On the Beaten Path

It's my second post in as many days with cliches (or slight alterations of them) for titles, as I pause for a moment to praise the beaten path. Not being off it — being on it. This year, this dry summer, the paths in our woods are especially beaten. Tough, cracked; not dusty but springy and elastic (thanks, I suppose, to the clay in our soil).

Since I've lately been exploring unfamiliar trails with my head down to look for the errant root that could send me flying, I've become familiar with the beaten path, have even reached down to touch it. The surface is smooth and clammy and imperturbable, like marble in its coolness. But unlike marble, it is a living, breathing thing. It shrinks, expands and cracks. When the weather is dry it becomes a dusty brown powder.

Traipsing these beaten paths makes me wonder what it was like when they (or slightly wider versions of them) were roads. Of course, they would have lacked the layered toughness and impermeability of a paved surface, would have been a mire of mud on rainy days and a cloud of dust on dry ones, but one can see that, at least part of the time, they would hold up their end of the bargain. That one would want to be on them. That to be off them was to be lost in the wilderness.