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.