AMONG THE STONES AND POETS
Somewhere off the Dickey Mountain Trail
8 January 2011
“Years ago,” I tell the group, “My dog and I wandered off the Mt. Dickey Trail and found a wonderful outlook over to Cone Mountain.”
A somewhat worried face in the back says, “And there’s a nice view?”“A fantastic view.”
“Course it’s snowing,” someone else says. “Too bad it's snowing today.”
“So do you know where we are now?” asks a concerned citizen, one of eleven intrepid wayfarers on this particular day.
I explain that we’ll continue like this for a distance and then begin heading uphill with more earnest, and eventually we’ll come to a paradisiacal place where we can see the mountains all around.
A very serious man mentions the “Importance of Being Ernest,” and others mumble things about how Wilde ones who wander off-trail can resist anything, except temptation; and with that, we continue deeper into not too distant fairy lands where mountains and men meet and find peace behind the busy days of lives.
Winding through a classic northern hardwood forest of Beech, Yellow Birch and Sugar Maple trees, mixed in with a towering company of Red Oaks, we come across the remnants of an old stonewall; and soon, having crested a small hill, we discover another stonewall. The proximity of these two stonewalls to each other forms a ghostly road between them, now grown thick with trees. Remembering as best I can the words of Tom Wessels, I explain how there are two types of stone walls: those built with small stones, which suggest that these were agricultural plots, because the stones were simply stacked as they came up from the ground with the spring tilling; or, those built with larger stones, which means they were fences to keep in the livestock, particularly sheep.
“Or maybe they’re just to delineate the borders of the people’s land?” suggests a woman from behind her scarf.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” someone else says.
And with that, we resume our tramping, chanting mellifluous fragments from a number of Frost’s pastoral poems: “Mending Wall,” “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” and “West-Running Brook.”
The grade steepens, and, with a few trampers right there with me, we look down along the white-powdered rocks and the frozen effluences of springs that coat patches of the hillside as if to freeze time, and see the brightly colored jackets of the rest of the group winding through the grays and browns of the tall trees below us. It won’t be long now. Soon we’ll be there.
We have just one place to find, one nook in the woods that will give us passage to our day’s summit; and yet, as is often the case when hiking these woods, the summit yields not without a fight; however, working together as a team against the seen and unseen forces of the universe, we eventually find our Providence, it seems, with the cliffs on Cone behind us, and the invisible sun beginning to set behind the tumultuous clouds in the west. And so, after a photograph, feeling like conquerors of some great Himalayan peak, we smile, and begin to descend.
…with miles to go before I sleep…
