Driving Will Get You Elsewhere

My early summer walk to work today is cool, green, and bloody. Nighttime exhalation of caves in this karst region brings moist morning air at a steady fifty-two degrees fahrenheit, watering thirsty trees, shrubs, and grasses even when it hasn't rained. Cave exhaust also brings out the critters.

Aerial scavengers eye a parade of the dead - the lump of a lime-laden deer, the smashed shell and splayed limbs of a snapping turtle, the sideways stare of a permanently frozen opossum, the red splash of a crushed cardinal, the sinuosity of a flattened black snake. Vultures in red or black, small hawks, and big black birds hop from one foot to another at the tops of trees and telephone poles, impatiently awaiting my passing,

It's a gruesome display, one that is laid out every morning on millions of miles of roads. All I can say as I lay the bodies into the roadside wildflowers is what a fellow flaneur might have if he had survived into the era of the automobile:

"Ya drives yer car, ya takes yer chances." - Popeye the Sailor Man

Nowhere Becomes Somewhere

Some days, when there's no need to be somewhere, you keep walking. Maybe it's the sublime beauty of a sunrise or the cooling breeze blowing away your uphill steam. It might be the pregnant push of a hectic household or the seminal pull of horse chestnut blossoms. It could be the serrated ridges of high cirrus clouds, harbingers of an early autumn. Whatever the call, in the daytime or in your lifetime, you just keep going, ending up miles from nowhere.

One time it was onto a hidden path into the meadow of a failed subdivision. A half mile trail snaked around a karst sinkhole that had halted construction of another half dozen houses. The coal baron owners mowed for hay twice a summer but otherwise tolerated occasional foot traffic onto this forgotten land. The simulated grazing spurred on the yarrow, motherwort, red clover, and wild oregano, staples of a growing home apothecary.

Another wandering took me down a dirt lane and out onto a rock pile overlooking an old quarry. My lunch time intrusion into this deer sanctuary startled them at first, but they soon tolerated the bearded picnicker ducking under the barbed wire fence behind a Chinese take-out place.

There was the diversion onto a game trail that wandered through a forest of fairy wands, peaking above a small cave that would become the overwintering den for a family of foxes. Or the stumbling onto an overgrown city right-of-way behind businesses, a secret pathway from my clinic to the shopping center. Or cantering down an old horse trail to a hillock of burdock and teasel, biennial roots that would serve as the basis of powerful herbal tinctures.

Some days you just keep going until nowhere becomes somewhere.

The Dame's Rocket Is So Beautiful

     My walk to work this morning took me through a tunnel of gorgeous four-petaled flowers, bringing back a regretful car conversation with a former life partner.

     Her: "The purple phlox are so beautiful this year."

     Me: "They would be if they were purple phlox."

     Her: "Hey, don't rain on my parade."

     Me: "I already told you I keyed them out as dame's rocket."

     Her: "What does it matter what they're called?"

     Me:  "It matters that you don't trust my plant identification skill."

     Her: "Leave me alone, I just want to look at the flowers."

     Me: "You got it."

     In appreciating their beauty on this late spring walk, it truly didn't matter what the flurry of soft petals in purple, violet, and white are called. Distinguishing their species only meant something to me in that former conversation because I was insecure with and fearful of the changes needed - in career, in relationship, in self-esteem. I was just beginning to discover herbal medicine as a pathway to a new life.

     Knowing what I know now, here's how I would have liked that conversation to have gone:

     "The purple phlox are so beautiful this year."

     "Yes, they're gorgeous, and I'm happy that you see beauty in nature."

Later that day, while she was working in the kitchen to make a meal for us and our two teenagers, I would have gone back to that tunnel, snipped a flower stem here and there, and placed them in a vase on the dining room table.

     Years later, after the changes are underway, a woman I've come to know and love gave me a second chance, observing "The dame's rocket is so beautiful this year." Where are my clippers?

Dame's rocket has alternate leaves

But Where?

     Deliberate walking - flaneury in French - can be both an unsettling and exhilarating proposition in a driving town such as mine, Lewisburg, West Virginia, population more-or-less five thousand in roughly two square miles.

     To get the thrills, walkers must first accept the funny looks, namely scowls from drivers who have to swerve, scorn from those who assume poverty or worse, and pity from a few who falsely empathize. It's a driving culture in most American towns and cities, and those in open opposition to it must be either odd or poor, probably both.
     In the 1970s, in my hometown in New Jersey, there was a quiet, middle-aged man who wouldn't have been all that noticeable, except he walked. Parents warned their children to be wary of this strange and potentially dangerous person. Children talked to their siblings and friends:

     He's just been released from Trenton State.

     He's a flasher when he catches you alone.

     He's a Russian spy.

     He had throat cancer and can't talk.

     He was a chemistry professor at Rutgers who blew up his lab.

So much for being a quiet, middle-aged man who likes to walk.

     A next step before reaching the joy of walking is learning to gracefully reject the ride offers that come in any weather extreme, be it heat, cold, or wet. Talk about killing with kindness, such do-gooders will stop at the apex of a blind hill or in the bend of curve, putting both the walker and themselves at risk of a collision. Expressing profuse thanks and relief at survival with an enthusiastic wave as these puzzled samaritans drive away will keep them from crossing over to the funny-looker side.

     Once accepting of scorn and mortality, the flaneur is ready for the joy of flaneury.
There are unsusual glimpses of the rising sun along with it's warming and healing rays. There's time-travel to another period of walking in life, for me to the half-mile trek to and from elementary school when friends were made, new paths discovered, and spontaneous adventures embarked upon. There are unexpected encounters with wildlife - a black-crowned night heron, a tiny snapping turtle scurrying across the road, fuzzy yellow goslings waddling behind their mother goose, a brawny red fox disappearing into the brush, a melanotic deer using black ears to swat flies. There's the uphill shift to fat metabolism, agonizing in it's urgency, slimming in it's outcome. There's insight into the right wording, the best direction, the better response. Then, after a mindful and mindless half hour, I arrive there, ready for the day's work, with these words from E.E. Cummings on the tip of my mind:

seeker of truth

follow no path

all paths lead where

truth is here