More than a Walk in the Woods

When we are children it seems there are so many things in life that mean so much to us. They are obsessions, hobbies, joys that bring us hours of endless pleasure. I think back to my undying love for baseball. I collected cards. I collected stats. I played game after game of pickup ball everyday with the boys in my neighborhood. There were also comic books. I met a boy in fifth grade that changed my life in many ways. He introduced me to the world of Marvel, DC, and all the indies. We created our own super group, we dragged his mom along to convention after convention, we spent endless hours discussing and debating the value and general bada**ness of every comic book character known to man. 

Just a little kid exploring my interests. :) 

I don't know when it happened, but one morning I woke up and I wasn't all that into baseball anymore. I still love the Reds. I still have a passive interest in the sport, but it doesn't consume me like it once did. I can't tell you the last time I opened a comic book. Honestly, I don't even do the super hero movies these days. There was a moment in time when I bought my last comic and my last pack a Fleer and Donruss. They were quiet moments. I didn't know they were endings. I didn't plan to never seek out another rare Spiderman or start another season of tracking batting averages for Chris Sabo and Eric Davis, but it was the last time despite. The Bible talks about putting away childish things. Perhaps these lost obsessions are part of that philosophy that overtakes us all eventually. There are so many examples just from my own life that I could expound upon. I suspect I'm not the only one. I suspect this is a near universal experience. 

However, there are some things, I'm finding, that seemed all but lost to the younger, more pure versions of ourselves that occasionally slip back into our lives. It seems these tend to be the things where the true heart of our nature reside. Without a doubt, it's been my experience that when this happens we have found true passion. 

Okay, I never really stopped loving breakfast, and this post isn't really about breakfast, but dang, this was good! 

Over the last few years this has happened to me, and it's one of the most beautiful, blessed parts of my life. I was raised with a deep and almost hereditary love for nature. The first time I escaped from a playpen, I was at a campsite with my parents and their friends. After a career in the Harlan county coal mines while raising his children, my grandfather was blessed to spend the last twenty years of his working life working for the National Forest Service. I spent summer after summer traipsing through the woods with both my grandparents and a slew of other relations. We fished, we camped, we hunted, we foraged, and we hiked. Man, did we hike. 

There is a classic story that is often told about the time my younger cousin and I found ourselves lost in some of the most remote forest land of Eastern Kentucky. We were camping with our family. As usual, we ate an early breakfast, packed our day packs, and headed out into the woods alone. I was roughly fourteen. He was about nine. I know that in today's world that is an unthinkable amount of freedom. When I was coming of age in the early nineties, it was just a given. It wasn't out of the ordinary. We had been raised on these trails. We knew what to do and what not to do. We had packs full of the needed gear for any emergency. Our grandparents didn't even think twice about letting us walk off into the woods on our own. That day we did something we knew not to do. We wondered off the trail to look at some long forgotten curiosity, and like a couple of soft footed chumps, we lost the trail. We got what we deserved because, dang it, we knew better!! It took us several hours to find our way back to familiar territory. It was frightening, but it wasn't terrifying. This was our space. We knew what to do. We knew how to react. We knew if we panicked, we'd be in serious trouble. We'd been taught how to handle this, and handle it, we did. This is how we were raised. When we returned to camp, we weren't even missed yet. We probably wouldn't have been missed until dark. 

Me with my Ma-Maw and Pa-Paw. Two of the most influential people in my life. 

I tell this story because I think it speaks so clearly to how I was raised and my relationship to nature. I was taught that nature was a place to yearn for. It was a place to explore. It was a place to respect, as well, in terms of respecting its power but also in terms of respecting its fragility. More than once as children, my aunt would take us on hikes as kids for the singular purpose of cleaning trails of debris and litter. I spent much of my free time as a youngster reading hiking and mountain biking magazines. My first pricey purchase, once I joined the work force as a teenager, was a really nice mountain bike. I saved for months to buy that bike. Being in the woods and being close to nature wasn't just an interest. It was my world. 

Then I learned to drive. Then I left for college. Then I spent a few years partying it up as a young adult. I moved to North Carolina and back one summer. I spent a few years slumming around in a book store. I did the things that so many middle class kids of my era were privileged enough to do. I floated along on a breeze for several years ever oblivious to my impeding collision with adulthood. During these late teen and early twenties years, my time spent with nature went from a torrent to a trickle to nothing. 

One morning, I woke up in my early thirties and realized it had been a decade since I'd hiked a trail, slept in a tent, or drowned a worm. It chilled me to realize that something that once defined all of me had become nothing more than a dusty memory of a life I once lived. This happened to coincide with a moment in my life when I decided that I wanted to work on becoming a healthier version of myself. I needed to move through space more confidently. I needed to find joy. Heck, I needed to burn some calories. The first thing that occurred to me when I decided to become a better version of myself was that I needed to spend some time in the woods. Not long after that realization, I took a hike. Literally. 

Phew!! Those first few trips into the woods were brutal. A quarter of a mile was about all I could muster. Gone was my sure footed gait over rough terrain. Gone was my ability to spend hour after hour exploring trees, wildflowers, and signs of wildlife. I took a fifteen minute walk in the woods, and I was done in! But, I noticed something else. I noticed that for those fifteens minutes there was nothing else but me and nature. I didn't bring the world's worries onto that trail with me. I was alive and in the moment and all distraction melted away like so much white noise. The sweat that ran down my brow was from exertion and concentration so pure nothing else could penetrate it. 

I was home. 

Home in a way I hadn't been since I'd let this part of my soul atrophy. Everything felt right and good. These woods hadn't changed. Nothing was any different on that trail than it had been ten years earlier when I walked out for the last time. Sure, it was a different trail head. The sights were unique to me, but this feeling and this connection that I felt so deeply was the same as it had always been. It was part of me. It was me. And, I was still there. 

Since that day in the woods, a great deal about me has changed. I have lived in a new part of the country for some time. I have a different career. I am more comfortable in ways too numerous to count. I can also make it a good deal farther than a quarter mile these days. I can spend the better part of the day just giving myself over to nature. I can leave my footsteps, and only my footsteps, over far greater distances. I will forever be convinced that the first step in each of those changes started when I tied up my hiking boots and took that first step back onto the trail. 

Today, The Mom and I spent a humid, blistering, brutal two hours doing a three mile trail loop at a park in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was a hard trek. We both came home with aches and pains that will probably last for days. As we came back toward the end of the trail, I suggested heading off on another path, but The Mom tapped out saying we'd had enough. She was more than right. We definitely pushed the limits of our endurance, mostly due to the heat and elevation changes in this particular trail. It was time to go home. 

But, I just didn't want it to end. There are no other moments in my life where I can say than I am more happy than the moments I spend in the woods. This day and age, most of that time is spent with The Mom. A year or so back, I convinced her to take up hiking with me. It's been a blessing to have a walking partner. Together we have explored so many raging creeks, harrowing ridge lines, and gentle paths, that it's hard to remember them all. We don't talk much on these trips. Yeah, we might comment on something unique now and again and if we stop for a rest we'll typically chat, but most of the time we just walk. I don't know what she thinks about while she walks, but me, I don't really think. I just relax, focus on the world around me, and breath. This is so contrary to how my brain typically works that it is a true respite from the noise. 

Overall, I am eternally grateful for that day now so many years past when I decided to take my first step back into the woods. It's helped me redefine myself and reshape my future. It's a part of my past and my being that I should have never let go of, but then, had I not, I don't know that I would fully understand its importance to me in the here and now. Had it always defined me, I don't know if it would define me now, if you care to attempt to follow that logic. 

My friends, I leave you with a challenge. Reach back in those old memory files and find a lost love. Rediscover something that made you uniquely you for a season. Maybe it's time for that season to cycle back around and show you a whole new world of peace and bliss. I wish you luck in this endeavor, and my deepest desire for you is that it changes you for the better like it did me.