Walking Distance

Yesterday, a walk with a friend. Not just any friend, but one who lives a walking distance away from my house. 

Granted, it's a walk through the woods, and this time of year the woods are full of burrs that attach to your socks and spider webs that cling to your hair and clothes. 

But still, to be able to walk anywhere around here is a triumph. And to walk to a friend's house ... even better. It humanizes the neighborhood. It allows me to think (even fleetingly) that I live in a village instead of a 'burb.

(A downed tree I clambered through on my walk.)

Coming Soon

A new sign greeted me on my early-morning walk. "For Sale: Coming Soon" read the sign on a house across the street. 

In retrospect I'm not surprised. The house is looking primed and polished these days with tidied landscaping and a newly sealed driveway. 

I barely know the occupant; his tenure has been relatively short, as residencies are measured in this neighborhood of long-lasting owners. I feel the lack of contact as a failure of sorts. We knew the previous owners of this house quite well. Their youngest daughter was one of our youngest daughter's best friends. 

Still, times change — and neighborhoods do, too. This one will be changing again soon.

Ancient Artifact

I was stopped on my morning walk by a friendly neighbor. He rolled down his car window and asked, "Are you missing a Christmas tree ornament?" It's almost July. Tree trimmings are not on my mind. I uttered something noncommittal. 

"Because we found one in front of your house, near where you might have left the tree for pickup. It was sticking out of the dirt there. A rocking horse?"

Well yes, there was a rocking horse ornament, metal with a looped string to attach it. Could it have escaped my multiple searches through the fir branches in early January?

It could — and it did. The ornament has, uh, weathered, shall we say. It looks like something from the 18th century, not the late 20th. But now it's home again, thanks to a kind neighbor. 

Split Rail

A frosty walk this morning, a split-rail fence beside me part of the way.  Surely this is fencing lite, only the barest barricade, I think, as I amble beside one of the more open models (two horizontals). 

Though now they now seem more decorative than anything else, split-rail fences have a long history in this country. They were used to mark property boundaries, protect crops and livestock, and, during the Civil War, troops burned them to keep warm. 

In my neighborhood, split-rail fences are the only kind allowed in front yards. In the back you can go wild with a picket or other plank styles, but the front must be open, natural — much like the snippet of yard I photographed this morning. 

It's a fence ... but barely. 

A Fox on a Walk

Today, on an early walk, I spied a fox crossing the road. Given its location and direction, it could well be the critter I see dashing across my backyard early most days. 

What surprised me is that the fox was heading into the deep woods, not the patch of trees (mostly downed) that fan out from the back corner of our property. 

This gave me a new appreciation for his range and rambles, for the ground he covers and, by extension, the life he leads. 

As I grew closer to the grove where he was hiding, I spied his cute little face and perky ears. He was looking at me as closely as I was looking at him. 

(Top, the woods where I saw the fox, and above, a couple of his fellow wild creatures, grazing in a neighbor's yard as if they owned the place.)

Soon-to-be-Gone

Sometimes I feel like a documentarian. My subject: the felling of trees in my neighborhood. This is not a job I sought or welcomed, but when the giants go, I want to record their passing. After all, they have shaded us for decades, have been beautifying this place for a century or more. Some of them are over 100 feet tall, and I treasure them.

The one meeting its maker today is visible from my office window. I write this post to the sound of chainsaw and wood grinder. The tree is healthy, but its owner fears it might fall on his house. And who can blame him, since a tree fell on the house of his neighbors and damaged it so mightily that they had to move out for months. 

It's a little like shuttling old folks to the assisted living center earlier rather than later. Prophylactic placement, or in this sense prophylactic felling. All I know is, once again I'm recording the soon-to-be-gone.

Lumber and Mulch

After rhapsodizing yesterday about tree tunnels and way stations, I learned that one of these shady spots had a defector. Another giant fallen. This on a cloudless, breezeless day, not long after I walked by.

I'm not surprised at the toppling. The tree (I'm trying to identify it from its leaves — maybe a cottonwood?) had been leaning for years, and had reached such a precipitous angle that it was only a matter of time before gravity got the better of it.

The trees in my neighborhood can be 80 to 100 feet tall. When one comes down, it can smash a roof or block the street. In this case, since it happened only a few feet before an intersection, it effectively shut down access to the outside world. 

Help was soon on the way. Before you could shout "timber" the thick trunk was chainsawed and pulled out of the way. But this tall, shade-producer, leaning and bent though it was, had become a companion on my walks, a landmark of sorts. Now it's only lumber and mulch. 

Wiki Woods

It has much in common with a wiki site, this woods I walk in; it's the work of many. The invasive plant eradication I mentioned yesterday is part of it. But even the paths themselves are forged and kept alive by many footfalls. Given the amount of undergrowth out there, it wouldn't take long to lose the trail. 

And then there are the bridges, a motley crew if ever there was one: A clutch of bamboo poles, handcrafted spans made from planks and two-by-fours, and then the places where it seems people just laid down a few pieces of lumber. 

Some of the bridges are for crossing Little Difficult Run, which meanders through the woods, steep-banked in spots. But others are for navigating the hidden springs and muddy parts of the trail. All of them necessary. All of them welcome. 

It takes a village to make a woods walk. 

Hybrid Walks

Here in the suburbs we have few bears, and no lions or tigers.  But we do have automobiles.

This morning, lured on by the buoyancy of the air and the radiance of the light, I turned right on a narrow road and (staying off it for the most part) made a dash on foot to the safety of a path. I was happy when I tucked into my usual route, because the road is hilly and cars travel fast along it.

On the way home, I thought about the walkability quotient of my neighborhood and how greatly it has improved since I've come to know the shortcuts and the cut-throughs, many of them woodland trails. 

The best routes around here are the hybrid walks, part paved, part pounded. They are the safest ways, and in some cases the only ways, to get where you're going. 

 

Suburban Passage

Once again, I'm on a mission, this time to find a passage through the Crabtree Park woods to a street called Foxclove. From there it's a short walk to a Reston trail. 

Having struck out on finding it from my end, yesterday I drove to Foxclove and tried it from the other direction. I reached at least one point I recognized from earlier hikes, enough so that I think I can find my way back there another time. 

Once I have this figured out I'll be able to walk from my house to the trail system I usually must drive to reach. It's not exactly the Northwest Passage, but it's something. 

Megalopolis!

Over the weekend, a family birthday party took me to Towson, Maryland. It dawned on me as I was driving that my niece, her husband and their now one-year-old daughter live in the same metropolitan area that I do. I can get in my little gray car and drive for an hour and a half and never leave home.

It sure feels like leaving home, though. Four expressways are involved: the Dulles Toll Road, the Capital Beltway, I-95 and I-695 (the Baltimore Beltway). And the two places have quite a different look and feel. 

The megalopolis is a strange creature, a many-bellied beast of a term. Coined in the middle of the last century, it means two or more adjacent metropolitan areas that share enough transport, economy, resources and ecologies to blur their boundaries and complete a continuous urban area. I see that megalopolis is an outdated term. It's now megaregion, according to the America 2050 Initiative. 

Given that most humans identify with a house, a block, a town at most, I think we're in dangerous territory here. Let the geographers have their fun, but as far as I'm concerned I definitely left home on Saturday.

(The Northeast Megaregion at night. Courtesy Wikipedia, which also served as source for some of the information in this post.)

Hybrid Walk

It begins in the neighborhood common land, field and forest, and continues in the stream valley park that meanders through these parts. I cross a couple of bridges there that have seen better days, and once I'm over them, I make my way to another neighborhood street.

This one is hillier than ours. It reminds me of the great sledding hills of my youth, including one I heard about but never experienced, Banana Hollow. The slope begins on one side of the street and continues on to the other. You have to imagine the hill without the houses and lawns, see it the way it once was, part of the roll and sweep of western Fairfax County hunt country.

After 20 minutes on pavement, I'm ready to be in the woods again, and follow a well-marked trail most of the way home. 

The hybrid walk: it's good for what ails you. 

The Sandwich Trail

You might call it the Sandwich Trail: a route that begins in forest, exits on the other side of the neighborhood for a mile of striding down a prettier-than-average suburban lane, then dips back into parkland again before returning. 

In the language of sandwiches, the woods is the "bread" and the long stretch of pavement in the middle is its filling. 

In the woods section I notice dry stream beds, new plank bridges, a path I thought I'd lost. In the pavement part I see houses with new siding, a massive and magical rubber tree, boulders in a garden.

Two parts trees and beaten-dirt trail, one part easy striding along a less-traveled road. A sumptuous repast. 

Novel Vistas

It's easy to vary my walks if I drive to trailheads scattered throughout the area like the loose-strung beads of a pearl necklace. But if I rely only on shank's mare, I'm more limited. 

Still, there are several ways to leave this "landlocked" neighborhood (pinned in by a busy street on either side), especially if I hike through the woods. 

That's just what I did the other day, following a trail I've known for years, one that leads to the mossy hill  and, if you angle it a differently, across a small valley to our sister neighborhood, Westwood Hills. That's the path I took yesterday. 

I hadn't walked there since winter, and I was glad to be back beneath its vaulting trees and novel vistas: a path of stones, a bridge that's seen better days.  But finding it just as humid there as it is here, I quickly made my way back.

Still, for a little while, I had broken free.

Random Paddle

Since we live less than a mile from the border of Camp Reston (my name for this suburb during the summer) and kayaks are available to rent on Lake Anne, a few miles beyond that, taking a random paddle some weekend has been on my list of summer things to do since May. 

Yesterday we were finally able to make good on it, with temps not yet 90 and rain not yet falling. 

What a revelation to kayak among vistas that I usually stroll through. There were the rose mallow, from the other side of the shoreline, the watery one. And there were the backyards and porches of houses I usually only see from the front. 

It was an exercise in perspective-shifting. And it was exercise, period. Both are necessary. Both are good.

Transformations

Last night my neighbors celebrated a special birthday with a dinner dance, complete with D.J., dance floor and tent. The latter turned out to be necessary since we had torrential rain and flood warnings just hours ahead of the event. But by the time the guests were gathering, the rain had stopped and the hosts had laid out a white carpet over the grass that led up to the tent entrance ... and I felt like I was entering an alternative universe. 

It wasn't just how the tent transformed the yard with soft greens and fairy lights. It was that the event transformed neighbors from people who chat about how deer are eating their hostas into people with careers and travels and families out of state, in short, into fully rounded human beings. 

I have a theory about my neighborhood, where houses are tucked away on wooded lots and there's a scale and beauty lacking in many suburban enclaves. People don't move here for showy homes. They move here because they like the woods and fields. It's a value that translates into many other admirable qualities.  Last night reminded me of those. 

(The tent that transformed our backyard for Suzanne and Appolinaire's wedding.)

Camp Reston

On a walk my first day back I marveled at the transformation. When I left for vacation, school was still in session and early heat was still battling spring chill. But now it is full-on summer. 

On the lake, fishermen wait patiently for a nibble. Children cavort on canoes and paddle boards. Sunbathers turn their towels toward the sun. Shade is deep and wide; the walker seeks it when she can. 

The place I live no longer feels like a suburb. It feels like a camp. 

Connections

In my continuing quest to  explore the untrod paths of my immediate environs I found myself  the other day not exactly lost "in a dark wood," but flummoxed on a bright, leafless hillside. 

In short, I was stymied by a creek that seemed much deeper and fast-flowing than I remembered it being the last time I was there. Since the last time I was there was several years ago, this was understandable. But it didn't help me across. 

For that I had to circle back to the shoulder-less two-lane road I'd crossed to get there. I trotted quickly along the side of the road facing the traffic, stepped over the guard rail, and made it to the other side of the creek before the next car sped by. 

I enjoyed the rest of the stroll alongside the creek, sauntering, thinking, except, I'll admit, for a vague unease about getting back. I needn't have bothered because I discovered on the way home a more direct passage to the trail by staying in my neighborhood's common land until it reaches the stream valley park. There was even a little homemade bridge to guide me. 

I'm not sure, but I think there's a lesson in here somewhere ... 

Whimsical Walk

The suburb of Reston, Virginia, is made for walking. Trails wind from neighborhood to neighborhood. Founder Robert E. Simon (the "RES" in Reston) designed the suburb for living and working. The trails connect the two.

Yesterday I strolled from Reston's earliest "downtown," Lake Anne, to its newest, Reston Town Center.  I'd never taken this path before, though I'd skirted quite close to it through the years. 

Along the way, I passed Hickory Cluster, a midcentury modern townhome development with big windows and geometric lines created in the 1960s by architect Charles Goodman. There were impromptu conversations in the community forest, one woman with a pair of corgis, another with a fluffy golden retriever. 

I passed a small giveaway library and the charming little scene above. The whimsy suited the place, looked perfectly at home among the woodland paths and the open common. I slowed my pace because I didn't want this walk to end.

Lenten Rose

A walk through Georgetown before class last evening renewed my hankering for Lenten roses. What creamy beauties they are, how full-bodied compared with their early spring cousins the snowdrop and winter aconite. I've wanted to plant Lenten roses (also known as hellebores) for years, but now I'm on a mission. 

Of course, last night I was being swayed by the excellent company the plants were keeping, by the environment in which I spotted them. A late winter afternoon, sun slanting low over cobblestones, grand houses standing guard over a neighborhood I could walk through for hours and never tire of.

Even a dandelion would look good in that setting.