Once the old house is sold, I won't have a driveway near the section of "my woods" that I usually start in, so I elected to hike up there yesterday while I was back in the neighborhood picking up mail and a few last items. Those who have followed this blog a while know that I very painstakingly made a map of the trails in the area, learning along the way that I have little sense of distance and even less of direction. I have been proud of the map, rendering sections in different colors, such as the parcels owned by the Forest Society. I have given copies to a select few.
Fifty yards in, there has been some minor logging done. Just one sweep, but the map is already outdated. There is a path underneath this somewhere. (As before, click to improve)
And a little further on, the path is under here. Or might be, because I may have already gotten muddled and the path be to the right or left of this.
Yet it is only the interruption of a few dozen yards - you can see in the background that the forest resumes presently, and the path has to be in there, just where it used to be, once I pick my way through the felled pines. (They leave the white pines because there's so much of it here. You wouldn't have to go this far into the woods to get some, there's plenty by the side of the road. they only cut them out of the way to get at the hardwoods with the heavy equipment.) Nice new habitat for some creatures. Small ones have new places to hide.
There is a lesson about impermanence in this. As CS Lewis wrote in
The Four Loves, "Everything not eternal is eternally out-of-date."
The"prohibited" sign is a longstanding irony. I never see footprints back here, just the very occasional ATV track. There used to be a guy with a fat-tire bicycle and before that, some dirt bike tracks. They do unintentionally clear the trail some for hikers, less than a dozen of us in a year.
This is new.
That stone wall is a boundary, so this deer stand is just at the edge of legality. It's bowhunters almost exclusively in this bit of territory. I keep hearing there's a moose in there as well, but I've never seen it. I'll be more likely to enter from the far side of the forest from here on in, so I don't know when I will be back here. Or what changes there will be, even in an unchanging place.
I have never been lost. Its unusual but I always know where I am, and where everything else is too.
ReplyDeleteI wander on my mountains I have all around me and know them quite well. My website is really about my wanderings. I wanted 'carnage.com', but had to settle for carnagepro.com. ;)
If you are interested in that sort of thing PenGun, I have done an entire series on Wayfinding - the differences between men and women, where we think oddities come from in evolution and the research being done on it.
ReplyDeletehttps://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2011/07/wayfinding-and-stonehenge.html
That's interesting. I seem to have very good directional skills. I have gotten distance a bit wrong, on occasion, but never direction. The sun is a really good reference if you know where you are, as you can use it for a general reference as you travel.
ReplyDeleteYes, in winter, anyway, when the leaves are off the trees. I do much better then, even when not paying much attention. My brain picks it up on its own, I guess. But between 10am and 2pm in mixed forest in summer, the sun hasn't done me much good.
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