![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
when will they ever learn
I did something today that I've been wanting to do for a long time, but I've never been sufficiently discouraged to before. It was a far too beautiful day and my afternoon class was cancelled due to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference this week, so after my morning class today I just started walking and didn't stop. Just kept walking.
Well, maybe "walk" is a bit of an oversimplification. I headed by the diner first and got some food and drink to take with me, then veered northish toward the edge of campus, which took me around the backside of the recreation center and eventually to Paint Branch Trail, but the trail doesn't really follow the creek that well, so I slid down the back to the water and ate my lunch right on the pebbly sandbar edging the creek. The water must have been really high over the summer, but it was fairly low today, so there were lots of exposed sandbars covered with river cobbles up to the size of my head. There were *also*, of course, lots of newly-carved scarps with precariously-hanging trees, too. Paint Branch is an almost textbook-perfect stream with alternating cutbanks and pointbars and riffles and pools, so I could only go a few dozen yards down the side I started on before the beach on that side ended and I needed to cross over. Unfortunately, it was really low on conveniently-placed fallen trees, so I was kind of stuck if I didn't want to get my feed wet. (And I would have, but it was a bit cold for that.) I played around for a while with trying to place stepping stones across one of the calmer stretches, but it wasn't really working, as you might have been able to guess.
Under one of the cobbles, though, I found a wolf spider about the size of a fifty-cent piece. I love wolf spiders; they're absolutely my favorite bug since I found out about them in one of our National Geographic books when I was little. They're so fuzzy and gray and cute and earnest-looking with all their shiny black eyes, and this was the biggest one I've ever seen in the wild, and he stopped and *looked* at me when I tried to move his rock. So I put him back and gave up on the stepping-stone scheme and scrambled back up the bank to try and find or make a path, one way or another.
Most of the leaves have fallen, but the shrubs and vines and weeds are still growing strong. The serviceberry is in berry, bright red, brighter than holly, all over the place, and a vine with three-lobed leaves was putting out berries that started green and ripened to crimson by way of cerulean blue and plum purple, so that they were rainbow covered and made me think of the Enchanted Forest. There were clearings full of herbs that I *almost* knew the names of without my books, and rampant raspberry bramble. (lots and lots of bramble, but that's half the fun.I'll have to try to come through in raspberry season.) I scrambled up and down the banks for a while, down in the creek valley where I couldn't see anything but sky, water, and plants. Eventually, after a particularly long bad bit where I was following "paths" made by some creature which only needed clearance of about three feet, every step a blind leap because the fallen leaves had covered the tangles of undergrowth knee-deep, and usually out of sight of the water anyway, because the scarp was lined with half-dead falling trees completely engulfed in Japanese honeysuckle, I found a place where a tangle of fallen trees provided a precarious bridge to the other side.
I made it across, too, without falling in, without even any close calls, once I was smart enough to pull a good walking stick out of the tangle, which got me across the fallen trees and then over the water on the other side of the sandbar.
The stick stood me in good stead on the other side, too, because I was past the pretty on-campus part of the creek anyway, and it was more pushing through the brush on the other side for a bit more. Finally I got to a point where I couldn't go much farther by the creek, and there was no chance of crossing, and it was no better on the other side anyway-- I was heading upstream, but somehow it had gotten wider and deeper in the interim-- but luckily I had decided to stop there anyway, to investigate the slowly decaying carcass of what appeared to be an entire pickup truck, smeared all the way down the bank, with part of a bumper caught in a tree near the top. Once I was up at the top I realized I was near a road (well, I was near a road the whole time; the stream's mutters were never louder than the ever-present sound of traffic, but I have never ever been anywhere that was comepletely out of earshot of car noises. To get there sometime is one of my goals in life.)
I emerged from the stream buffer on an old and abandoned parking lot. (Future geologists will call this the 'asphalt boundary' and theorize about what sort of astronomical catastrophe could have caused a mass extinction, climate change, and a thin global rock layer consisting of clastics trapped in a carbon-rich matrix.) There was also a tent back in the woods just past where I'd come out, tucked under the honeysuckle canopy, which I suspect was the camp of some homeless people, but I exercised the better part of valor and gave it a wide berth, instead hiking a few yards down the road and crossing back to Paint Branch Trail by the Metzerott Road bridge. The trail shunted me on to the detour around the golf course before I could make my way back down to the water, because of course *nothing* can be allowed to disturb the sacred Golf Course. But that was all right, because it took me by some of the tracks of the tornado four years ago, whole fields full of dead trees with their topps lopped off and lying below them, the streamlet dammed and flooding with trunk after trunk fallen across it like a log bridge. It was beautifully devastated and stark.
Past the golf course I managed to get back down to the creek again. Actually, in the middle of the golf course I made it down once, where the stream had split into four channels and was dropping about a foot around three high sandbars, and sat there for a while thinking and looking at the sky and listening to the rapids and watching yellow leaves undulate through the water like little golden fish. (I have never seen a living fish, frog or slimy thing in the creek; it is really too clear to be healthy.) But the water channelled back into a gorge between to clay scarps, so I had to jump back across all three channels and get back on the proper path. (I didn't fall in then either, thanks to my trusty stick, although there were a few stick moments when I realized it might have been easier jumping there than jumping back. But apparently my everyday ankle boots are a lot more waterproof than I thought they were, so it turned out fine.) Shortly after that, the trail bridged the creek and started following it a lot more closely, but I walked along the sandy bank for a while anyway. There were places where I had to test every step ahead of me with the walking stick, because there were maple leaves indiscriminate over everything, land and water, and I couldn't tell where the edge was just by looking.
Shortly after that I was wandering through a quiet old suburban neighborhood, the kind where the houses are a reasonable size and the developer left trees in the yards, and I started seeing the spectre of IKEA looming through the trees ahead every now and then. I walked on till I hit Cherry Hill Road and stopped. I wanted to keep going, inot the park on the other side, and if I'd had a watch or hadn't had a nine o'clock class tomorrow, I would have. But the sun was giving me looks that said "I don't know about *you*, but I'd like to get to bed before too much longer, and I'd appreciate if you'd let me," and the park officially closes at sundown, so I stopped. There was actually a shuttle stop right down the road, and if I'd had any idea of the schedule I probably would have kept going until dark and then caught a shuttle back to campus, but I played it safe and turned around.
Going back is always a lot less fun than heading out. Actually, I went most of the way back with my eyes closed. I love going for longs walks blind, navigating by the sounds and smells and the feel of the wind on my face and the earth under my feet, and since the trail was absolutely deserted and there were no roads to stumble onto or cliffs to fall over, I didn't have to worry about going off course, so I just walked along, eyes close, arms hanging off the walking stick on my shoulder, more than half asleep, singing Peter Paul and Mary songs under my breath. It didn't seem to take very long, but the sun was a lot lower in the sky by the time I was back to the entrance to the golf course at Rt. 193.
Instead of taking the trail back to campus, though, I turned off at Metzerott Road, trusting vague recollections from post-tornado explorations my freshman year that it would bring me back to North Campus by way of the CDC with only a little bit of cutting through people's yards on the way. Because after all, it's silly to go out exploring and come back the same way you left. So I wandered through that little community park for a while, marvelling at the amenities of civilization like a water fountain (which was broken) and public bathrooms (which were closed for the winter) and a trash can I could finally dump my lunch dishes in, and a swing set! Swing sets are the sort of serendipity that should never be taken for granted, so I dumped my book bag and swung until my feet had stopped hurting and my thighs had started. Then I slid down the slide a few times, because it was a nice, tall, old-fashioned metal one and you don't see those too often any more. In fact, the only thing missing was a merry-go-round. And there wasn't anyone else there! In fact, the whole park was deserted, and by the look of the leaves, there hadn't been any kids there for several days at least, which was a terrible waste, and I may have to come back there, because it was so pretty and empty and fun.
Then the sun nudged behind the treeline and I headed on. It turned out I was right about getting back to campus by the CDC, too, although it didn't turn out to be much shorter, because of silly and uneccessary barbed wire fences. In fact I ended up in a facilities yard which had a salt pyramid! Salt pyramids are the coolest bit of suburban monumental architecture around, excepting only electrical pylons. Okay, and cloverleaf intersections. If I was the sort of student to act on her latent acrophiliac tendencies (beware the riant anthropoid) that's where I'd be headed back.
So I made it back to the diner and got a bit more drink and food and headed back across campus the long way, but that wasn't nearly as pleasant given the mood ofcampus people today, so I shan't talk about it. Except that I ended up going around back of the art/soc building and was reminded of how cool the art gallery is; I will have to find out if there's an exhibit open and head in there the next time I'm feeling iffy.
That made about six hours straight walking, and it was the best day I've had in, well, in a very long time. I must do that sort of thing more often.
Well, maybe "walk" is a bit of an oversimplification. I headed by the diner first and got some food and drink to take with me, then veered northish toward the edge of campus, which took me around the backside of the recreation center and eventually to Paint Branch Trail, but the trail doesn't really follow the creek that well, so I slid down the back to the water and ate my lunch right on the pebbly sandbar edging the creek. The water must have been really high over the summer, but it was fairly low today, so there were lots of exposed sandbars covered with river cobbles up to the size of my head. There were *also*, of course, lots of newly-carved scarps with precariously-hanging trees, too. Paint Branch is an almost textbook-perfect stream with alternating cutbanks and pointbars and riffles and pools, so I could only go a few dozen yards down the side I started on before the beach on that side ended and I needed to cross over. Unfortunately, it was really low on conveniently-placed fallen trees, so I was kind of stuck if I didn't want to get my feed wet. (And I would have, but it was a bit cold for that.) I played around for a while with trying to place stepping stones across one of the calmer stretches, but it wasn't really working, as you might have been able to guess.
Under one of the cobbles, though, I found a wolf spider about the size of a fifty-cent piece. I love wolf spiders; they're absolutely my favorite bug since I found out about them in one of our National Geographic books when I was little. They're so fuzzy and gray and cute and earnest-looking with all their shiny black eyes, and this was the biggest one I've ever seen in the wild, and he stopped and *looked* at me when I tried to move his rock. So I put him back and gave up on the stepping-stone scheme and scrambled back up the bank to try and find or make a path, one way or another.
Most of the leaves have fallen, but the shrubs and vines and weeds are still growing strong. The serviceberry is in berry, bright red, brighter than holly, all over the place, and a vine with three-lobed leaves was putting out berries that started green and ripened to crimson by way of cerulean blue and plum purple, so that they were rainbow covered and made me think of the Enchanted Forest. There were clearings full of herbs that I *almost* knew the names of without my books, and rampant raspberry bramble. (lots and lots of bramble, but that's half the fun.I'll have to try to come through in raspberry season.) I scrambled up and down the banks for a while, down in the creek valley where I couldn't see anything but sky, water, and plants. Eventually, after a particularly long bad bit where I was following "paths" made by some creature which only needed clearance of about three feet, every step a blind leap because the fallen leaves had covered the tangles of undergrowth knee-deep, and usually out of sight of the water anyway, because the scarp was lined with half-dead falling trees completely engulfed in Japanese honeysuckle, I found a place where a tangle of fallen trees provided a precarious bridge to the other side.
I made it across, too, without falling in, without even any close calls, once I was smart enough to pull a good walking stick out of the tangle, which got me across the fallen trees and then over the water on the other side of the sandbar.
The stick stood me in good stead on the other side, too, because I was past the pretty on-campus part of the creek anyway, and it was more pushing through the brush on the other side for a bit more. Finally I got to a point where I couldn't go much farther by the creek, and there was no chance of crossing, and it was no better on the other side anyway-- I was heading upstream, but somehow it had gotten wider and deeper in the interim-- but luckily I had decided to stop there anyway, to investigate the slowly decaying carcass of what appeared to be an entire pickup truck, smeared all the way down the bank, with part of a bumper caught in a tree near the top. Once I was up at the top I realized I was near a road (well, I was near a road the whole time; the stream's mutters were never louder than the ever-present sound of traffic, but I have never ever been anywhere that was comepletely out of earshot of car noises. To get there sometime is one of my goals in life.)
I emerged from the stream buffer on an old and abandoned parking lot. (Future geologists will call this the 'asphalt boundary' and theorize about what sort of astronomical catastrophe could have caused a mass extinction, climate change, and a thin global rock layer consisting of clastics trapped in a carbon-rich matrix.) There was also a tent back in the woods just past where I'd come out, tucked under the honeysuckle canopy, which I suspect was the camp of some homeless people, but I exercised the better part of valor and gave it a wide berth, instead hiking a few yards down the road and crossing back to Paint Branch Trail by the Metzerott Road bridge. The trail shunted me on to the detour around the golf course before I could make my way back down to the water, because of course *nothing* can be allowed to disturb the sacred Golf Course. But that was all right, because it took me by some of the tracks of the tornado four years ago, whole fields full of dead trees with their topps lopped off and lying below them, the streamlet dammed and flooding with trunk after trunk fallen across it like a log bridge. It was beautifully devastated and stark.
Past the golf course I managed to get back down to the creek again. Actually, in the middle of the golf course I made it down once, where the stream had split into four channels and was dropping about a foot around three high sandbars, and sat there for a while thinking and looking at the sky and listening to the rapids and watching yellow leaves undulate through the water like little golden fish. (I have never seen a living fish, frog or slimy thing in the creek; it is really too clear to be healthy.) But the water channelled back into a gorge between to clay scarps, so I had to jump back across all three channels and get back on the proper path. (I didn't fall in then either, thanks to my trusty stick, although there were a few stick moments when I realized it might have been easier jumping there than jumping back. But apparently my everyday ankle boots are a lot more waterproof than I thought they were, so it turned out fine.) Shortly after that, the trail bridged the creek and started following it a lot more closely, but I walked along the sandy bank for a while anyway. There were places where I had to test every step ahead of me with the walking stick, because there were maple leaves indiscriminate over everything, land and water, and I couldn't tell where the edge was just by looking.
Shortly after that I was wandering through a quiet old suburban neighborhood, the kind where the houses are a reasonable size and the developer left trees in the yards, and I started seeing the spectre of IKEA looming through the trees ahead every now and then. I walked on till I hit Cherry Hill Road and stopped. I wanted to keep going, inot the park on the other side, and if I'd had a watch or hadn't had a nine o'clock class tomorrow, I would have. But the sun was giving me looks that said "I don't know about *you*, but I'd like to get to bed before too much longer, and I'd appreciate if you'd let me," and the park officially closes at sundown, so I stopped. There was actually a shuttle stop right down the road, and if I'd had any idea of the schedule I probably would have kept going until dark and then caught a shuttle back to campus, but I played it safe and turned around.
Going back is always a lot less fun than heading out. Actually, I went most of the way back with my eyes closed. I love going for longs walks blind, navigating by the sounds and smells and the feel of the wind on my face and the earth under my feet, and since the trail was absolutely deserted and there were no roads to stumble onto or cliffs to fall over, I didn't have to worry about going off course, so I just walked along, eyes close, arms hanging off the walking stick on my shoulder, more than half asleep, singing Peter Paul and Mary songs under my breath. It didn't seem to take very long, but the sun was a lot lower in the sky by the time I was back to the entrance to the golf course at Rt. 193.
Instead of taking the trail back to campus, though, I turned off at Metzerott Road, trusting vague recollections from post-tornado explorations my freshman year that it would bring me back to North Campus by way of the CDC with only a little bit of cutting through people's yards on the way. Because after all, it's silly to go out exploring and come back the same way you left. So I wandered through that little community park for a while, marvelling at the amenities of civilization like a water fountain (which was broken) and public bathrooms (which were closed for the winter) and a trash can I could finally dump my lunch dishes in, and a swing set! Swing sets are the sort of serendipity that should never be taken for granted, so I dumped my book bag and swung until my feet had stopped hurting and my thighs had started. Then I slid down the slide a few times, because it was a nice, tall, old-fashioned metal one and you don't see those too often any more. In fact, the only thing missing was a merry-go-round. And there wasn't anyone else there! In fact, the whole park was deserted, and by the look of the leaves, there hadn't been any kids there for several days at least, which was a terrible waste, and I may have to come back there, because it was so pretty and empty and fun.
Then the sun nudged behind the treeline and I headed on. It turned out I was right about getting back to campus by the CDC, too, although it didn't turn out to be much shorter, because of silly and uneccessary barbed wire fences. In fact I ended up in a facilities yard which had a salt pyramid! Salt pyramids are the coolest bit of suburban monumental architecture around, excepting only electrical pylons. Okay, and cloverleaf intersections. If I was the sort of student to act on her latent acrophiliac tendencies (beware the riant anthropoid) that's where I'd be headed back.
So I made it back to the diner and got a bit more drink and food and headed back across campus the long way, but that wasn't nearly as pleasant given the mood of
That made about six hours straight walking, and it was the best day I've had in, well, in a very long time. I must do that sort of thing more often.
no subject
no subject
from Mom
(Anonymous) 2004-11-04 09:07 pm (UTC)(link)