Walk through the middle - #203

Enjoy your fucking walk.

I took the dog out. He didn’t need to clear his head. He wasn’t looking for clarity or ideas (though he was almost certainly looking for that deer leg again.) He needed to walk. And so did I. I needed to feel the uneven ground. I needed to engage muscles and lungs and be driven by the contraction of my heart. It was early mud season, just after a wind event, and I pulled on my muck boots. I knew what I was getting into, and I walked straight down the center of the path.

You might think: yes, that’s how you walk on a path—straight, on it. But you would be surprised how many people do not do this when doing this is at its most critical.

In mud season, the path is full of fallen trees, deep puddles, post-holing snow banks, slurry fields of indeterminate depth. And the whole point is to walk right through them.

This isn’t some kind of tenacity test (though, you could argue). It’s actually best practices. When you come to a snowy or muddy section of trail, you’ll often see a wreath of footprints fanning out around it—people sidestepping in an effort to keep their shoes clean and dry. Listen, I get it. I get it! But this is poor etiquette. It’s also cowardly, destructive, and denies your shoes the chance to show you if they belong here. But the real problem is that every detour erodes the landscape beside the trail. For those who want to give back to the wood as much as the wood gives to them, they practice walking in the center: in the slush, in the crunch, right up the middle.

The snow on the trail always melts last. Everything around it could be clear, bare ground, spring-hopeful—and there the snow would still be, packed stubbornly on the path itself. Like nature is saying, just one more moment to get my leaves in order before you come over!

Part of this is the result of foot traffic: all that compression turning the snow denser and more durable than what nature alone would make. She kneaded the dough fine the first time. Having countless others knead it has made it…rough. But the trail holds what it’s given.

There’s another reason though that doubles back on us. The trail is flat. Humans made it that way—cut and graded to be easier on our knees, friendlier to our stride. And on a slope, meltwater runs. On flat ground, it sits. The forest floor on either side, all that loose duff and root and decomposing leaf matter, conducts warmth up from the earth and drains the water away. The trail can do neither. The snow lingers longest on the very path we carved to make things easier.

Muck boots are not the best hiking shoes. They’re a bit loose, a bit clunky, and I could feel my narrow heel sliding up and down in the back with every step—my whole foot going up and down, up and down, post-holing through snow, inclining my boot to be more attached to the ground than to me. I found myself in six-inch-deep puddles. I found sticks of varying sizes accosting me from strange angles, jutting out from the hillside after being thrashed about by the wind. I found myself scrambling for purchase on icy pools, keen not to go down elbows-first, since my hands were occupied: one holding my phone to narrate all of this, the other holding my decaf coffee with two kinds of creamer, lactose-free half-and-half and oat caramel.

Ever the sensitive flower, I am.

This is the way of the mud and the mush. To become so sodden and sour as to come out sweet again. And so I did—sliding and lurching and sloshing, right up the middle, trying to be good for the trail, ever so slightly uncertain whether the trail was being good for me. I know it is, I whisper to myself. Enjoy your fucking walk, I grit through my teeth, I grit through my year, tasting only dirt and iron.

Days later, the deer leg appeared again on the front stoop, maybe an inch from the threshold. I opened the door to call for Jib, and he appeared with such velocity that I didn’t even notice how gracefully he’d dropped the leg mid-rocket as he hurled himself over it. The leg has appeared again and again, both last fall and this spring, emerging from melts and other dogs’ domains. It is a prize rallied about the town, and Jib knows his efforts to win it will be dashed again when he is forced to leave it outside.

But he relishes the challenge. He comes in so wracked that he collapses on the couch, dirt covering his belly, gashes along his narrow legs. Jibs who does not know slush or snow or mud or muck. Jibs who only knows bone.

God, can you imagine?

Or really, can you remember? Can you remember?

I have this memory from some indeterminate time in my childhood. It was summer and it was raining outside. It had been raining for hours because the grass was slick with the dirt it grew from. The whole yard was a slip-n-slide, begging for your knees and your hands, and I answered the call. The mud was thickest just around the perimeter of the house, and I remember army-crawling through it as I pretended to be a soldier in the trenches, dragging myself through the mud into battle. And all there was to do was to lick the splatter of dirt off my teeth and keep crawling. Dirt and iron. Muck and mire.

I don’t remember going inside. I don’t remember if I showered or took a bath or where I took my shoes off. All I remember was my elbows in the mud, my heart in the muck.

Just like the trails we build, we grade ourselves flat. We do this. We optimize and streamline and engineer out the slopes, and it works; it is easier on the knees, it is friendlier to the stride—but flat ground doesn’t drain. The hard things pool in the comfort we built for ourselves, sitting there, taking longer to melt than they ever would have on a hillside.

Somewhere in me is the kid with her elbows in the mud. Somewhere in me is the dog who only knows bone. But right now I can’t find either. So I keep walking, right up the middle.

The muck, the mire, and me.