“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it; the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
—Andrew Wyeth
Serenity, mountains, and waterfalls, moonlight nightingales, an old cabin on a spruce-shadowed lake, a wood-burning stove, coffee and poetry, rusty lanterns and smoke-filled chimneys, the vivid leaves dripping like rain from the eaves as a cold wind prophesizes through the pines. I’m here, alone. Far from the charade of a fabricated world that keeps us chained to the profane. Far from the abominable pandemonium of progress and production and the prosaic haste of our times. The summer had fallen away like a dead leaf from an old elm. I voyaged north into the womb of a distant wilderness, tucked back into the bowers of the sublime. There is another world in which we’re all seeking and it is here— in this solitude, in this seclusion, in this lucid silence. Late fall. Moonlight vespers. The fragrance of firewood mingled with the breath of the woodlands revives a forgotten song. Pride and ego vanish. No one knows my name. There are no clocks, time here is a mockery. In the window of my forlorn cabin, a candle burns and the lanterns sway on a midnight branch somewhere out there in the dark, you can hear the timeless ache of a million nights. I'm somewhere deep in the great state of Maine gazing up at the snow peaks of Mount Katahdin, its highest mountain, the same rugged and unspoiled land that Thoreau wandered through over a century ago. I have his journals tucked into my old olive pack along with the poetry of Kunitz and Roethke. “In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood —” In the morning I set off in the surreal silence, the cold wind in my face, muddy boots and a thermos of coffee, my spirit as free as an uncaged raven. The moist crimson leaves I step upon will soon be choked and smothered by a winter snow. The trees will become disrobed and this vibrant landscape will develop into an achromatic scene to tomorrow's eye. Hours upon hours of trudging along on the sinuous trails of a late fall wonderland, I can’t help but reflect on how our ancestors once took part in the world, how they wandered and toiled daily in the alcove of a forsaken hinterland, endowed with a universal kinship and a tremendous reverence for all of creation, reveling in the mysteries and mysticism of the vast cosmos, enriched with a divine connection that we moderns seem to have been torn from. Worn and haggard with my legs bruised and battered, I return to my old cabin that sits among the spruce, birch, and soft maples on a stone-lined shore of an ancient lake where a heavy mist hovers like an iridescent apparition before my eyes. Poised, I sit, on the front porch with a jug of red wine that warms the blood, eavesdropping on the wisdom echoed in the stillness, awaiting the night hours with a sweet forlornness. In this sacred severance, far from the convulsion of crowds and the comfort and constraints of civilization, I sit here on the ebbing tide of the hazy shore of life, the haunting sound of the almost bare trees trembling in the wayward wind, the piercing verse of a dead poet takes hold: Peace! Peace! To be rocked by the Infinite! As if it didn't matter which way was home; as if he didn't know he loved the earth so much he wanted to stay forever
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Thank you so much, Erik, for sharpening my memories of a 7 day/6 night trek in the backcountry of Baxter State Park, home to Katahdin. Fall, 1980. Then a party of two could reserve an entire site, which afforded the silence and solitude of which you spoke.
No cell service, of course. The very few we passed seemed intent on solitude as well. Of course I delighted in reading of your lived experience, knowing that such conditions still exist. Nonpareil.
"The timeless ache of a million nights" "The comforts and constraints of civilization"
What great lines. I can smell the wood smoke in that cabin and that wonderful scent of a woodland walk.