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“The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”
“I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of God.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
Dear S,
You chose this trail with confidence on a day I felt uneasy.
Roaring Brook Falls was on a list we found online while waiting to see the chiropractor. This hike was just the two of us, on the Thursday that was actually your first day of summer vacation. The trail head is in a residential neighborhood, and the hike appeared to be short, based on the very vintage looking map a few feet from the spot where we parked our car.
I felt weird that morning because I had had one of those incredibly vivid dreams that happen right before you wake up. The dream was about your dad, and in it he needed help, and in it, you were grown and he was a child. I wrote the details down in a note on my phone; they seem incoherent right now, and the specifics will stay locked away until I can think them through.
We ate a small lunch in the car before we started our hike. You finished quickly and ran out to read the sign and decipher the map, while I ate celery sticks and Baby Bell cheese. (This is Day Four of my sugar free/ gluten free cleanse. I am a bit grumpy and I miss bread, ice cream, and doughnuts.)
We walked over a concrete bridge that cut across a pond (a reservoir, maybe?) and took pictures of the calm water. We looped around an abandoned tennis court- the vines creeping through the net and the weeds sprouting up from the cracks in the pavement seem like a too-perfect metaphor for leaving the residential and entering the woods.
~~~
Rebecca Solnit has an incredible collection of essays called As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art and I read a bunch of them at the beginning of the summer. The first essay in the collection, “The Bomb: Lise Meitner’s Walking Shoes,” opens with the line, “A sentence, or a story, is a kind of path,” and that feels like an epigraph for this waterfall project.* Solnit goes on to write about Thoreau’s famous talk-then-essay “Walking,” which describes Nature as a holy place, and walking as a way of “being somewhere, but not necessarily getting anywhere,” because walking is great for thinking. She points out that there is shift, though, in Thoreau’s words. In his praise of wilderness and celebration of the West, he is, contrarily, also applauding man’s technological progress, which, of course, is synonymous with destruction. “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progresses from east to west.” And here we are, you and I, walking through the forests of New England, not praising advances, but, in some ways, escaping the modern. Except that we aren’t. You play games on a handheld Nintendo while I drive our car to these trails. We have cameras and an iPhone in our pockets. And I am writing here, on a blog, from my laptop.
I feel a little like I am searching for Emerson’s transcendental moment, that old transparent eyeball that absorbs rather than reflects. I want to hike these trails and be fully with you, in the woods, exploring. And yet, as we’re walking I wonder- is it possible to absorb without reflection? It seems to me that Emerson must have reflected on all that he took in from nature in order to write his book. Perhaps then, like Thoreau, this waterfall project, or rather the writing about this waterfall project, is a looking back while moving forward. So far, we have been climbing up to look down.
~~~
Our red dot trail took a sharp right turn and the hill was right there, daunting, maybe taunting. We stopped a lot. I worried for a moment that we didn’t have enough water. There were more than a few times that we asked each other whether we should go back or keep climbing. I was grateful I stuffed extra cheese in my front pocket and jammed the bug spray in my back pocket.
There was a rest area marked on the map. A spot near a tree where the grass has been flattened and where you can hear more than see the falls. We rested there for a bit and left our walking sticks leaned against a big rock. It almost looks like it could be the end of the trail, but I knew that it wasn’t and we went on. And then we found it. It was dark and quiet, the falls tumbled cold and soft onto some flat rocks. We took pictures. You seemed anxious. You said you were ready to go home.
~~~
There are spots peppering the trail that whisper of youth. A massive stone fireplace near the base of the trail filled with charred logs, larger stumps in a half-circle in front, a few crushed cans of light beer on the ground. A narrow path that drops dramatically down to the water, where we heard the echoes of people laughing and splashing. And at the top of the path, where the falls begin to spill, a burnt-out circle, more ashes, a pair of underwear stuffed beneath a rock, a bottle cap.
When I was twenty-one I went cross-country with your dad. We had two-months worth of supplies crammed into the backseat of a Pontiac Sunfire, an atlas, and National Geographic’s Guide to National Parks. Your dad rode shotgun and I drove. We hiked The Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, Capital Reef, Bryce Canyon, and Zion in Utah, The Grand Canyon in Arizona, and the Redwoods in California. We were very young, perhaps reckless, and searching. There are pictures in a box in the attic and someday I will show them to you.
~~~
The hike back down was harder than the hike up. I taught you to walk sideways, so your feet and the trail are perpendicular. You held onto my elbow for stability, white knuckled, and I guided you as best I could down the dry dust and skidding pebbles. It was both exhilarating and scary, I think.
Once we skidded back down to the tree line and righted our feet, you relaxed. The trees were dropping seeds so furiously that it sounded like it was raining. The noise was distracting, or maybe it was attracting, because at that moment we were solely and acutely aware of nature. That’s when I noticed that our trail ran parallel to an overgrown gulch. A scar on the land created, maybe, by a glacier or running water that no longer flows. It was a deep cavern filled with tall grass and tangled weeds- evidence that something massive and perhaps destructive, had shaped the land.
When we got home we ate strawberries in the hammock. I asked you what you thought about our hike, worried that the tricky terrain might have deterred you from wanting to try any more trails. You swung your arm over the side, absent-mindedly plucking at the bits of grass that grow under there, and said, “It was kinda tough, but the reward was beautiful.”
*Solnit, Rebecca. “The Bomb: Lise Meitner’s Walking Shoes.” As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art. Athens, GA: U of Georgia, 2003. Print.
the shape of me 