On a blustery Saturday in February, we traveled to the western edge of Shenandoah National Park to pass a few days at the Robert Humphrey cabin, a semi-primitive cabin maintained by the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. With electric lights and a formidable little wood stove, we were a significant step up from winter camping. Periodic frigid trips to the privy under twinkling stars in a velvet sky reminded us of our good fortune: simply to be here at all; to savor the starlight; to hurry back to a snug little sanctuary.
Sunday was overcast and rain was expected for the afternoon, so we got up early and by dawn were headed north on the Appalachian Trail on the western slope of Saddleback Mountain, near the Swift Run Gap entry station of the park. A short way down the trail is a faint path that leads to an old family cemetery, where we stopped to pay respects on a steely gray morning.
Continuing north on the AT, we eventually took a short loop onto the Saddleback Mountain trail, which circles back onto the AT after a couple miles. The woods were silent and mostly still, though a stiff wind had a few things to say as we pulled back up onto the ridge at the AT intersection.
We followed the AT back down to our starting point, slicing soundlessly through naked woods, over mud frozen solid but that occasionally yielded to a footstep, turning up complex crystals underneath. Even in the woods there were early signs of spring: slightly swollen tree buds; a flash of green ajuga; a tiny pop of onion grass. It’s been a mild winter so far, and the fungi of fall had suffered little damage. White bracket fungus covered acres of fallen hardwood for a quarter mile or so.
No particular view or topographical feature defined this hike; it was simply a lovely walk in the woods on a day too cold and under skies too threatening for most people to be out (woodsmoke chuffed up out of many a chimney from the valley below). Our footsteps were not driven by the hopes of an epic view, nor a glimpse of a thundering waterfall. Every step was simply a moment of meditation, strung one to another across a morning of silent miles. The plainness of the woods, the silence of our animal friends conserving their energy for the season, and the desolate gray sky all created a welcoming space into which to empty out our thoughts and trudge onward unencumbered.
That night the woodstove roared back to life in the cabin, and foil packets of leftover pasta and steamed broccoli warmed atop it. We settled in with books, with my choice being “Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival” by Bernd Heinrich. In our little den I pored over the secrets of muskrats, snapping turtles, wood frogs, and kinglets, all of whom have evolved extraordinary methods for surviving the depths of winter cold in the woods around the author’s Maine cabin. Likewise, that very day we had shared the Virginia woods with thousands of beings–bear, deer, bobcats, foxes, birds, snakes, and frogs–though we had never seen a one.
Later I nestled into a sleeping bag, gazing at firelight dancing on the tongue-and-groove log walls of our temporary home. Building this house in 1800, and living in it, is a world beyond what I can ever know, and no doubt it was not a world that should ever be romanticized. And yet–and yet–(forgive me, dear Reader)–it is such a lovely imagining, on a dark February night, to think of a life lived solely with family and a few neighbors, knowing of a small cemetery not too far away. Knowing that each day for all of your life you would rise and chop wood; carry water; haul ashes to a pit. Knowing that every spring tiny blue forget-me-nots would spill onto the front porch, and every fall the walnut tree would rain down a bounty. Knowing that one day your being would end (perhaps simply and quietly, though quite possibly not), and you would be laid to rest beside family who had gone before, on a little hill in the woods with a view of the mountains beyond.
“The touching of nature is, to me, more than a satisfying of my curiosity. It is the source of my wonder. Any one species is a link to my life and all of life that has ever been.” ~ Bernd Heinrich
Watch Me While I Disappear 