The Black Leviathan And Other Short Tales

I started my walking career by walking to school and one or two local landmarks. It seemed like a mile at age 6 but in reality it was no more than the length of two football fields to my old school which was brand-spanking new at the time. It was from this school I ran home in November 1963, crying, after we were let out of school the day President Kennedy was killed. To get to the school my siblings and I trudged up a scrub brush covered hill (looks more like a small wooded mound today) to reach the road towards North Branford center that lead by the school which at the time was called Cedar Lake Elementary (It’s now a business park). Several hundred feet further were the tracks of the Branford Steam Railroad, a relatively short line which ran to and from the trap rock stone quarries above the town of North Branford to barges at Juniper Point near Stony Creek on the shoreline east of New Haven, Connecticut.

About the time I was about six my Swiss mother would walk myself and a couple of my younger siblings up to the railroad where we would watch the black leviathans that shook the earth, looking like a snaking Satan himself which created an alarmingly loud but exciting spectacle. I still remember the engineers waving to us as they passed by. On one occasion we walked, looking back at it now, a surprisingly long distance on the Old Northford Road south to Branford to a dairy barn to look at the moo-moos and their attendant dairy farmer. I remember we stopped to picnic and eat Swiss cheese and yellow mustard sandwiches along the way. We ate a lot of those back then. I would later walk those same tracks when I was older, a short time after my mother died of cancer when I was thirteen, the three-quarter mile to the town center to buy my first 45 rpm records at a small music store in the tiny stripmall that also anchored our volunteer fire department building. The small adventure, one of the first things I ever did on my own, was cathartic and I did it quite a few times. My first two purchases were Stevie Wonder’s My Cherie Amore and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary.

Later on as we grew older, dad started to bring us RVing to state parks throughout Connecticut. The trails we walked were reasonably distanced for our varied ages, the five of us kids were spaced six years apart, and uniquely interesting in their own way. One had a lush wide waterfall, another was a former eighteenth century village with remnant cellar holes now overgrown. They all had that verdant petrichor that was enticing and enchanting. The weather was usually cooperative and mostly we went during the crisp autumn months, which probably explains the reasoning behind my favorite time of year. Summer was usually out of the question as my brother Fred and I were shunted off to Camp Sequassen, a Boy Scout camp in the northwest part of the state. We would go for very long car rides to the Canadian Maritimes or out west to Indiana where my dad received his first military training. We did very little walking then. Probably Mammoth Cave in Kentucky was the longest walk of any vacation spot we went to. At Sequassen we walked through disgustingly humid hot air along a shadeless road lined with Queen Anne’s lace and poison ivy, perhaps a short distance but it seemed endless, to the camp 22 caliber rifle ranges.

I always hated hot humid air, something my Florida-native wife simply doesn’t understand. In fact I would rather jog at night in my Florida housing neighborhood rather than walk it’s many popular trails through sub-tropical broadleaf forests, palmetto prairie and nasty sawgrass. Hiking? Maybe one fine winter day but not in summer mud season. I’ll have to start sometime I suppose. It’s just so damn flat! And did I mention the fire ants and alligators and now boa constrictors? How about those LOVELY 900 species of Florida spiders? Aren’t they cute? I can’t wait to carry home some hideous critter in my backpack after a foray into the swamps. I just know it will first find a home in my car and make its presence known while I drive 80 miles per hour on the highway. It’s just that there are SO many trails here. I don’t get the enjoyment part yet. Somehow I feel less threatened by a black bear than a Florida insect. I’ll think about it.

 

 

On Poms and Walmarts

Do you like to walk? How far? How often? Where do you go? Everyone has a special time and place, a special place where you  just feel right with the world. I have a nine year-old, seven pound pomeranian that I walk every night for a minimum 30 minutes. Its for her own good. We take a different route each time. I’d almost say it’s fun usually, until without prior notice she slams on her tiny brakes nearly yanking my shoulder out of its socket just to sniff about and read her pee-mail which comes at anytime, usually a distance of about twenty feet. Her recoil leash has been ripped out of my hand on more than one occasion. Who would have guessed such a tiny compact animal could have such burly strength? Perhaps because she descends from large dogs such as the Icelandic sled-pulling Spitz? In some parts of the German speaking world they are known as Zwergsitz (Dwarf Spitz). This little fireplug with pencil-thin legs has a wicked stubbornness and growls when she doesn’t get her way. Her new thing is to sit in front of me and stare. And stare. But she has such a nice smile…

I get a minimum of exercise on these walks too I suppose but the weather here northwest of Tampa can be brutal most of the year (some people actually enjoy living here) and I simply refuse on esthetic grounds to shave her into some sort of bizarre canine topiary. So she sits on top of the couch, watching out for the rudely intrusive neighborhood felines outside the window, or simply waiting for her daily walk. Of course I bring her outside for the sake of a dry floor. We go outside to get the mail or to pull weeds. We used to go to baseball fields where I’d let her run free, wary of attack from one of Florida’s larger raptors. The kids loved her during games and she them. But her favorite entertainment is to go shopping. Doesn’t matter that it’s Home Depot or Walmart. Even a visit to the drive-through drugstore is enough to entertain her. We modified and elevated a child’s car seat so she could go out for joyrides in the car, watching the world go by, held in place by her halter and attaching short leash to protect her from sudden stops. She soaks in the adoration she receives wherever we go like a happy smiling panting sponge. But always we wait for sundown when the sidewalks aren’t 120 degrees. The ambient sidewalk temperature at her height can be dangerous. Our neighbor’s golden retriever died a week ago from heat stroke. Yeah, they die of things like that. We sometimes break away for a walk on the attractive new concrete boardwalk in Clearwater Beach during the sunsets where she really commands – and expects – attention. Quite often we even sneak her into restaurants inside a cleverly disguised tote bag. Don’t tell anyone…

Which brings me to a point author Bill Bryson brought up in his wonderfully funny and ecologically alarming book, “A Walk In The Woods; Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail”:

“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. ‘Because I have a program for the treadmill,’ she explained. ‘It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.’ It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.”

The typical American, he writes, walks a mere 350 yards a day. Think of it. A mile is 1760 yards. That means we walk a mere 1/5 of a mile a day. Oh alright, I suppose an occasional shopping spree at Walmart constitutes a bit of walking, actually more if you think of it since one lap around the store is a quarter-mile, roughly equivalent to one lap around a typical high school’s outdoor track. So there ya go. Need to get away? Go to Walmart. But seriously where’s the fun in that?

Hiking 101

 Put one foot in front of the other, or so the saying goes. The longest journey begins with but a single step. Sounds easy, doesn’t  it? Mankind has been walking since we developed out of the early Pleistocene era. It was that early urge to eat that began the urge to walk. Our food sources that allowed our brains to increase in size were themselves looking for their next meal and also walked. Eventually those four legged meals began to walk into man-made pens of boulders strategically aligned to focus the drift of migration into killing zones. We were smart then. As smart as we are now. But before these intelligent hunters existed that trapped their dinner we were following our dinner. A recent student-athlete speed runner from Kenya enrolled in the United States said he learned how to run in his homeland by following gazelles and building endurance and subsequently speed to catch and kill his dinner. This two legged endurance runner would eventually outrun his four legged prey by sheer anatomical superiority. While having four legs seems on the face of things to be easier, the physiology actually proves less calorie efficient than the use of two legs. In time, a human can outrun a cheetah and even a horse. Humans developed in time not for speed but for endurance. And we would follow our dinner to the ends of the earth quite literally.

As our brains expanded from protein consumption, so did our understanding of the world around us. We found through the experience of starvation that grains could be eaten, digested for the most part, creating another form of sustenance. We found it could be reproduced and cultivated and harvested. We made beer! Things quickly went downhill from there. We began to discover a need to protect ourselves from lazy and self serving pillagers with extended family groups – clans – and the increase in clan populations begat small communes. As our fear of thieving marauders increased, so to did the size of villages which by their size alone deterred attack. Villages served another function.  Our sense of “other” was the beginning of our interpretations of serendipity found in nature. From this grew shamanism.  We learned wonder and by logical consequence mysticism. Mysticism and its power to persuade would unleash religion. Towns became renowned centers of communion for religious pilgrimages. And this all goes way back. Way back in time, far earlier than archaeologists currently claim. We are only beginning to understand just how far back this kind of civilization goes. The latest guess is now more than an incredible 75,000 years in Africa.

Walking was not only a means to an end, it was a means to travel to extended clan villages for trade. In time we discovered animals could carry cargo. Paths were created by habit, then by necessity. And then finally by design. Paths over time eventually became roads. These were necessary when traffic became such that two horses, mules, or camels moving in opposite directions needed to share the byway. Long lost paths crossed the great plains between Europe and China thousands of years older than the famous Silk Road. Desert desiccated Cherchen Celt mummies found in Western China date to the bronze age. They did not arrive in covered wagons. They walked. Because that is what they did. During the neolithic age India had a west coast path which was one of the first recorded major spice trade routes. Wheels, as such, weren’t known to exist beyond six thousand years ago and were to our best learned assumptions only used for pottery making. We lead our beasts of burden until someone came up with the bright idea of sitting on one. This was perhaps one of the greatest technological leaps, I suppose you can call it, man had made since his dubiously happy utilization of fire. And beer.

As technology progressed, man still walked. He walked to see his cousins. He walked in funeral and religious processions. He walked for days or longer on pilgrimages to holy sites. We even walked to work until very recent times. The Romans took the ancient celtic  footpaths and brilliantly turned them into measured, repaired and widened roads that allowed their armies to conquer the Mediterranean/Britannic world. In very early New England the Connecticut Path, an Native American trail of great antiquity, brought Reverend Thomas Hooker and his congregation from Boston in 1636 to new settlement to a place they would eventually call Hartford, along the Connecticut River. The trail even crossed a shallow submerged neck of land at Lake Manchaugagagog. This route through southern New England remains one of the gentlest, historically interesting auto/footpaths in the United States. I would even go so far as to call it charming.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s preemptive militia attack against the Narragansett Indian’s palisaded town in December 1675 initially took an ancient Indian trail from Watertown near Boston to Providence Plantations, the village created by the banished Reverend Roger Williams  in what is now Rhode Island. There they boarded water vessels and landed across the Narragansett Bay, encamping overnight before they began the final leg of their journey. In a raging blizzard guided by an Indian from a rival tribe, they formed a single “Indian file” along a trail to the Narragansett Indian settlement. The English and a few Indian allies then successfully attacked by surprise, destroying the village, its undefended inhabitants who were unable to flee into the woodlands, and their stored winter harvests before retreating the way they had come.

When 46 year old French General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau was sent to aid the rebel cause during the American Revolution he led a French army over trails from their base in Newport, through Rhode Island and Connecticut enroute to Yorktown, he stopped at Wethersfield to meet General George Washington. His army had dragged along a massive wagon supply train of 1,500 horses and oxen up and down some low but prodigiously steep hills along the way, following established trails that meandered from farm to farm, settlement to settlement or having his ax men cut his own. This route can also be followed today by trail or car. The Native American Plains tribes were walkers for millennia until the Spanish reintroduced horses to the Americas. They walked because that is what people did.

But where was the joy?