A Walk in the Valley

Artist’s rendition of “Valley House”, my childhood home, in the Minnesota River Valley surrounded by ancient gneiss outcroppings. Many thanks to artist Jean Opitz, with whom I have shared many walks in the valley.

In midwinter it can feel like the world sleeps in waiting for the spring awakening. While there is less to attract our attention, it can be easier to remember our surroundings in all of their seasons and guises, to step back a bit from full engagement and immersion to get a better sense of our place in the world.

This month I want to share something I wrote back in 2015, imagining a walk that I took hundreds of times in my childhood through the wild lands surrounding our home. Each year, it seemed, I would add a layer to my understanding. One year I learned all of the wildflowers. One year I decided to learn all of the birds by their songs. One winter I was inspired to learn all of the trees by their bark. I feel blessed to have had this experience in my formative years, at a time when most children grew up with orderly lawns and sidewalks, before the time when most children grew up staring at tiny screens and interacting with a virtual world.

I’m bringing this back in part as a reminder to myself. Over the past two years I have felt myself pulled outward into the world of politics and philosophies, pandemics and paradigms, narratives and counternarratives, with more time spent looking at screens and sitting in chairs and less time spent exploring and experiencing the wondrous world we inhabit. That is something I hope to change in 2022.

So, as you read this I encourage each of you to imagine your own special places in all of their seasons and guises, all of their creatures and creeks. Imagine a place in which you feel like you truly belong, in which you are not merely a visitor but a participant. If it has been too long since you have immersively explored, with no real agenda or distraction, perhaps set aside some time to do that in the months ahead.

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Out the back door

Past the garden

Down past the newly-cut elms

Up the valley

Squeezing past the oak branches where the spirit of Quercus macrocarpa has twice tried to close the trail, the first attempt surrendering to our saw, giving heat in a now-forgotten winter.

Next through the meadow with prickly ash

Do the bottle gentian still live, waiting patiently for their time to grow and blossom?

I remember finding them in the time when spider webs cross the path, when I once watched one so carefully and deliberately build a web, thereafter trying to avoid them lest I undo hours of work.

The bottle gentian patch, a last remnant of a dying patch of prairie, in bloom on the last warm days when it seems warmth is dying too, giving way to the soft scent of fallen oak leaves and finally the crisp scent-free air of winter’s cold.

The old trail went up the valley, past the huge surviving elms guarding the shortcut to Sunset Tree.  But the horses came through once, made a channel, and the meandering, marshy Bluff Creek became a straight, ugly channel.

Off to the left then, into red oak and ironwood.

This forest is old.  Ironwood only sprouts in the shade.

Old red oak are dying, and I see no young ones.  What was it like here when they were born?  What has changed?  So many have fallen now.  I give thanks for the ones who have warmed our home through the years and give a hug to the oldest that still stands, a century and a half perhaps, wishing him long life and beauty in experience.

A straight gray trunk ahead stands out from the basswood all around.  Ulmus rubra, red elm, once abundant and now, after half a century of disease, only a few remain.  This one looks healthy still.  Perhaps it is a survivor, resistant to the imported fungus that has made the once-dominant elms a short-lived tree.  Perhaps its seeds will give life to a new generation of resistant elms, reclaiming their place in this forest when I am gone from this life.

A curve to the right, curling around a pale skeleton of a tree.  Ulmus americana, American elm, succumbed to the same plight.  This tree was a mystery when it was alive, its bark not a clear reflection of its species.  I stopped here often, when I was learning winter trees, wondering exactly what it was.  In death it has blessed us twice with bountiful harvests of oyster mushrooms, bringing the deep woods to our kitchen table in stir fries and sauces.

Ahead across the pond, only filled during snowmelt or after heavy rains.  I snuck up on a spotted sandpiper and a wood duck here once, marveling at these denizens of open water deep in the woods, inhaling the rich scents of springtime after the winter’s dearth.

Up to the guardian tree in the pass, where I once hid a clue on a long scavenger hunt for my dad.

Then up a rock step and through some prickly ash to the pair of potholes, perfect cylinders carved into solid rock over hundreds of years by the once-mighty glacial river that made this valley, digging deep into glacial silt and sand to uncover the ancient bedrock – rocks formed deep within the then-young Earth beneath a mountain range long since weathered into plains.

Over the saddle to Strawberry Rock, a place of many memories.  Solstice fires in deep cold or enveloping mist.  Solo visits, gazing out across the river to Vulture Hawk Rock.  Memories of late-afternoon fame flowers.  Checking the time capsule, perhaps writing a new reflection or reading over earlier entries.  This place is open now, cleared of trees and visited more often by those who look but do not truly see.  A place of magic, of mystery must be experienced and acknowledged as such by those who visit or it will lose its identity, become just another rock, forest, or patch of prairie.  Such may be the fate of Strawberry Rock, though it may again be forgotten to grow a new covering of cedars, to inspire a new generation of those seeking solitude and quiet reverence.

Climbing down the cliff, through the giant tree-nursery pothole and around the west side.

An unbroken wall of moss, formed on rock cliffs in the shade.  This was the first green to return, awakened by March snowmelt.  I used to come here on the first warm days, to a verdant dripping wonderland, each tiny leaf of moss a path for water released from ice above, rejoining the hydrologic cycle.  I would bury my face deep into the moss, inhaling the beautiful scent of chlorophyll, of Earth, of life reawakening from winter.

Up then from the pass, following a trail I helped to build.  The Middle Ridge Trail, last of Ed’s passageways to be built, and first, perhaps, to be abandoned.  Ed seldom comes this way now, and I push my way through cedar branches reclaiming our passageways.

Squeezing through the crack, beneath the balanced boulder.  The Moon Boulders, we called this area, and it was once a distant mysterious place.  When I was small, the Lookout, Moon Rock, and Powder Rock were the center of my world.  Sunset Rock seemed farther, and Bluff Creek was the edge of the realm.  Everything beyond Bluff Creek was the outer reaches – places where we seldom ventured that seemed wilder, less safe, less familiar.  Such was my world once.  Then I grew and space began to shrink.  I explored the whole park, then the whole valley, then to Colorado, and Ecuador, and Oregon, but always I connected to places as I did around Valley House.

On to the top of Bluff Creek Falls, the elf-divide.  A rock pool where the smallest branch or tuft of moss can redirect the creek, sending it cascading through the birdbath and down through the tumbled boulders or else off to the east, flowing quietly through trees and glades before cascading in a torrent straight down a cliff.  I loved to build dams and diversions, but not here.  This was not my playground; other consciousness was at work.  Here I did not seek to change the world, but rather found joy in its ever-changing patterns.

Eastward then, on the Main Trail, the route that I can still walk in darkness, sensing the position of each landmark from years of memory.  Past Onion Rock, detouring northward to the Sunset Tree.  This came later, when I cast a new focus on familiar places, seeking the highest point.  My hands and feet find the branches by memory, emerging into the last rays of sunshine.

I have watched at least a hundred sunsets here, maybe two hundred.  Sunsets swaying in the biting northwest winds of winter.  Sunsets in the awakening of spring, with Great Horned Owls calling in the distance.  Sunsets in the peak of summer, when the clear trills of the Wood Thrush and the whistle of the Whip-poor-will mix with the mysterious night song of the Ovenbird, a joyful warble delivered high above the trees by a bird normally found near the forest floor.  Sunsets in September, when the valley turns yellow and orange, the woods fill with spiderwebs, and the air fills with the soft, rich, earthy scent of new-fallen leaves.  The tree itself has changed but little in fifteen years.  It is perhaps five feet taller, and I need to climb one branch higher for a clear view of the horizon.  I wonder if it will outlive me, if I might still be able to visit in my later years to watch the sun set over the ever-changing, ever-renewing valley.

Time to climb down, as the sky fills with every hue of red and pink.  Beneath the rotting boards of our sunset platform, where Ed would take me as a little boy, carrying our army-green backpack with a granola bar for each of us.

On through Jean’s elf-passage, where she felt the spirits of nature close at hand.  I sensed them too, but they have moved now, perhaps to the wilder rocks and woods north of the Sunset Tree.

Around Falling Down Rock, a place whose story I know only from retelling, not from memory.  Little Mark fell here once, or so the story goes.

Then the open expanse of Powder Rock.  I barely remember the rock-powder projects that spawned the name, but this was always my rock spot.  This or the top of Moon Rock next door.  I have felt true joy here – a sense of being connected to all that is, and feeling that I belong and have a place within it.  I have come here feeling confused or foggy or anxious and left feeling more restored, more connected, more at peace.  Here, I feel, in the ancient rock stretching unbroken to the center of the planet, the consciousness of the Earth Mother is close at hand, more available for communion, for emotional rebalancing, for self-discovery.

An S-curve through the woods and across Acorn Creek to Moon Rock.  The oaks here are old, much older than the cedars.  The cedars are overtopping them, shading out their babies.  Historically this ridge was open, scattered oaks mixed with prairie islands.  When the fires stopped, the cedars grew, changing the dynamic of the place.  The oaks remember a different time, perhaps wish for its return.  Ecologists, too, strive to remove the cedars.  I understand the desire, to preserve the prairie species, but I have always known this place as a cedar world.  Nature changes but slowly, and the feel stays the same.  Human change is abrupt, changing the feel of a place.  I would be sad to see the cedars go.

Moon Rock, where I discovered “snow wheelies” on a fresh-crusted snowpack, where I followed the possum trail, where I slid down on my butt in new powdery snow, where I lifted rocks in summer to find blue-tailed skinks.

Down Moon Rock, below the sky jump, walking and sliding down familiar passageways to the tennis rock and the back porch.  Back at Valley House once more.