Walking In The Woods
Life is better when you can just be a kid again.
No politics today, just some happy thoughts and childhood memories. We all need that sometimes, right?
Getting what I wanted
I’m a somewhat introspective guy. I like a little peace and quiet and want to have some space for myself. One of the reasons I moved from the country’s sixth-largest metropolitan area to the sixty-fourth-largest was to have a little more of that space.
Everyone who has ever lived in an urban environment knows what I mean. Living like that, there is almost no moment when you aren’t aware of other people.
At any moment, at least one of your senses can detect the masses. You can always hear, see, or smell the signs of your fellow urban dwellers, and there is nowhere you can go to escape them without driving far outside the city. Even spaces as ample as Central Park in Manhattan or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco are crowded by the standards of anyone who truly enjoys solitude.
I like people, mostly. But to maintain my sanity, I must be alone and away from signs of humanity reasonably frequently. I have that here and made the most of it over the holidays.
Quiet, secret spaces in the middle of everywhere
I live next to a private school on 33 acres that used to be a dairy farm. In addition to the school buildings, there are some open fields, a baseball field, and soccer fields. Behind the soccer fields are about four and a half acres of woods, bordered by a creek.
My dog and I walk in these woods.
We have to walk across the entire campus first, so we only do it when school’s out, but my dog loves it because he can be off-leash the whole time. He follows nearly every scent and chases birds, rabbits, and even deer. (I’ve seen coyotes, but fortunately, he has not.)
While walking past the parking lot and the sports fields, I usually listen to music, a podcast, or an audiobook. When we get to the woods, however, the headphones come off.
Even though these woods are not extensive and are surrounded by houses, they feel a million miles away. They are dense enough that I can’t hear cars on the nearby roads, and only occasionally can I hear other humans. It’s a slice of nature that almost everyone in the surrounding neighborhoods completely ignores.
I’m in my happy place in the woods.
Being young again
When I was young, I walked in the woods.
I grew up in a house that backed up to hundreds of acres of undeveloped woodlands. I remember going on family walks through the trails with my father and grandfather when I was just five years old.
As I grew older, I’d play in the woods with my siblings and neighborhood kids, but I walked through the woods alone. I learned to stay quiet and listen, surprised by the sounds of birds I didn’t recognize and critters I could never see.
Walking through the woods, I learned to see subtle changes in the land brought about by the seasons. I could tell when the frogs and snakes started awaking in spring, and when the winter birds began arriving from the North.
Some days, I would sit for hours looking at a hole in the ground by a creek, just waiting to see what would emerge. A crawdad? A chipmunk? I learned to tell the difference between their hidey-holes, and staying still in the woods opened up a new world.
Now, nearly 50 years later, I get to experience that again. The joy it brings me is incomparable to the busy suburban world. The things I see can't be matched by anything online.
There are many reasons why I’m glad I moved away from a big city, but walking in the woods in my own neighborhood means more to me than anything else.
Some of what I’ve seen
Here are just a few of the cool things I’ve experienced in the woods near my home.
So appreciate this, especially living in a dense urban environment. You and Loki keep doing those walks!