Because, as the crow flies, I’m only a few flaps and caws from the Connecticut River, I wake up most autumn mornings to a river fog dreamscape. All the air is suffused with soft gray, as if the whole town were in flight through a cloud. The windows in my bedroom face east, north, and south, and each one keeps me tucked in the cloud until it’s turned back by the sun.
I grew up on the edge of a cliff overlooking where the Croton River flows into the wide part of the Hudson, and the clouds lifting upward from the Croton filled my windows on fall mornings back then. As a kid in New York State, I would get up (much as I do now as an adult here in New Hampshire) and part that lacy moisture, walk out into the hills, into the oncoming brightness – the bluest skies, the brimmingest meadows, the wild winded maples, the ridges to the west, and the maddest late-season bees – moving through hours and strata of backcountry, woods roads, and trails, happy to step through familiar terrain or to break off over streams and rocks by the navigation of my senses. Life thrived everywhere.
Walking in the woods, I could examine deer tracks or pellets, stone walls hidden where there once were farms, tiny ice structures strewn in mud as the cold came on. I’d see the hobblebushes turn strange, and the undergrowth lie back, the views between tree trunks opening up as the fallen leaves obscured the paths instead. Walking was my joy and adventure, a science and an art. How to know a place, how to return home with it. I’d gather light and shadow, take in texture and shape and peace, and I’d squirrel away mementoes for my windowsills: shagbark hickory nuts, red oak acorns, owl feathers, the bird-shaped knot from an old pine, a shed snakeskin, flat river stones, the tiny bones of a vole.
A few years ago, I read in my mother’s journal this note about me at 22 months: “Alice likes to walk long distances.” I don’t know what a “long distance” is to a less-than 2-year-old, but in recent years I’ve climbed uncounted mountains, hiked through national parks, backpacked half the Appalachian Trail, trekked across Scotland. But this year, my brain is wrapped in its own fog, and my limbs don’t have the strength for wandering. A different kind of curtain has fallen over me: a chronic fatigue of undetermined origin.
When I was 20, shortly after I decided to delve in earnest into the arts that I loved, I broke my right arm, requiring surgery with pins and wires, and a year of rehab. I had an identity crisis: Who are you, I asked myself, if you can’t paint or play music or even write? I learned that we can never only be what we do, or how we use up our days within the magical wish for a limitless number of them. We must be as much – or more – who and what and how well we’ve loved, how great an effort we make to affirm life despite “interruptive” injuries and illnesses, inevitable aging and change.
Now, and for a duration of time I can’t know, I can visit the woods and the distances only by imagining or remembering them. The human spirit is not constrained by the constraints of the body. Like the plants and animals all around us, the very geology of our landscape, weather, and place, I am in a season of change. At the same time, I can live with all I’ve got to give and gain, vibrant and determined. Changing. Changed.
And outside of me, there’s this: Even in my small-town neighborhood, and in my garden, daily there’s the flaring wildlife of worm and bird, cricket and tree frog, the creep and scent of four-legged marauders, the lingering coneflowers and asters, the goldening leaves. Hummingbirds come one last time to the trumpet vines, sunflowers lean their bowed necks against the yellow siding on my house. Geese cleave the sky over the river, and the song sparrow sings in the redleaf rose. I stand among them, and know my place.
This fall, every day that I wake up, I can look out my windows, into my memories and dreams and my own backyard, and see that the views here are infinite, visible even through the fog.