Location: Ohio, U.S.A.
Setting: Exterior, Eastern Deciduous forest of mostly Beech, Hickory and Maple.
Time: Sometime between 8am and noon May 7th, 2018.
Subject: Middle aged WASP male, Alone.
It's a nice day today!
I'm currently unemployed and slowly coming out of what I hope was a midlife crisis. (If that wasn't it, God help me when it hits!) I awoke this morning to find the weather more than serviceable for a walk, so I loaded my backpack. (Toilet paper, a camping hammock, spare dry socks, knapping tools, assorted paraphernalia for the outdoors enthusiast, a fixed blade knife, para-cord, a life-towel, etc.) I have no great need for any of it, it's just stuff to take up space and add weight to my pack. I'm trying to get conditioned to carrying 10 to 18 lbs on a regular basis while hiking, as I've managed to convinced myself that one day I'll do the AT, the PCT and the CDT. I'm not sure how or when but I'll be used to hauling a full pack all day should those days come. None of that matters today though, today's hike is short, I know my destination.
I arrive at that days walking spot, one of a handful of places in my area I haunt frequently, and set out on my walk. The day is warm and sunny, there is a slight breeze from the NW and the temperature is hovering right around the boiling point of Trichlorofluoromethane refrigerant R-11, I couldn't ask for warmer. Over the last 34 years I've managed to put together an ever changing list of places where the ordinary world seems hundreds of miles away. My first such place was in my own woods, just behind the house I grew up in.
I was six and a half when I moved with my mom and sisters to Ohio after my dad was killed in an auto accident. We had a four acre property with about 1 acre of woods, which was it's self a part of a couple hundred acres of woodland. This seemingly endless forest would become my classroom, my playground, my best friend at times, a counselor at others and above all else, my link with myself and the Infinite, my grounding spot, my place where I was truly and purely me; and at the heart of it all, a rock.
I start down the overly groomed, mulch-paved trail. It's not like me to stick to man made paths; I know it's one of the seven deadly sins of hiking, but you never see anything good on the oft'n walked ways... I continue on and find a heavily worn deer trail and I turn off to the right, surely they know better places and greater spots than the denizens of the concrete forest just down the road. Their trail sticks to the higher ground, curving around the the low spots in the forest floor where the root balls of some long gone trees once rested until violently ripped from the Earth, toppled in a wind storm. The deer avoid the resulting puddles of these fallen, no longer visible trees, but the American Toads (Bufo americanus) seek these shady nurseries out in the spring to lay and then abandon their brood. I cross the creek and head up the embankment holding her waters in... Looking, scanning the underbrush, I know it's up here somewhere.
As I grew up in my woods, I would explore farther and farther every year, by the time I was 8 or 9 I had found it, MY ROCK. It was a large granite boulder in the middle of the woods. It had a flat area on top where possibly, in some ancient forest fire, the rock was heated and fractured, cleaving off a flat section that still lays at the base of the rock to this day. From the day I found it, I knew this rock and I were destined to spend a lot more time together. I took a small rock from the creek near by, and began to peck and grind my symbol into my newly found boulder. It too remains to this day. Now I had my sanctuary. Over the next ten years or so, I would spend countless hours sitting on My Rock. Watching deer or quail forage through the woods, lighting up one of mom's Deluxe Menthol Light 100's from a pack I'd swiped from the fridge earlier. I'd sit contemplating the future, making sense of the past, and just being in the present... Everything was real. Nothing was hidden on the rock.
I crest the old creek bank and now it's only another 100 yards or so. I found him last summer and it was love at first sight. Now I try and swing up in this direction whenever I stop to hike these woods. It's not the same as my old rock, but it functions the same and it has it's own story to share and all the time in the world to listen to mine. He's far from home and has thousands of years in residence here, my problems are nothing to him, my worries are nearly comedic to one so old. He doesn't judge though, his kind don't, but they'll cry out regarding the one who does, should the need arise.
Up here in Ohio, we don't have native granite. We have sandstone, shale, limestone, coal. That's about it. When you stumble upon a boulder like this, you know it came down from Canada's direction during the last ice age.
Often when I come across one of these larger glacial erratics, I'll stop to take a sit and grab a drink out of my pack. Most of the time, my mind starts to wonder who else has sat here, anyone? How recently? Who and when was the first?
When I was a kid, I'd imagine Indians gathering near my rock hundreds of years ago or one of their young hunters sitting on it, arrow knocked waiting for a deer to pass by to take back to the village.
Now, I'm less imaginative. Now I picture other wandering fools like myself just taking a break on it. I imagine kids leaning against it taking dabs, discovering the world's problems and ruminating about them. I imagine squirrels taking a paranoid and alert squat while eating their newly acquired nuts. I imagine and I wonder. I wonder if anyone will sit here one day and imagine a guy sitting here years earlier, making notes in his phone about this very rock he sat on, in order to introduce himself to a bunch of total strangers.
I sit.
I am here and my past is here with me.
I'm reminded I am.
I remember who I want to be.
I regret who I have often been
I feel the pain and shame of many actions and mistakes
I smile at the memories of joy and fun in life
I miss the lives and love of others passed on or just moved away.
I'm reminded of who I am
I'm reminded I will be.
I rise to leave.
All is well. My first sit on my new friend of this hiking season is a success, the scent of nectar hangs in the woods now, the squirrels are chasing each other - oblivious or careless of my presence, and for the moment all seems well and right and nothing else matters. The stories will write themselves later, the words will come and the thoughts will clear. It was a good hike, it was a good day, it was a good time of introspection.
When we moved away from my childhood home, I went one last time to my rock. I hadn't sat on him for a year or more it seemed. College and jobs, a few friends and my first truck seemed to occupy all my time then, and while I needed him as much as ever, needed that space, that quiet, that peace, I just wasn't' around to use what he'd always offered. One last visit. I cleaned the leaves off him from the previous fall, removed the 3 smooth, round, river rocks I'd placed on the flat of the seat to keep other critters from using it as their toilet, and washed it off with water from the near by creek using a mason jar I kept stashed in a crevice at the base of the rock. I then replaced the rocks and left. I didn't sit that last day, I was moving on and he'd no longer be privy to my life's details, it wasn't right to start reciting a new chapter to him, just to leave it unread.
I walk away from the new rock. I'm still amused by the neighboring tree's strange embrace of him, but it's a position he's likely been in many times over since he first settled to ground on this side of what is now Lake Erie. I look forward to more time sitting there, to more time thinking there, I mark his location on my Google map and save it under Favorites...I'll be back. I decide to walk deeper into the woods, there are Ramps and Morels to be had for free. It's a nice day today!
It's my hope that someone will be entertained by my musings, my brain droppings; it may be a bumpy ride, but I can promise an occasional chuckle, something to think about and probably lots of Nature pictures.
Greetings, steemit. I'm Ryan.