trail maps

1.

As a kid, I would sit in my room in a house with views of the White River National Forest on all sides, and pore over the hiking guide local to the Aspen area — my place of trails. I can still picture the cover, a faded peach-colored image of the Maroon Bells on a white background. The binding had let go of most of the pages, both because it wasn’t of high quality and especially from excessive use. Then I would zero in on the map of whatever hike I had selected, following the trail line with my eyes, finger, and sometimes a pen on tracing paper.

 A few of the hikes in the guide I actually walked, with my little legs — my dad carrying the gray canvas backpack, and my mom with her light blue button-up hiking shirt and rumpled bucket hat. American Lake, Hunter Creek, and Crater Lake. One place in the guide, Fravert Basin, I remember looking at often especially because of the photo, which was captivating even in black and white. A trail bisected a lovely meadow with aspen trees in full leaf in the right foreground. Pretending to be there felt calming after yet another confusing adolescent day in middle school. But the real hike required an overnight backpack and wasn’t a place I made it to until my 30s. On that trip, I came across a string of bear tracks perfectly held in the soil. Uncannily human. Barefoot kin on the same trail I traced in my room those many years ago. 

2.

The map posted at the beginning of the trail says “You are here” with a brown arrow pointing to the starting point, which often has been worn away from people putting their fingers or the tips of their hiking poles on it. Why do this? Perhaps to touch the origin of upcoming adventure, solidify one’s relationship with a map, or revel in the feeling of being directly addressed and acknowledged. But am I? Here, that is. There is a Buddhist saying that we don’t see the world as it is, rather we see the world as we are. In this moment, then, it might be better to say “You are here, as you are.” That’s a lot of verbiage for a map, though.  

You embark on your walk. While the guide, blog, or social media description indicate some sort of experience, likely with photos, from that person’s account, your hike, with your body’s unique steps, breathing pattern, feeling of the air temperature, noticing of aches — make it all your own, as do the observations, thoughts, emotions, and photos your eye is drawn to make. It’s a version of wilderness, even if you aren’t in actual wilderness — encountering the inner and outer topography that can come with being in nature. From the starting point, you release yourself to the trail and become your own guide. 

3.

I recently learned about the Beale Wagon Road, which was charted in the late 1850s as a transportation route from Fort Smith, Arkansas to the Colorado River. A stretch of it in the Flagstaff area has been preserved as a historic trail, which includes maintaining the original modes of transport: travel only on foot or horse (no cars, ATVs, dirt bikes, mountain bikes). Trails offer a guide to the past, and another way of thinking about it might be that trails help foretell the future (parts of the Beale Road have been overlayed by Route 66 and Interstate 40).

We know about and walk the route because of the precedent of others, animals included, like bears in the Colorado high country, and of all things, camels on the Beale Road, which were used to help carry tools and supplies. There is something hard to ignore about that connection as our bodies move through the same swath of space across a landscape at different times, lines on maps the imprint of a layering of lives.

Foxes in the Light

Recurring fox visits over the last few months have made me feel honored and proud, as if these wild canids were bestowing upon me a neighborhood award: Best Yard for Foxes, the left-behind scat piles the trophies. Of course, it has little to do with any imagined relationship — mainly just the water dish and bird seed under the feeder. I have looked closely at a dozen images made by my wildlife camera, feeling weirdly voyeuristic. Enough footage to create a story. And to spark curiosity.  

What are identifying features? How many? When do they come? Small-sized, pointed darkish snout, and appreciable tail with a black stripe on top. Sometimes one, sometimes two. Always at night, most frequently between 11pm and 1am. As if these are gray foxes, and their territory includes my yard. 

The infrared light the foxes are caught in is beyond my human eye’s register, as if it were a magic trick, the curtain pulled open on the phone each morning to reveal fur-bearing beings with eyes aglow planted in a landscape I know. The technology helping me see what I normally can’t. Even what we may think of as nothing special, like eyeglasses and hearing aids, is really quite something. Assisting and enhancing perception, which is foundational to our experiences, our thoughts, our “as ifs.”

One evening in January, on the heels of the full moon cresting the ridge, I heard the camera notification. I was still up and went to the windows. The entire outdoors was visible in the moonlight, as if a cool lamp in the sky were on a dimmer setting just light enough for shadows to show. I could make out two foxes sprinting back and forth across the yard, chasing each other. A joyous romp, at least for me — perceiving it all in real time, directly with real eyes. There is a saying by Zen-inspired artist Frederick Franck: “This eye is the lens of the heart, open to the world.” He then refers to drawing that which comes through our lenses when we are in a kind of un-self-conscious state. The extra focus my eyes needed to gather and follow the silvery floating forms made it feel like I was drawing them internally.

Gratitude for the camera, which has opened a captivating night-time portal into foxes, and to the moon, which energizes and guides them to my heart.

As Slow as Lichen

To be on a rock, in geologic time

Or on tree bark, in tree ring time

I am trying it

Wandering the arid highlands

Looking at lichens

I am slowing down

How do the fungus and algae 

Meet up and take hold

I am wondering

And survive, exposed

Living beings previously 

Un-noticed by me

No roots, all sustenance

Born from the air

I am breathing

Usnea, Cladonia, Rock Shields

Sound like outer space

Blowing me away

Right here, on Earth

Egg yolk yellow, burnt orange

I stop in my tracks

Lacy green mats on a boulder

Growing a millimeter a year

Far from the fast-moving news

To be in a partnership 

Built across kingdoms, 

I am part of it

the wild edges

It is within the first hour of daylight and four mule deer look in the dining room windows. Two does and two young bucks. This detail matters simply because it is part of the act of paying attention, which is a kind of purpose. The bucks’ antlers are embedded within velvet, looking strangely tender, like soft shrubs; their eventual dramatic headsets in protected, patient formation. 

The largest of the deer, one of the does, has a scar below her right shoulder, a distinct line that is black now, healed with time, the cause left far behind. Her eyes, quarter-sized liquid brown balls, stare down the tensed cat, a thick grey cord of furred sinew with laid-back ears. A window screen and six inches between them. 

The agile mouths pull up rattlesnake weed, grab photinia leaves, and reach high for branches of the purple leaf plum tree. The deer are pruning here through their repeated visits, particularly noticeable with the plum tree’s ever-rising canopy. 

The rattlesnake weed (Euphorbia albomarginata) is the unplanned one in this otherwise designed landscape, its basal rosettes spinning out stalks of oblong leaves and tiny white-rimmed maroon flowers, thriving this season after late winter rains. They even grow up between the driveway’s pavers. The hard regimented bricks being taken over by flowing, live greenery. The young bucks favor these matted native plants, perhaps not as experienced as the does, who eat equally all that is edible. The hummingbird feeder near the plum tree gets a bump and a few licks from the large doe. 

The edge of the house is rich in comings and goings, on both sides of the windows. It is where we all can be ourselves. Being oneself — perhaps a definition for “wild”? And the edge can be permeable and fierce, as the cat’s being has briefly become that of her ancestors. 

bluebirds and home

It is a winter filled with Western bluebirds and the shy, soulful eeps they make while moving around the different neighborhoods in this patch of the Mogollon Highlands. One group I bent over backward to see had at least 40 birds flying over, scattered enough to make me keep watching for more, together enough to feel connected — a hermitage of bluebirds.

In an area nearby, they like to perch on the deeply corrugated bark of large pine trees before flying to the grass. They don’t linger long before flying up and perching on another trunk, repeating the pattern as they stitch together trees and ground. The bark-perching is so interesting — perhaps an affinity related to their nesting in cavities. Tree trunks as a safe haven. Others sway on skinny branches within photinia hedges, their purple-blue backs joining the shiny green leaves as they feed on red berries. This time they stitch together colors.

Occasionally, the bluebirds come to the bird bath — some bright, others drab, all alert, none staying for long. Unlike the house finches, or Anna’s hummingbirds, they aren’t beholden to a certain yard. This is one aspect of the collective noun “hermitage” that perhaps doesn’t quite fit, although if I open my definition, all the different places where the bluebirds are these days comprise their winter monastery.

I think of this in relation to my own winter way, with its mainly sedentary routines around home. There is something to be said for staying put, as on a meditation cushion, watching what comes and goes, the changes in the light and sky, temperatures, birds, soundscape, and of course, the ever-shifting momentum and contents of the mind.

But, to join the bluebirds and visit my yard periodically as one habitat stop among many might loosen my firm grip on what I consider a safe, grounded center, making possible a more expansive and interconnected experience of home.