Elaby's LiveJournal - 57 Academics

You may remember back in the spring of 2013 how I posted about discovering that a forest I walked through at work had been bulldozed. A happy consequence of this was that because I was forced to find a new walking route, I found another path through the woods that led to a glorious meadow and pond. For a year and a half, I've walked there almost every day when the weather would allow for it. I've watched it move through the seasons and I know it's a place of magic.

On Friday, after a week of rain, I was going stir crazy at work. I went out for a walk in spite of the chill and drizzle.

And I found yellow POSTED signs at the gate and all over the trees lining the path to the meadow.

They state, in no uncertain terms, that trespassing for any reason is strictly forbidden. I called Rachel and cried and she comforted me and on her suggestion I e-mailed the local development authority (who had posted the signs) to ask if walking there, leaving no litter and disturbing none of the plants and animals, could possibly be allowed. I thought it was a nature preserve. I haven't heard back -- I probably won't -- but I'm not giving up my meadow without even inquiring.

Luckily, unlike my other forest that was torn down, I have many pictures of this forest path and the meadow. It's a breathtaking place.

( Photos under the cut. )

I'm sitting in our yard, beneath our crab-apple tree, with a cricket or some other musical insect serenading me from the other side of the flower bed. Today is the most gorgeous day - the sky is a clean-washed blue and it's been unrepentantly sunny, with temperatures in the 60s. I stepped out of the door last evening to help Rachel bring in groceries, and I felt it on my skin - fall coming. This morning, it was even stronger. I thought of pumpkins and drying grasses and tea all the way to work, and at lunch, I went for a walk. I couldn't pass up this beautiful day!

Actually, I've been going for a walk pretty much every day recently. The temperatures calmed down a little last week so that I could actually go outside at lunch without overheating, and on the first day, I walked out to the field behind my office that I discovered after I learned that the nearby woods I used to walk through had been torn down. It's such a haven - the forest path to the field is a green tunnel, carpeted in grass and flowers. That day I stopped by a particularly interesting tree, one that's been broken off about fifteen feet up and is now completely engulfed in leafy vines. My walks aren't very strenuous - I stop a lot to look at things - and when I turned away from the tree there was a huge feather lying right in front of me on the path. It's more than a foot long, brown and white striped, pristine. I picked it up and carried it with me.

Upon stepping into the field, there's a slight rise, and at the top, you can see all the way to the treeline (with the highway on the other side) on the left and all the way across the pond on the right. An enormous bird was winging its way slowly over the trees - a great blue heron - and I heard this sound, a cry, like a seagull, only longer, keener. I thought it might be the heron, but then a hawk swooped up from the forest, and I knew that's what it had to be. It flew over me, circling and crying, so triumphant. I think it may have been a broad-winged hawk, but we have so many red-tailed hawks near my office that it could've been that as well.

That day I heard frogs jumping into the pond. I saw a thousand butterflies (yellow ones, white ones, brown ones, and flocks of tiny pale blue ones). Grasshoppers scattered like raindrops. On the way back through the forest, I found one half of a tiny white eggshell, speckled with black. It's on my altar now, with the feather. That night, I dreamed of sailing in a little wooden boat, and a female osprey flew beside me, so close I could stroke her back. I could tell she was female because the females have brown markings on their white chests that look like a necklace.

The next day, when I went back, I watched fish swim around in the pond. And on Friday, I went back again, and everywhere I looked, something moved out of the corner of my eye. At first I just thought they were grasshoppers, but I would see one land and then bend down to get a closer look - and nothing would be there. This happened over and over, and I walked down by the lake again and wandered toward where I could hear some water-birds playing, flapping their wings against the surface. I swear I saw a gray frog (gray like granite, not any color I've ever seen on a frog before) jump from the path into the grass at the edge, but when I looked closer, there was nothing, not a stirring. Something that big would surely cause movement in the grass as it scurried away, right? On my way back at the pond, I heard birds chirping - it sounded a bit like a cardinal I saw there today - and I looked and looked, but couldn't see them. This isn't unusual, but the unusual thing was this: I heard the same chirping coming from a clump of tall grass right near the path, and I went over to look inside. It sounded so close - right under my nose - but for all my tentative poking and moving aside of sticks, there was nothing in there. The chirping continued, though, and I was afraid I would hurt whatever it was or startle it, so I moved away, and then I heard the chirping above me - across the path - in this part of the sky and then that - right over my head, like it was circling me, but there was nothing there. I told Rachel about it later, and she was like "The faeries sure had a good time with you today!" And I went "...Oh." Suddenly everything made sense!

Today I brought them a little piece of bread in a heart-shaped milkweed husk that I picked up in the area last winter. I put it by the clump of grass and thanked them for playing with me. Funny how I spent my childhood desperately searching for some sign of faeries, and it's only now that I'm an adult that I'm really getting to know them.

Lately I've become obsessed with birds. I've always loved watching them, but not until I read Molly Beth Griffin's Silhouette of a Sparrow (BRILLIANT, by the way) did I realize that I could actually transform this interest into a pursuit. The lake by my office is home to dozens of bird species, and they visit the maple tree by my desk's window all the time. On Wednesday, I picked up the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America, and on Saturday, I bought a modestly-priced monocular. Already I've found that the little black birds that live in our trees are common grackles, mixed with some red-winged blackbirds and house sparrows. We've got robins and chickadees and mourning doves, and today, Rachel and I took our bikes to Fort Foster so Rachel could bike around and I could look for birds. I didn't have much success in the marsh - the birds there are too well-camouflaged to make out - but I did see some interesting sea birds that I couldn't identify in my book. They were ducks, I think, judging by their shape as they bobbed out in the ocean by the edges of some small islands. One was all black except for a patch of white either around its neck or on the back of its neck and a white stripe on its wings. The feathers on the back of its head came to a point. The other duck I saw was all white except for a black cap and black wing-tips, and maybe a black tail. I couldn't find either of them in my book :\

It's so fun and relaxing to look for them. We took a snack of fruit and cheese and crackers and ate them sitting on a bench, when Rachel got back from her bike ride and I got back from huddling behind some giant rocks on the beach to watch the ducks out of the wind. I have a journal that I'm writing down all of my sitings in, and notes about the birds to help me look them up later. I'm really enjoying it <3

Yesterday I went for a walk at lunch, and I discovered that a forest I used to walk through when I worked at our old building has been torn down.

I felt like I'd had something stolen from me. It was almost unrecognizable - there's literally a pile of dirt where there had been woodlands before. The frame of a building stands on a section of it now, just I-beams and supports and guys in hardhats yelling "Below!" to each other as they throw things to the ground. While walking, I'd seen the corner of this frame over a line of trees close to the main road, and I went to investigate.

Let me tell you what it used to be like. I have no pictures - all of the ones I took of it were on my old cell phone - and I feel like I should memorialize it somehow.

When I worked at the old building, I used to walk a loop (more like a square) at lunch. My building was on a cross-street between two more well-travelled roads, and I'd walk down one to the closest cross-street. I work in an industrial park that used to be an air force base - Rachel was born there - and nowadays it's a patchwork of huge buildings with manicured landscaping and overgrown forests where deer and turkeys live. Roads that used to lead to military housing now disappear into the woods, leaving behind stepping stones of asphalt.

The street with the forest-that-used-to-be is called Oak Avenue (ha ha oh god). I would turn onto it from the main road, which is open to the sun and wind and is lined only with equidistant saplings and a blindingly white sidewalk. Oak Avenue was like walking into the wildwood in comparison. The sidewalk turned to crumbling black tar (where there was a sidewalk at all) and pine trees - immense, towering pine trees - met far overhead to create a cathedral-like tunnel. It was overwhelmingly green and cool, the only shady place on my walk and a haven during the summer. The sidewalk was on the left side of the road, bordering a wooded area filled with more pine trees and a few oaks. There was a considerable amount of open space in it, and I think there must have been small buildings there once, because concrete foundations could be seen half-covered in leaves and blankets of orange pine needles. The whole area was sheltered by trees, though, I remember it as a slightly mysterious sun-dappled place where history lay just below the ground's surface.

There, another horseshoe-shaped street looped up the side of the hill up which Oak Avenue runs, its start near the bottom and its end near the top. This street was named Pinecrest Terrace, and it's fitting that it no longer exists. I never used to walk up Pinecrest Terrace, which brings me to the second reason this turn of events disturbs me. Near the curve in this road was an abandoned water tower - and when I say I never used to walk up this road, I mean that I walked up it once and never did again. To say that the area around the water tower is creepy is a very big understatement. As much as I want to be able to sense things that aren't part of the physical world, I find that I'm a bit dense in those areas; this place is a great big exception. I explored it once, and what I found beneath that water tower was bird feathers and a feeling of intense loneliness and the distinct impression that someone was going to drive up in a black car and dump a body there. I made the mistake that day of trying to walk back to work through the woods on the other side - much denser than the woods that were cut down - and it was right out of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, complete with the assurance that something was measuring me up for a sandwich. I have it from several different people - independently - that the area made them uncomfortable too.

And now they're building on top of it.

The woods that are cut down now, my pine trees with the carpet of leaves and needles and acorn caps and violets beneath them, were always a calm, protective barrier between the sidewalk and the water tower. I would greet them as I walked beneath them, sometimes touching their branches, and they gave me their tree-gifts of sharp sunlight on their needles whenever I needed something beautiful. It's transformed now, even the land heaped and churned and flattened beyond recognition. They left three or four of the oaks - one in particular near the road is bare and beaten and has broken branches hanging high in its limbs, like they'd been tossed up by a tornado. Rachel suggested we bring it something (and bomb the place with wildflower seeds later, once the construction is over). I'd like to do that; it looks bereft.

I felt sick when I saw it, dragged down, drained. It must have been that way all winter. Since we moved buildings last fall (and after I broke my ankle), my few walks have taken me in a different direction, and I never even knew it was gone. I'm glad I visited it so many times before it was torn down, but now it's so barren, like it was never there. The only thing I can do is write about it and share a little bit of what it was like with you.