grip that’s hard to break. The wetter-than-normal spring must have provided conditions that caused it to spread like rabbits. Last fall, I pulled up all the burdock I could find. This year, there’s even more of it around. I need to proactively uproot what I can before it goes to seed and ends up in Waldo’s coat. Sigh. That’s making me feel something, alright.
And it’s not a sense of monotony or boredom.
The trail is always beautiful.