Feet Feat

Me and Siobhan took Schwartz for a walk in the woods next to Walden Pond yesterday. It was just before sunset and the forest was full of snow. I was wearing tennis shoes, the only shoes I'd brought to her house that weekend, so I had to step carefully and aim for boot packed snow spots lest our hike end prematurely due to freezing feet. I squeaked down the initial slope to where the trail skirted an iced over marshy pond and then branched back up the adjacent rise. We were en route to a loop that we often hike in these woods, a trail marked every few hundred feet with minimal metal sculptures, each with a Thoreau quotation insinuated on its perimeter. Readers who at this point anticipate that I may have memorized one or two of these lines for quotation in this blog entry are readers who clearly don’t know me that well. For their sake, allow me to say that although there is not a snow ball's chance in hell of me performing such a memory feat, there were nonetheless, the makings of hundreds of such balls all around us as we trudged up the hill through the snow. The woods were dazzling, late afternoon lit and with crimson edges of coming sunset.

At the top of the hollow Siobhan grabbed a pine tuft and, tucking it conspicuously between three oak saplings, marked the turn we’d need to find on our way back. She unleashed Schwartz and he hurtled at break neck speed into the forest, spraying snow like a skier on the down woods turn. Hundreds of steps into our hike I had defied all odds in having not yet stepped deeply enough into snow to soak my socks. There was powder all over the tongues and laces, but none had violated the chewy foot filled center. As long as I paid attention and kept moving I’d stay dry and warm. In the crunching silence of the woods I was able to do both with ease. Thoreau’s words now began to appear at regular intervals; thought-stopping common sense, set so unobtrusively that each quotation seemed to have grown out of the forest like literate birch or pine. I grabbed each line by the last word and swung to the next like a boreal Tarzan, unbeknowst to my Cheetah and Jane.

The light was now fading noticeably and we decided it was time to head back to the car. We reversed directions and at the first fork in the road I persuaded Siobhan to take the one less traveled. After hiking just a minute in that direction she concluded that we'd taken the wrong fork, discreetly called it to my attention, and initiated a retracing of our steps. I took the correction well, I might say, and summoned up a sled dog load of Robert Frost as we bounced, “whoopsy-daisy thank-you mom” back to rights and over the rise. Soon afterwards we came upon the bread crumb pine tuft and it was downhill from there to the frozen pond.

Siobhan later voiced concern that we “could have gotten lost in the woods at dark”, but I wasn’t worried because it’s a known fact that even after the sun has gone down, deciduous trees hold light in their branches for just long enough to give wayward trampers a second chance if need be. I liken it to the sliver of air between a lake and its frozen ice surface, oxygen once utilized by Houdini in the greatest trick of his career (later recounted in the great Bob Holmes song). Each of us took a deep breath as we emerged from the woods, unscathed. We climbed back into the car, and drove off to buy artichokes and salmon for dinner. My feet were warm and dry.