Another American Adventure: Walk in the Woods

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Walk in the Woods

Honest to God, sometimes I don't see how heaven can be any more beautiful than earth. Since I was a child, I have loved to walk in the woods. This is an off the road place that is sort of nearby where I take Jubilee for a walk occasionally. It is a nothing place. No one is ever there.

1 comment:

AnonymousJuly 31, 2010 at 9:59 AM
i spent much of my childhood walking in the woods as well...maybe that gives you a taste for contemplation.....
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.