Journal of a Sabbatical

November 12, 2000

sun

Today's Reading: Autumn from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake

We lucked out. We woke up this morning to sunshine in clear blue skies. Instead of our usual route up Jackson Falls, we tried a trail that goes up Eagle Mountain from behind the golf course that's across the street from the Eagle Mountain Inn. The views of the surrounding mountains are stunning.

The trail we'd planned to take ended sort of abruptly at a bridge with so many planks missing you'd have to be an Olympic class broad jumper to cross it. We were going to turn back and just walk around the golf course when Claire climbed up a little hill behind some bushes on our same side of the river and found the beginning of a ski trail that goes all the way up the mountain (well, up if you're hiking and down if you're skiing I guess) called The Wave. This turned out to be a stroke of luck. The trail was gorgeous.

We spotted this old rusty mowing thing in the bushes. I doubt that they use it to mow the golf course. Everybody said "photo op" at once. I must have an entire file drawer full of photos of rusty old farm equipment already. It's one of those New England clichés. I've written before that I find it difficult to photograph New England scenes because it seems like everything is a cliché. There's nothing fresh that still conveys a sense of place. Autumn leaves, pumpkins, apples, rusty old farm equipment, white churches, you name it and it's all been done. I find it way easier to photograph exotic places. Even if there are clichés there too at least I'm not familiar with them. That said, I photographed the rusty old thing anyway.

The trail above the golf course was wet and mossy. There must have been 2 dozen kinds of mosses and as many kinds of lichens growing there. I wished I'd brought a field guide for the mosses. Either that or I wished I had Thoreau with me to tell me their names and life histories. Actually, the White Mountain section of Thoreau's journal that I printed out for Rita lists a whole lot of the mosses so maybe I can check my memories of today's hike against his list.

The sunlight on the mossy rocks makes it look like the woods are full of emeralds. Amazingly, some wildflowers are still in bloom here. Yarrow, goldenrod, red clover, the tall dandelions, and regular dandelions are all in bloom. Even more amazingly, crickets are chirping in the high meadows. Some of the maples still have red and yellow leaves clinging to them also. But this is November! What a fantastic day to be in the White Mountains!

Alongside the river Claire spotted what looked like a sign for another trail or something so we stopped to investigate. Joan-east and Rita kept going and got well ahead of us. The sign turned out to be a face carved into a board nailed to a tree. We laughed and wondered who on earth put it there and then forgot about it.

We caught up to Joan-east and Rita again, then I stopped to photograph something and got a little behind them. I got further behind when a noisy flock of dozens and dozens of chickadees descended on me. They surrounded me on all sides, on the ground and on the trees calling loudly. I was transfixed. I was in the middle of some chickadee event and they were oblivious to me. I kept trying to take pictures of some of them but every time I'd get one in focus it'd fly off. I finally gave up when I realized how far behind the others I'd gotten.

They were waiting for me at a bend in the trail, laughing and looking at something in the woods that I didn't immediately see. It was a pile of logs that had obviously been cut to clear the trail sometime ago because they had a fair amount of moss, lichens, and fungus on them. And they had faces carved in the ends! Funny faces. Grimaces. A whole range of facial expressions. At first I decided it was too dark there to photograph them because we were in deep shade. I started to leave when the others did, then turned back after a few steps and photographed them anyway with flash.

Chipmunks and squirrels ran around all over the place frantically storing nuts for winter. Woodpeckers drummed on the trees. Far off chain saws felled Christmas trees. The trail smelled of balsam. I was so far behind the others by then that I had all this glorious mountainness to myself. I almost hated to catch up with them, but I met them at the next bridge and told them I had managed to get photos of the faces after all. Only then did Claire tell the others about the first face we saw. We looked in vain for more for the rest of the way. Whoever carved them definitely has a sense of humor.

We got back down to the golf course some 2 1/2 hours after we started. As we trekked back to the car we picked up pockets full of beat-up range balls for Rita to practice with. While we were up on the trail, the inn's parking lot had filled up with the cars of Sunday brunch-goers and mountain bikers. Tons of people were out enjoying the gorgeous day. It was hard to go back to the ski condo, fix and eat lunch, pack, and set out on the drive home. When the weather is like this, no weekend seems long enough.