Hopeful Dreams and Heavy Pack

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Today I leafed through The Fields of Noon, an outdoors-themed book by the author better known for her Disney-adapted The Incredible Journey. This book’s most recent copyright (my edition, anyway) coincides with the close of the baby boomer birth years. But across the decades I find another woman I like, one who packs for a long walk with the same philosophy as me:

…It took me nearly ten minutes to assemble all the necessary gear for an afternoon’s walking in the bush…Into the pockets went shells, insect repellent, chocolate, cigarettes, silk scarf, pencil, notebook, and a tired hunk of garlic sausage; attached to my belt were a knife (mushrooms, etc.) and a small prospector’s pick (geology); over my shoulders were slung a camera (for photographing mushrooms) and field glasses (distant birds?); I carried in one hand a gun (partridge for dinner), and in the other a chip basket (rocks and mushrooms). I looked like a mobile Christmas tree…

Alright, I admit she’s got me beat–for a long walk that includes civilization in its route, I may have my iPhone (for pictures or emergencies), money (coffee or water), dog poop pickup bags, collapsible dog bowl, jacket, keys, bird guide, binoculars (and dog, of course!). But no gun, no cigarettes, no knife, and certainly no silk scarf–maybe I should kick it up a few notches and go more Sheila Burnford, striving for the  look that cries out for tinsel and colored lights to complete the ensemble. She died in 1984, at only 66, and I am so grateful I got to meet her, at least through her words.

Decor a la Knapsack

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We have an antique schoolhouse desk by the front door, and on the flat space above the hinge, at regular intervals, lie seed pods, feathers, pebbles, butterfly wings and the like. They mix in with the more mundane detritus of daily existence–random coins, keys, the new insurance card for the glove compartment. Nature spills onto the kitchen and pantry windowsills, too, and threatens to overflow the brim of the cardboard shoebox my son Gavin decorated for me: The Cabinet of Curiosity. Inside is a trove; most prized perhaps are the nearly complete robin’s egg, a “book” of sorts with river birch bark pages, and a papery white snakeskin.

I found a kindred spirit today in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: archaeologist and cartographer Anne Campbell, whom he meets on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. I lust for her collection:

On the mantelpiece and window ledges were dozens of found objects: bird’s eggs, bones, antlers and pebbles. A swan’s wishbone with no central join. A skua’s egg from the Shiants. A pure-white golden plover’s egg, fragile as a bubble. Dark-brown sea beans, floated in from
the Caribbean, like little leather kidneys.  

Streamside Sunday

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There really is nothing that could make a book and nature lover happier than a Sunday afternoon during which you acquire a used, 4-volume set called The American Seasons by Edwin Way Teale, and then watch your son wade in the shallow stream next to the Reader’s Quarry shop and catch small crayfish in the sun-dappled water. From Journey Into Summer, volume 3 from the set:

To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same–follow a stream. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature’s own Wilderness Road.

I am thinking our crayfish may have been the Allegheny variety. Continue reading →