Some Notes on Rambling

Thanks probably to genes and certainly to practice, I've got a good bump of location (as the older Yankees still call it hereabouts); it's pretty hard to cross me up in the northeastern forest. Still, I'll now and then recognize that I've been bushwacking for some time at a slightly or even a radically different angle from what I imagined.

That's usually a good turn of events. It may in fact be what the following book is "about." It's certainly what that book will somehow do.

On such occasions, I'll burst out of the puckerbrush, my face festooned with spiderwork in the warm months, my snowshoes a chaos of pine-whiskered iceballs in the cold. When that happens, I'll find myself . . .

Yes, I'll find myself. It's a strange thing, but even if the rambler and the writer should seek to avoid all double entendre, and not just that afforded by language, to get at the actual in its fullest actuality, that effort is inevitably thwarted. Stranger still, it's from such defeat of intention that we arrive at our fulfillments. One thinks of the Christian teaching that the new man cannot come to life unless the old one dies.

Complex stuff, to say it far too mildly. More about it as I travel.

What I meant to say was, I'll suddenly find myself looking down or up or out on territory familiar as my thumb, but looking from so unfamiliar a perspective that I'm temporarily convinced of something strange and certainly wrong: Life starts all over from now.

Better a false sense of rebirth than none at all. Or so I always claim—especially if such delicious fantasy can go on repeating itself, as it has done for me, and does, and I pray will do.

For I am a rambler, or I am nothing at all.

Am I just delusional? Maybe yes, maybe no, probably both. We'll see about that, too, as we go through one dark wood or many, or through a bright one or many; or anywhere we roam, come to think of it. Rambling is rather a matter of lost and found, as I've implied; but I mustn't get ahead of myself: I'll be doing enough of that in what follows.

As I leave the indoors behind here, it seems fitting for me to recall a specific moment from many years ago, one lively as ever in my mind. I've gone up a certain favorite mountain, off-trail. Along the freshets, the trout lilies gather in their huddles. Climbing, wandering, I've sniffed out not only the more common red but also the painted trillium beds amid the north slope wetland. I've reflected on the odd concatenation of the flowers' fetid odor, their beauty, their fragility, their hiddenness; I've vaguely imagined them as emblems, found in them a not quite mute commentary on life itself, human and natural.

For the rambler, each sense will—in his more elevated (or depressed) moments—inform the other, so that each flower reeks both of mortal splendor and splendid mortality and all their manifestations, bodily and spiritual. Each is as fresh and new as it is old and memory-laced. Senses interfuse, but so do memories and anticipations, bygones and presents, and hopes and fears.

A self is a thing both fluid and habit-bound, just as wildness is a thing both rife with permanences and ever changing.

In any case, I stand in this memory at the mountain's rounded summit, a sort of granite dune. The wind is now bossy, now mild, now gone, now creeping or blundering in from a different quarter. Around me the conifers upthrust themselves, knee-high, which is to say as high as they'll ever get, not because I'm above timberline—I'm not—but because, as the farmers whose scions now live amid the rich, black soil of the Midwest so quickly and shockingly discovered, vegetation's roots don't go very deep in this country before they run against the...