Maybe the lake won't go that way until we're no longer here to enjoy it. In the meantime, the woods sprawl up wild along its banks.
*
Emerson has much to say about the "plastic power" of the eye. But there's also the plastic power of what is to be seen. A single landscape at different times of year--different times of day, even--takes on vastly different qualities. Then there are the sounds, or the lack thereof, also mutable.
Before the first hard frost, the woods are still thick, almost impenetrable, but opening up. I went out on a morning unusually thick with mist, dew-spangled spiderwebs scattered through the grasses. The air was still, cool but heavy, and the woods were still but for the falling of a yellow leaf, the sound of which is the only sound I hear--besides the clumsy noise of my own steps. It's a curious sound, that of the leaf falling: the tiny rustle of detachment, a gap of considerable silence, then the slight clattering as the papery dry leaf takes its place on the forest floor. My feet, by contrast, can't help but intrude upon the woods with their own immense clatter.
Day by day, the landscape reads dramatic because we see in it that most fundamental of struggles, the ongoing one that, as we imagine, started the universe: that of light imposing itself on the darkness. It's a struggle that reflects our own struggle between vision and obscurity, between what we know and what we will never know. There are, after all, lights and colors that we cannot even see.
The light we can see breaks through the tree tops, pierces through the mist, illuminates little droplets of moisture seemingly suspended in the air. The sun climbs higher still, and eventually the fog disperses entirely.
*
Then there's that other struggle, also present at the beginning, between gravity and all those things that would defy it: trees, leaves, ourselves--because one day we will abandon the upright vertical posture with which we stride along the landscape and begin our permanent residence below the surface of and parallel to the horizontal plane, in that final sleep that our little daily ones prepare us for (as Hamlet would have it: "to die, to sleep"--and Prospero: "... our little life is rounded with a sleep").
The universe itself seems to be defined by its opposition to gravity, its relentless struggle not to collapse, not to give inward and fall in on itself. Will the momentum created by the initial grand propulsion of matter eventually give way, or will that momentum win out against gravity and continue to disperse itself--ever more thinly--on and on forever? Which end do we find preferable?
The answer is obscure, and it has no bearing on the moment. Because in the meantime, trees have fallen down since last I walked these woods, and some have fallen across the path. A particularly large trunk blocks my way, so I decide to go up the pass, where a field of tall grass, burnished red by the old season of sunlight that formerly inhabited this place, opens up, and an elders chorus of crickets sounds out loud enough to dominate the aural landscape. I walk the edge of the field, thinking of Keats's hedge-crickets, then follow the next path back down into the woods, where once again I am the loudest thing there is, and therefore the most out of place.
*
On seeing: There is too much to see. I see very little. I suspect that I am simply oblivious to most of what's around me.
Whatever resides here is aware of my presence long before I am aware of its. The first sign of a wild turkey is the crash of its wings against the undergrowth as it seeks to distance itself from me. I scan the tree branches for owls, see none. A few crows announce my presence and their own. In winter, there is the creak and sway of tree branches in the wind, but the air is still today and for minutes at a time I am the only sound there is to hear.
*
Solitude is inevitably what we seek in the woods, but it's hard to walk the American woods alone. Emerson and Thoreau are with me, too, and I couldn't shake them even if I wanted to. All that I experience here in these woods, I experience with a nod in their direction.
Thoreau, in particular, is with me today, making me self-conscious because of the pedometer I have with me. I keep checking it to see how many miles I have traversed. The numbers matter too much to me, I fear. What do I gain from this knowledge? What's behind my desire to quantify the nature of my experience here? I imagine Henry David admonishing me. His Realometer chides me.
Regardless, the pedometer continues to tally up the miles, the fractions of miles--even though, in fact, I am unwinding them, having looped around on the trail, making my way inevitably back to where I started.
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