Oh, the perils we face

Garfield Falls

Trailhead: N45 3.1032  W071 7.8642

In the New Hampshire woods you'll find what you're looking for. I seek high drama, preferably from a distance and especially this time of year. For instance, I like to feel the roar of the falls. That  thunder underfoot reorients the soul nicely. For extra impact, the spongy soil broadcasts the boom of the falls through a network of porous bone. The more grounded you are, in my case that means size 10 boots gripping the soil, the better to receive the full effect. And, yes, massive water still pours off the boulders, mushrooms push through the thin carpet of leaves and well-fed fox trot along, cocky as ever. As for the horny bull moose, they are gearing up....

I am interested in tenacity, which is probably why I see it everywhere. Here is a leaf that has fastened itself in the bough of a fir. Hang in there! Said leaf is unwilling to let go quite yet. Someone else will read this scene quite differently. Perhaps an artist will find that it is reminiscent of a dynamic composition: The leaf provides near garish relief amid so much brown and green.

This tree fungus is opportunistic. It found a weak spot, a canker on a sturdy trunk, and burrowed in. Perhaps the relationship is symbiotic but what I see, and I spot this intrusion from a great distance, is persistence. This little life form has found a place to dig in. Hurrah! In time it may compromise the tree. I wonder, though, how a fungus gets a foothold on a healthy tree? In time this tree will fall and cede its substance back to the soil from whence it came.

Not everything is deadly serious. I encounter frivolity here — stark white fungi sprouting milky frills all over the forest floor. Lighten up, everyone. Lose the drama for a second. Have some lunch!

Life hangs in the balance. There's no other way to interpret this wrenching struggle as the once great tree clings to the bank, tilting ever closer to the east branch of the Diamond River. I'm seeing that tenacity only gets you so far in some dire scenarios. On the other hand, what better way to explain this feat of balance than sheer tenacity?

Buried in a small crevasse, bounded on all sides by rock, a small brown mushroom prospers. Protected from the elements and rodent teeth, this little domed soldier digs in for the duration. 

Adios, little wonderland full of stories. Surely you'll have more after another winter in the North Country.

Vacation imagination

This is where I watch the sun come up. 

So much of the pleasure of a vacation happens weeks in advance.

My upcoming three-day hiking trip to my favorite wilderness retreat — Pittsburg, New Hampshire — begins next Tuesday. But in my heart and my imagination, my nature getaway begins the minute I open Evernote and begin itemizing packing and to do lists.

• S’mores ingredients. Check.
• Hat and gloves. Check.
• Running shoes. Check.
• Walking stick. Check.
• Travel mug. Check.

Each item on the list comes with a treasured repository of memory. There’s the hilly, chilly morning run past First Lake and on to Happy Corners restaurant for celebration pancakes. Hat and gloves a must. There’s the late-night, fire-pit roasting of marshmallows under a jewel box of radiant stars. And that steep and miserable climb up to Magalloway’s summit, where my walking stick’s a necessary appendage? Up there, breathtaking — oooh, aaaah — tempts hyperventilation it is all so beautiful.

And what about the travel mug? My daughter Ardis and I sip coffee on our before-dawn photo safaris up and down remote logging roads, where fox, bull moose and deer bound in front of us, flushed from their meanderings, as surprised as we are. Ardis, the daring one, takes our off-road vehicle places I would never go alone.

Full moon over First Connecticut Lake.

For years I have opted for Pittsburg adventures in lieu of travel to Italy or France or Greece or Spain — all places I have no personal knowledge of despite how right they seem for me. I choose nature. And it calls to me so persistently that I never fail to reserve a cabin and let myself be drawn, mile by forested mile, till I am breathing pine and peat and wood smoke. My hiking buddy Lynn called it “the Pittsburg effect.” Once I pull away from it and head home, and that is a wrenching moment, it haunts when I blink, turn my head, bring a fork to my mouth, mount a lectern to greet an audience. I know the siren call personally. And so did Lynn.

And yet, you cannot know what is to come.

I often open my iPhoto library and scroll through Pittsburg photos taken year after year, season after season. How many photos do I have of Murphy Dam? Of the moose feeding in the wallows? Of Lynn? Of Cliff? Two of my favorite hiking companions, Lynn Harnett and Cliff Post, died within a week of each other just a couple of years ago. They both look so happy in Pittsburg, with the panorama of Maine, Canada, Vermont at their backs and the solid granite summit stone at their feet. I miss them most right there and in the memory of there.

Cliff Post, left, feeling content,
at the end of the scramble
to Table Rock. Lynn Harnett, right
thrilled to have found a new trail
in nearby Vermont. 

I have packing-for-Pittsburg rituals that keep up my end of the bargain so that Pittsburg won’t disappoint. I wedge a sharp chopping knife into the middle of a roll of paper towels because my knife is a good one. I bring two-ply toilet paper because we do appreciate our creature comforts more than the lodge owners do. I have a gin-and-tonic on the deck after a long day of hiking and exploring so that, despite the chill this time of year, I suck in enough of her essence to carry me through the winter and bring me back to her next year.

As the sun sets, there's time to commune.

In the top tier of New Hampshire, where Pittsburg spreads its ever-changing woodlands and waterways like a Secret Garden, there is always something new to see and do in nature. Or, put another way, there’s always another way to bully fate.

Pittsburg doesn’t get old. It is the lover with always the new trick up her sleeve. Or the soft shale on the precipice’s tempting edge.   

All this pre-travel fantasy may psyche me for my next rendezvous with Pittsburg, but it will never prepare me. Imagination gets me only so far. I have to be there to truly know.

  

Water Muse

The Fourth Connecticut Lake — a marshy pond on the U.S. border
with Canada in New Hampshire —
is the source of the Connecticut River.

Note: I just read Gloucester author Gregory Gibson’s Christmas booklet about his John Ledyard-inspired walks abutting the upper Connecticut River. He reminded me of my own hikes to the source of the Connecticut River at Fourth Lake on the Canadian border. This is farther north of where Gibson's own adventures began. I’m re-posting this, from my guest blog on Write on the Water. Fourth Lake is inaccessible to me right now. It's January and the hike would be icy and treacherous. And snowmobiles are not allowed up there. Such inaccessibility makes the fantasy of being there that much more desperate. Gardeners with seed catalogs on their laps, when it's 5 degrees outside as it is today, must feel much the same way.

It’s called Fourth Lake, though by Connecticut Lake standards, it’s more puddle than lake.

Fourth Lake is a sludgy tannin-stained bog inhabited by frogs, dragonflies, Canada Jays and red-winged blackbirds. You have to climb vertically for about 45 minutes to get there, every once in a while catching pungent, sour whiffs of moose or a deer’s abrupt snort of alarm. Some hikers’ feet fit inside the hoof prints of the bull moose that have churned the trail into muck.

Once at Fourth Lake, you can walk its perimeter in an hour. You’ll need boots that are water-treated because you are treading on a grand and fertile sponge.

Fourth Lake is sacred the way mothers and muses are sacred. This spittoon of a bog is the source of the Connecticut River and the Connecticut Lakes. Unlike the other lakes, you don’t boat here and your dogs aren’t allowed anywhere near it. Relatively speaking, it’s pristine and rarely, if ever, will you encounter another human though you see their prints, too.

Fourth Lake sits on our border with Canada. The area just to the north has been ruthlessly clear-cut post 9/11 to give reconnaissance planes better border views. The trees, felled in a tantrum, are angled in all directions and take on the look of ten thousand booby traps.

To get to the trailhead, you have to drive to the terminus of Route 3 in New Hampshire, past the U.S. border guards, and, then, right before the Canadian border guards, you pull into a small lot. They no longer make you sign in and explain why you want to see Fourth Lake. The hike up to the lake includes several unsecured border crossings marked only by small brass plates embedded in the granite. What this means is that sometimes you’ve got one foot in Canada and one foot in the United States. As an aside, if you drove another few feet, you’d be on the Magnetic Hill in Canada. There, you can experience your car being dragged backward up a steep hill in some kind of astonishing and ever-amusing optical illusion.

I make an annual pilgrimage to Fourth Lake. When I go, I bring a lunch so I can prolong my visit. I sit on one of the felled tree trunks and stare across the bog. You never know what you are going to see on that busy surface forever a-roil in splashes. This is where life takes hold. Ripples radiate in circles everywhere across this buoyant breast.

One year, while crouched and savoring my ritual meal at the shore, I happened to glance at a small underground den capped by a pile of boulders — no doubt a glacial deposit. Inside that dark hole I thought I saw a flash of pink. Yes. I pulled out a small journal and a pen, wrapped in layers of plastic. It was covered in peat and had overwintered a couple of times.

Someone had begun a conversation about this place, and others had joined in. My daughter and I did the same, though by then the small pen skipped. No waxing effusively, then. The talk was about beginnings, about a tiny puddle that, at its southernmost spot, dribbled into something like a rivulet. One toddler’s baby step could traverse the Connecticut River here! From Fourth Lake the 407-mile Connecticut River took hold and passed through New Hampshire and Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut before emptying into Long Island Sound in Old Saybrook.

What could be more reassuring to a writer than a dribble that works itself into something majestic? If nature says it, it must be so. Be persistent, then.

To get to Fourth Lake one year, my daughter and I needed to break the ice that had crusted on the granite with our fists in order to secure footholds. We had to get there.

The late Don Murray, my nonfiction writing teacher at the University of New Hampshire, gave us a piece of paper on the first day of class with the message: Nulla dies sine linea.

Never a day without a line. And no river of words without first one word, then another.