Slow Your Going

This morning a dashing young friend told of a favorite bicycle ride that they would take, straight down a country road; well that wasn't the end of it.  They live amid farmhouses and large tracts of land, now growing green in a riot of summer; a bicycle ride will clear your head if only because you are breathing more oxygen to pump those leg muscles.  Some of this clarifying elixir may make it to your brain, and create a stronger alertness, sharpen colors, and bestow the olfactory senses of a pointer.

I would ride my bike down my street when I was nine, and particularly during autumn notice what everyone was cooking for dinner that night.  Knocking on the door would have not been out of the question; pot roasts simmered, chickens roasted, pork and sauerkraut wafted from the Clementowski's house.  The cool air just at the end of a fall afternoon honed the kitchen incense into a salt and pepper symphony; by the time my bike turned up the driveway, I had enjoyed each household's offerings as if I were a guest.

Prior to living in the town with sidewalks and nearby stores, we had lived in an area with maybe four neighbors stretched out by miles and half miles, ending with a sheep farm and a quarry at one end, dairy farms and cornfields at the other.  The story of the country bicycle ride tuned my fork, as it were, for, sure; a bicycle ride out where little traffic exists is exhilarating, mid green things and occasional hundred year old trees, but.  This rider did not stay on the road, they got off the bike and walked it over fields and clods of plowed furrows to a copse, to sit and breathe, to listen to birdsong.  What caught my own memory was that as they tramped over the field's rough ground, they looked for things "of interest".

Me too.  I didn't sit in the woods, not brave enough alone; but through any of the acres of land surrounding our house, I looked, and you learn about things by first looking.  Toads, spitbugs, grasshoppers, fluff from a mother rabbit to make a nest for her kits; a woodchuck skull, snakeskin, an empty shell from a wood snail; goatsbeard, teasels, butterfly weed, milkweed pods, elf dock, purple asters; fossils from Devonian oceans, obsidian, gneiss, quartzite; feathers, wooly bear caterpillars, garter snakes, corn snakes, coachwhips and rat snakes that looked large enough to entwine both my seven year old self and the bike.  Snakes were okay, the sudden movement would startle, but then the patterns or reflection of light off undulating scales would fascinate.

The abundance of life was taken for granted, for that is how it was and in my small head, the way it would be forever.  Now I know better, through invasive species pushing the natives out of the way, through the development of farmland to town to city or manufacturing plant.  Where I lived is now a headquarters for National Fuel; a godawful drag race track is now the other side of the woods, and NiMo has installed the stilted monsters that carry powerlines from Niagara Falls to the east coast.  The ground cherries are gone, the wild raspberries also; the price of the land escalated, turning the dairy farms into upper crust cul-de-sacs.  No more mooing from a lost cow in the night, no more fresh, cold water from the natural spring on Wuller's property.

By losing wild fields, we also lose the barrier zones that cushion the forest from the buildings; there are two, immense abandoned malls in the area, and the debris ends up in landfills or honest to goodness, is shuttled on semi trucks from destination to destination.  If the shards of concrete and reinforcement wire are refused at one site, it is taken to another, states away.  Or another.  Or dumped into the ocean.  Meanwhile, to hear the lullaby of crickets or the song of a finch, a drive out to the country will take you at least thirty minutes as compared to the flinging of a screen window, open to the rules of nature.

I have felt the bullet sharp click of a grasshopper's legs taking flight from my palm; chickadees have plucked seed from my hand, brushing against my face with their wings; I have held the cool dryness that is snake, fallen in the crick, made a painting with ink from Coprinus mushrooms.  Look when you walk over grass, or a field turned inside out as it waits for seed, find something of interest if only the rising damp smell of earth.  Walk about, learn what's underfoot.  It's a strong lesson from a young cyclist.

Night is closing, supper is waiting to be scumbled together; I hear footsteps in my mind, slogging over rows of field, breathing the rays of an autumn sun, then pushing down on the pedals to get home after grabbing a stem of asters or goldenrod for Mom.  Sleep as the winds blow through tall grasses, over lake waters, through branches where sparrows have bedded for the night; be accountable for how you treat the earth.  You don't have to become a crusader, only toss some seed for the birds, pick up a piece of litter, dispose of chemicals carefully.  Weave your own song through your dreams, so the single notes of one blend with others to make a composition, together.  We are in this together; you, I, the animals, the plants, fungi, protists, and monera; I count rocks as well.  The kingdom of rocks.  I'll explain it someday.

Dream, then.  Dream of the song of stones.