by Lynn Darling
It was turning into a spectacular fall, one of those rare intersections of changing weather and waning light combining to produce the most vibrant color seen in years. In town, the residents and the shopkeepers were as stunned by the display as the leaf peepers, as they called the tourists, and drivers would stop their cars in the middle of the roads leading in and out of town, gobsmacked by the beauty.
All that loveliness—inviting, ephemeral—made the woods much less forbidding. I stood at the back window, watching the play of light on the leaves of a white birch. Calvin was right: Henry and I were ready for a walk. The puppy had never seen the creek; we would clamber down the hill at the back of the house and take a look around.
I found Henry under the crab apple tree. Ever since our blackberry communion, he had been more tractable. A day or two earlier he had ambled into the living room with something loathsome in his mouth. Drop it, I had said, more out of habit than of hope, and much to our mutual surprise, he did.
I took Henry to the backyard, to the lip of the hill that sloped steeply down to the little creek. At first I was wary: I had rarely walked in these woods without getting lost. But the falling of the first of the leaves had begun to create gaps in the formerly solid wall of green, piercing its opaque mystery. If we didn’t go too far, if we kept the house in sight, surely nothing could happen.
At first we stuck to the plan. The puppy ran down the hill until gravity and speed overthrew him and he somersaulted and slid on his belly, bouncing off stubbly bushes and outcroppings until he flopped into the creek and immediately set about chasing dragonflies and darting little fish. Then a shadow on the other bank caught his attention and he was off, splashing through the shallow water and up onto the far side of the creek.
I started across the creek myself, intent at first on simply fetching him back. But it was a lovely afternoon, and the warm wind seemed charged with a volatile excitement, and throughout the wood there was a sense of kinetic energy, like that of a great orchestra tuning up, playing on the infinite variety of shape and color, light and motion of the trees. I was suddenly aware of being at the beating heart of a moment, of the leaves high above my head that were just barely rimmed with crimson, their stems still stained with the green of summer, and the ones just a breath away from falling, curled and brown, their history written. It was the kind of day that mocked your fears, made you impatient with any and all hesitation. On such a day you can do anything; I was suddenly sick of the anxiety and the lethargy that had lingered for so long. Today was the file hidden in the layer cake, the key slipped inside a book beneath the wary eye of the guards.
Henry was almost out of sight. I took a last long look over my shoulder, and up the hill, back the way we had come—I could still see the house, sort of, through the trees. We would be fine, I thought, mostly because I was far too giddy to think otherwise at that point, and because it was too fine a day for anything bad to happen. And besides, there was something else: I knew things now that I hadn’t before. Or thought I did.
I had brought two books with me to Vermont. One was a standard navigational handbook on the uses of map, compass, and altimeter. I had cracked that one first. It started out encouragingly enough: any moron, it promised, could learn to find his way in the woods. That was the shallow end. The deep end of the book was made up of passages that talked about how to combine map reading with compass use: “After the compass has been set for the proper bearing, carry the compass and the map in the same hand, holding them firmly together with the edge of the compass lined up with the route of the map and the direction of travel arrow pointing forward. Then keep the compass map and (one)self oriented by always keeping the north part of the compass needle over the north arrow of the compass housing, letting the front right hand or left hand corner of the base plate take the place of the thumb.” Take the place of the thumb?
The second book was called Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass, written in 1957 by Harold Gatty. Gatty, whom Charles Lindbergh called “the prince of navigators,” was a handsome, daring, and distinguished Australian flier who in 1931, with his partner Wiley Post, circumnavigated the world in a record-breaking eight days, a feat so stunning that the United States awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross by a special act of Congress.
After World War II, in which he had served as group commander in the Royal Australian Air Force, Gatty and his wife settled in Fiji, where he established an airline and set up a coconut plantation on Katafanga, his own island. At the same time, he traveled the globe, researching his book on path finding as it was practiced in every culture and climate, illustrating his observations with detailed drawings of camel caravans in the Arabian desert, termite mounds in northern Australia, Maori canoe routes, and glacier tables at the North Pole.
Gatty had trained bomber pilots for the United States Air Force, and the responsibility of sending young men out over trackless oceans, deserts, and snow-covered tundra lends his book an underlying sense of urgency and precision. At the same time, his work is a prose poem to the glories of the natural world and the mysteries it veils in plain sight.
Gatty recounts, for instance, how the explorer and traveler F. Spencer Chapman was once kayaking with an Inuit hunting party along the east coast of Greenland when they were enveloped in a thick fog. They were close to shore and could hear the sound of the waves breaking, but Chapman worried about how they were to find the narrow entrance to the fjord that would take them back home. The Inuits were unconcerned; “indeed they beguiled the time by singing verse after verse of their traditional songs,” he wrote, “and occasionally they threw their harpoons from sheer joie de vivre.”
After hours of steady paddling, the leader of the group suddenly swung the kayak toward shore and hit the narrow inlet right on target. Chapman was amazed; he spent days trying to figure out how the men had done it. It was only on subsequent trips that he finally twigged to the secret: the Inuit had been listening to the songs of the male snow buntings that nested along that coast. Each bird sang a slightly different song, and the Inuit recognized the notes of the birds that nested on the headland of their home fjord.
Sir Ernest Shackleton and other polar explorers made their way to camp by steering their sledges at a constant angle to the sastrugi, the parallel ridges of snow that invariably ran north to south, much like the sand dunes by which the Bedouin navigated in the Sahara. Pioneers on the American prairie oriented themselves by way of the pilot weed, whose leaves grow in a north-south direction. Longfellow refers to the same plant as “the compass flower” in Evangeline, his epic poem about the expulsion of the Acadians by the British. It was the plant, he wrote, “that the finger of God has suspended / Here on its fragile stalk” to guide his heroine across the emptiness of America as she searched for her lost love.
In southern Europe, you can orient yourself, or could, in Gatty’s time, by the vineyards, which were planted on the southern sides of the hills in order to take full advantage of the sun. In less cultivated country, the traveler could look to the mountain ridges, which are less eroded on the northern side. On the banks of the lower Orange River in the mountains of Namaqualand, hundreds of plants incline their heads to the north. In Afrikaans, they are known as “half mens” or “half men” because from a distance the plants look like silhouettes of people buried up to their waists in the ground. In Fiji, the flower plumes of sea reeds grow on the side opposite to the direction of the prevailing wind.
Clouds over land can point the way to water; clouds over water can point the way to land. Look up: the dark shadow you see on the underside of a cloud formation may be a water sky, the reflection of a pond or a patch of snow, while a brightness of light on a dark cloud over the ocean in northern waters might be an ice blink, the reflection perhaps of an unseen iceberg ahead.
If you are lost near Tristan da Cunha, the Falkland Islands, or southern Argentina, the presence of large numbers of great skua flying overhead can tell you how close to shore you are. The Polynesians, on l
ong night voyages over hundreds of miles, frequently carried pigs with them—the pigs would get excited when they smelled land. Shabur, a shimmering haze in the desert that points the way toward an oasis, is visible ten feet from the ground, the same height as a traveler’s eye when he is sitting on top of a camel.
I started out reading Gatty’s book because I thought it might offer a shortcut—who needed to know how to read a compass if the world was such an open map? But soon I was reading the book in the late afternoon, curled up in the chair in my bedroom, making my way through it as if it were a book of fairy tales, skipping the detailed charts and the careful caveats, fascinated by the pageantry of strange facts and remote places, and the keen observations of this intrepid man and the other adventurers.
What I learned, sitting in the overstuffed rocking chair, was that the world was large. Looking back, it seems to me now that in reading that book, in thinking about the messages to be found in weed and rock and a prevailing wind, a large door began to open, a chink of light let in.
Not all of Gatty’s observations were esoteric; I learned, for instance, that the pattern of growth on a tree can tell you which way south is, and that such a pattern held true as much for the sunstruck pines of Virginia as for the windblown cypresses of southern France. Gatty accompanied this wonderful fact with a drawing of an elm tree in Holland. The right side of the tree faced southeast and was full of branches, while the other side was undernourished and skimpy by comparison. How obvious! I began to swell with confidence.
Now, it might have helped, given the course of subsequent events, if I had read the paragraph directly under the drawing of the asymmetrical elm, which clearly stated that “when observing a tree for directional purposes, it is essential to choose a tree growing in an exposed position and one which is not interfered with or sheltered by other trees or buildings.” But I missed that part.
Instead I checked the sky and the position of the sun. It seemed to me that if I simply kept the sun over my left shoulder, I would have no problems. A basic knowledge of astronomy might have been useful here; I might then have considered the fact that knowing where south was didn’t much matter if you hadn’t stopped to figure out where your own house lay in relation to the sun, or for that matter, that if you keep the sun on your left for any length of time, and the sun moves westward, as it is wont do, then you are going to be traveling in an arc, not a straight line. Instead I kept Gatty’s drawing of the elm tree firmly in mind: there was nothing ambiguous about it—one side was full and geometrically perfect, the other practically anorectic in its foliage, like some of the young women in Washington Square Park who would shave one side of their heads and leave the hair on the other side long and wild and iridescently purple.
We wandered up the hill, more or less in a straight line, but I wasn’t paying too much attention. The falling leaves, crimson, yellow, still vibrant with life, the snuffling, scuffling puppy rooting in the bushes, a shaft of sunlight illuminating an unsuspected stand of white and yellow birches, the musky smell of fallen tree trunks and mushrooms and moldering damp, the sharp scent of the pine, the bright bite of a wildflower—there was no time to pay more than glancing attention to the sun or any other marker. I had fallen into the timelessness that the woods evoke, existing as they do in a different tense altogether, one that is entirely present and yet comprises both its ancient and its most recent past: the glittering of mica in a rock that might have arrived on the tide of a glacier, a fallen feather still smelling of the cloud that passed along shaft and vane.
We don’t wander much these days—in fact we are rather afraid of it, rarely venturing across town without a GPS or a smartphone that can pinpoint our precise location. We are a long, long way from the footsteps of the philosophers, of Rousseau, who walked across France and Switzerland to escape his critics and attackers. “These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and during which I can truly claim to be what nature willed,” he wrote in Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Thoreau, that old curmudgeon, was quite uncompromising on the correct and incorrect way of walking in the woods. “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.”
The seventeenth-century Japanese poet Bash¯o, a virtuoso of the art of wandering, saw the unplanned path as a way toward wisdom, insight, and beauty. He was part of an already ancient tradition: to wander was a Taoist metaphor for ecstasy. Bash¯o couldn’t stay put: even though his disciples built him several huts and planted a banana tree in his yard in the hopes of inducing him to stay, he spent much of his life on the road. He traveled on foot, and took the longer, more difficult, more dangerous route. He always left home, he said, expecting to be killed by bandits or to die in the middle of nowhere. His journeys took him over hundreds of miles, for months at a time; he nearly died of cold in the mountains while riding down rain-swollen rivers. It didn’t matter: wandering was the ideal way to find and to appreciate the transcendent ephemeral moment, to let it offer up its beauty.
The soft panting of the puppy caught my attention; he was lying spread-eagled in a pile of leaves, too tired to even look up. The sun was blazing hot high overhead, and I was thirsty, very thirsty. How long had we been walking?
I looked around. We were standing at the bottom of a hill, two hills, really. I looked up in the direction from which I thought we had come, but I couldn’t see the house. Of course—we had crossed the stream and started up the other side. And then? Where had we gone then? Scrambled images came to mind—a bridle trail, a stone wall, a scrap of pink boundary tape wrapped around a maple—but they bore no relation to one another, told me nothing about the order in which I had seen them.
I raced up the higher of the two hills, ignoring the scratches of brambles and raspberry canes, crashing through briars with Henry in my arms. From the top, I would figure out which way to go, I would catch a glimpse of a road or a house, perhaps even my house. But there was nothing to see at the top, only more trees and another ridge.
It went on that way for hours. I crossed and recrossed the brook, followed deer trails and the occasional bridle path and crumbling stone walls that abruptly ended. The sun was so hot that I was afraid the trusting little creature by my side would expire before I got us back home. I tried to take my cues from the trees, as suggested by the dauntless Gatty, but they had nothing to tell me—in the darkness of the woods, there was no clear-cut message to the foliage patterns, or at least none that I could discern. Moss, which I’d read somewhere always grew on the north side of a stone, displayed a remarkable flexibility on the issue in this part of the world. The sun—well, I couldn’t remember where the sun was supposed to be or on what side of it I was meant to be, and anyway, how could the sun be in the south when it was directly overhead? How was that even possible?
I fought down a shiver of fear. After all, there were hours left until dark. But the country was remote; these woods, endless uninterrupted acres of them, belonged to people who rarely came near them. No one would hear me if I shouted. No one would even know that I was missing.
We were lost and we stayed lost for hours. I yelled for help, a little hesitantly, because I wasn’t sure which was worse, getting no response and wandering for hours until exhaustion set in, or getting a reply, and having to face life as the Woman Who Got Lost in Her Own Backyard. Fear triumphed and I yelled louder, but I heard nothing, not even a distant generator or the drone of a tractor. I sat down with the puppy in my lap, too tired to move, hot, hungry, afraid.
When I was young I loved to wander, though I never pretended that my motives were dressed in any of Bash¯o’s transcendent purpose. To leave was the thing, and never to arrive. Wandering was an escape, from every inconvenient obligation and follow-through, every unpaid bill and neglected friend and sulky lover, from the thoroughly annoying inconven
ience of myself. My twenties were a topsy-turvy decade of confusion, exaltation, and despair, one in which I had no idea what I wanted, or how to get it if I did. Sometimes I gloried in my reckless and improvidently romantic approach to life; more often, I worried that I was lacking in some essential element of character, that somehow I wasn’t as real as other people my age, who had begun to grow up, who made plans, honored commitments, and seemed to possess a clear sense of where they were going.
I was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, working on a daily newspaper, wanting passionately to do well despite a harrowing conviction that I was a talentless fraud, and that one day my editors would see the mistake they had made in hiring me and cast me out of Eden. It made for a rather contingent kind of life, in which dread was kept at bay by large quantities of Jack Daniel’s and various less-than-legal chemical aids.
When it all got too overwhelming, I would get in my car and pick a way out of town and drive and drive, the windows open, the radio loud, the direction a matter of supreme indifference, driving until the miles expunged every anxious, guilty, self-loathing thought. As the day waned and the high-beamed lamps of the highway switched on and the dusk began to obscure the shoulders of the interstate, I would look for the most likely exit, ignoring signs for the familiar motel chains huddled close by the major exits in favor of the more obscure-looking off ramps leading to a small strip of rooms with inadequate lighting and old beige or brown wall-to-wall carpeting, with just enough room for a bed and a TV set placed on a bureau, a patchy neon sign outside indicating you had arrived at the Wayside, or the Cozy, or the Starlight.
Looking back, those trips don’t seem as purposeless as they did then: they were in some respects my own version of Proust’s madeleine. My family had taken a number of cross-country trips as we moved from one military assignment to another, and it was during those long hours in the family station wagon, the fresh promise of the motel at the end of the hot and dusty days, that I felt the safest, the most at home.