Making a Trail And Cultivating It.

When I was a kid my dad would hike with me in the woods and take me on trails I couldn't even see.  He found his way looking for the blazes on trees that he and his brother had made when they were kids.  Occasionally he'd show me a natural deer run and marvel about when the deer run overlapped with the trail they had blazed.  It was all magic of the deepest and best kind as far as I was concerned.  My own personal Narnia with a father as shot through with mythical powers as he claimed his own father was -- "the strongest man in the world."

So last year Jaelyn and I set out to reclaim or redefine or rejuvenate one of those trails.  In my mind we would clear the ground as a first signal for the hiker, but then also add blazes on the trees to reinforce the correct way.  She disliked the violence of the blazing (and I agreed with her) so we instead followed her instinct of gathering fallen birch branches and trunks and demarcating the trail that way.  

It was involving work that was mentally easy and so happy because the whole time you were in the wood of your ancestors.  After several days of several hours of this my abstraction-oriented brain started to burble with a sense of how profoundly insightful this whole process was as a metaphor for living.  

I began to think of my parents lives as "Making a Trail and Cultivating it." I thought of what the "Trail" of my Grandma Marge was.  What the trail of my Grandpa Andy was.  What the trail of my Grandma Linda was. 

I could barely think of the metaphorical trail of my Grandpa Ed.  The literal trails of his life fill those woods and it was hard not to think that the concrete work he did of hewing the Old Shack Road and then the Old Road from the Club Road and then the New Road (Eddidit Road) were such clear spiritual pilgrimages both for he and for his children and all his children's children and even more of his children's children's children.  

These woods are so massive that the shouts and laughters and howls and birdcalls and fireworks and four-wheelers and chainsaws and cracks of guns through all these years do not even slightly affect the Holy and Magnificent Silence that rustles in the leaves and needles high above and underfoot.  The trails are puny but a worthwhile kind of work through the magical and overwhelming wilderness.

(Oh and if you visit, you should check out the birch trail.  It's meandering but not treacherous, there's one passage we designed with the illusion of danger - a narrow passage between a fallen tree and a railing we built of fallen branches.  We tried to amplify the drama of the situation by putting dried animal skulls and bones all along the length of the tree.  You'll love it.)