Describing a Thought-Path

What descriptions—or good ones anyway—actually describe is consciousness, the mind playing over the world of matter, finding there a glass various and lustrous enough to reflect back the complexities of the self that’s doing the looking.

—Mark Doty, The Art of Description

EVEN in term time, in the middle of the day, it’s rarely crowded. In the early morning when I cycle, it’s unusual to meet anyone. Sometimes there’s a jogger, or dog-walker, or one of the university porters going in to work. But mostly the path is deserted and I have it to myself. It runs for several hundred yards between farmland and playing fields. On the playing field side a dense coniferous hedge borders the path. Cherry trees are set into its dark foliage like pillars. There are maybe thirty of them, planted at regular intervals along the full length of the path. Sometimes, on breezy mornings, they remind me of the wooden stakes sewn into the canvas windbreak that we unfurled around us when I was little, on family picnics at the beach. When the wind is strong, the hedge is blown into canvas-like bulges, straining between their cherry stakes. In a gale it’s almost like a long ribbon of sail with the cherries resembling a flotilla of masts holding each billowing section in place.

A seven-strand wire fence, strung between chest-high wooden posts, runs parallel to the hedge on the other side of the path. It marks the boundary between path and fields. When the wind is strong enough to flex and curve the sections of hedge between the cherries, the wires sometimes sing eerie, plaintive notes. Whenever that happens, I think of the fence as a kind of unearthly seven-stringed instrument whose invisible player places ghostly fingers along the frets of the posts, subtly altering the volume and modulation of the wail.

The path is as well surfaced as a road. It’s lit by streetlights, and is just wide enough to take a car—though vehicles, other than bikes, are prohibited. At one end of the path there’s a village-sized cluster of student halls of residence; at the other, a sports center. From the sports center it’s just a short walk to most of the university’s science departments. Mostly the path is used by students taking a shortcut between living quarters and lectures, but it also offers cyclists an appealing alternative to the main road.

The routes I take in the morning vary. I’m cycling for exercise—and pleasure—before I start to write. It’s not as if I’m forced along one track of iron routine dictated by a daily commute. But despite this freedom, almost invariably, whatever route I decide to follow, it will at some point incorporate the path. Though it took a while for me to recognize the fact, the path has become a special place for me, a place that exerts a kind of magnetism that I find perplexing yet irresistible. My motive in writing about it here is straightforward: I want to try to describe and bring into clearer focus the nature of the path’s appeal, and so begin to understand why it keeps drawing me back.

In part there’s nothing mysterious about this. There are enough factors to offer a plausible, commonsense explanation of the path’s attraction. Straight, well-lit on dark winter mornings, smooth surfaced, no cars, few pedestrians, and on only a gentle gradient—the path offers a short stretch of well-nigh ideal cycling terrain. Not only that, but for someone interested in natural history like me, the path is close enough to countryside for it to be a fruitful locus for the sighting of creatures that don’t venture into town. I’ve seen hares, weasels, and foxes here; the birdlife too is varied. Cycling along the path I’ve spotted goldfinches, yellowhammers, curlews, oystercatchers, herons, sparrowhawks, owls, and more. The verge that runs along the farmland side of the path is dotted and clumped in midsummer with untidy arrays of wildflowers...