A Walk around the Block

I call my most common weekly walk "walking around the block" although there’s no block and it’s got some scrambling and jumping as well as walking.

When I was a kid in the New Jersey suburbs we walked around our block, and it just a quick, level, paved, ten-minute walk on sidewalks, past houses, no going across streets.  My father and I would do it late afternoon to get out of the way and work off some steam before dinner, or my parents would sometimes in exasperation say to me, "Go take a walk around the block!"  When my own kids were little in California suburbs we too lived on a block you could walk all the way around, although it seemed to take us much longer, so many cool puddles and plants and neighbors and stories to slow us down.  And as a free-range parent I too sent my kids out to walk around the block by themselves sometimes, to work off steam. 

So I guess that's why, even though my walk now is a steep dirt and forest loop through woods and landslides, down the path, jump over the creek, up the grade and then back down the dirt road – that’s why I call it "walking around the block." It's a loop, you do walk around.  But it's no block.  The operative work is "around." 

Unlike my New Jersey or California sidewalked suburbs, there is hardly an inch of level in my Big Sur forest walk.  All walks in Big Sur are steep.  That's called geology, granite meets ocean, and it's up or down, great views, winded lungs. And this is no suburb - only a third of my walk is paved, and that's a steep road with no sidewalk at all.  The rest is dirt roads, fire roads, paths I've made through the woods, and sometimes a little cross country around a fallen tree.  Walking alone (as opposed to with a curious kid or an unsuspecting guest) it takes me 30 minutes.  When I'm training for a longer walk I use it as my stair master or laps, and I've gotten it down to 25 minutes. 

Like all good loops you can go either way.  In the suburbs, you come out of the house to the sidewalk and go either left or right.  That was the choice at 1133 Evergreen Avenue and 40 Grand Street.  But at 37755 Palo Colorado Rd the choice is whether to start going up or going down.  Do you want to end the walk coming up the steep path from the creek or the gentler return down the dirt road?  I usually start going down, to the creek, then up the steep grade and the dirt road, then end with quarter mile of downhill dirt road, so I can catch my breath before arriving home.

There are several points on the walk where I usually pause and take it in, or catch my breath, or say a word of thanks, or all three. 

When I jump across the creek, I am happy, this winter, to see it full and rushing with water, after a long dry summer.  I think of the lines from the Robinson Jeffers poem “October Evening:”

In an hour Orion will be risen.
Be glad for the summer is dead
And the sky turns over to darkness.
Good storms, few guests, glad rivers.

A glad river is our creek these days. 

Not far from there, I look up on the hillside at the big burn scar from our terrifying wildfire this summer.  It got this close to my house.  The winter rains have forced some scary slides and runoff down from that burn scar.  But there also has been some wonderful surprising new green growth, like these redwood trees.  When we first came back from our three-week fire evacuation exile these trees were blackened sticks.  But soon, and now more rapidly with the rains, green fuzz has sprouted from trunk and top. Redwood trees can survive massive challenges, and fire actually helps them resprout.  I am reminded of nature's resilience and how fire can be both creative as well as destructive.  Glad trees.

And last, I stop at these mailboxes to check our own mailbox, the bulletin board, and often to run into a neighbor also stopping at this community meeting place.  We are all as different as our mailboxes, but we all share this canyon forest community.  Glad neighbors.

Then it's up the dirt road to the ridge top and down again towards the creek, easing on into our house with tales of refreshed creeks and revived trees and neighbor news. 

A good walk around the block.  Glad me.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter