Kerrera to the Rescue

One of the things I like best about travel is that it shakes you out of your routine. In fact, sometimes it flips you over and turns you upside down. But when it just jostles you a bit, the sensation can be pleasurable.

The main reason we traveled to Oban was to explore the Inner Hebrides. We were excited to see the birthplace of Christianity (Iona) and Fingal's Cave (Staffa). Instead, as soon as we landed I learned that the ferry and boat tour was canceled. Bad weather was moving in. 

After being in Scotland four days, I can safely say that bad weather is always moving in. But good weather is, too. And with Mull, Iona and Staffa out of the picture, we needed an island to explore. 

Kerrera to the rescue! This small island is a five-minute ferry ride from Oban and basically car-free—a walker's paradise. We skirted Horseshoe Bay, lunched at the Kerrera Tea Garden, and marveled at the ruins of Gylen Castle. We met some fascinating people. It was not what we planned to do, but it was just right.

Moving Image

When I woke up this morning I was dreaming I was snapping a picture. I was a passenger in a moving car, and the terrain we were driving through was like an ancient Chinese painting.

There were human-sized hills, a winding stream and perfectly coiffed trees. There was a sense of scale that made me think I could capture the landscape quickly from a vehicle.

The dream probably augurs nothing. But if it does, could it mean that I've become less of a words person and more of an image one? It's happening to many of us these days.

Of course, there's the fact that I'm writing about this experience, not illustrating it. And I'm doing it on an outmoded platform that is anything but image-friendly.

Whew! I'm probably safe — at least for the time being.

Evening View

Now that we're in Daylight Savings Time, I can bounce on the trampoline in the daylight, not the darkness. It's more inhibiting, true. With tree cover still nonexistent this time of year, I have to keep my trampoline dancing moves to a minimum lest neighbors think I'm crazier than they already think I am.

But what daytime bouncing lacks in concealment it makes up for in scenery.

As Copper ran around the yard squeaking his new yellow day-glow ball, I was treated to clear skies, a slow drain of color and finally ... this view.

What a way to leave the day!

Mappiness

In a few minutes I'll bundle up and take to the streets. It will be my lunch break and I'll spend it walking in the suburbs. No surprise there. But what is news, at least to me, is how much scientific evidence there is to back up my hobby/exercise/obsession.

In 2010, a British environmental economist named George MacKerron created an app called Mappiness that allowed him to check in with 20,000 volunteers several times a day and ask them what they were doing and how they felt about it.  The data he collected showed that people are significantly happier when they're outdoors — even when other variables are accounted for.

Great news, right? Unfortunately, he also found that people are indoors or in vehicles 93 percent of the time. So even though we're happiest outside, we spend most of our time inside.

What to do? Another researcher, Timothy Beatley of the Biophilic Cities Project at the University of Virginia (which I've just been reading about and will definitely discuss some day in a separate blog post), says we need daily doses of nature: everything from New York City's High Line to the little park around the corner. We can't let the perfect (a hike in Yosemite) be the enemy of the good (a walk around the block).

It's always tough to parse the value of the walks I take, to figure out how much of their benefit comes from moving through space and how much from the space I'm moving through. All I know is that the woods and trails around my home and the parks I frequent in the city are far more than backdrops; they are mood-enhancing and soul-stirring. They are the stars of the show.

(Thanks to Ellen for sending me the Wall Street Journal article where I learned about this research.)

Happy Centennial!

They are a ridge-top trail along an old mountain. A path winding perilously down a near-sheer canyon wall. A hot walk through the hoodoos in Bryce.

These are just some of the strolls I've taken in national parks, which celebrate their one hundredth birthday today.

While it's wonderful enough just to glimpse the Grand Canyon or Zion or Yellowstone, it's even better to walk through these places. To inhale the piney air and feel the sting in your calves from trudging up an incline.

National park hikes are some of the most treasured walks I've ever taken. And today I think of them, and of all the protected natural beauty that makes them possible. Happy National Parks Centennial!

(Photo: Wikipedia)

New Scenery, New Eyes

How do we perceive the vistas around us? With what eyes do we take in the forests, hills and plains of the natural world? When a new and radical form of scenery presents itself must we change our tastes and proclivities to appreciate it? Wallace Stegner raises these questions in Beyond the 100th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Penguin, 1953) — and from what I can tell, he answers the last one with "yes."


Stegner chronicles not only the physical exploration of the canyons, buttes and gorges of the "Plateau Province" (mid to southern Utah and northern Arizona), but also the artistic one.

The process that is triumphantly concluded in [Thomas] Moran's "Yellowstone" was one that had begun forty years before in the water colors of Alfred Jacob Miller, when the painter's eye first began to adjust to prairies that were not green meadows, mountains whose rocks were other than the Appalachian granite, scrub growth whose shades were those of gray and brown and yellow, earth which showed its oxidized bones, and air without the gray wool of humidity across its distances.

 It's an interesting thought, that new types of places require new ways of seeing. Makes me ponder Pluto's recent closeups and the fantastic images that the Hubble space telescope has sent back to earth. The strange beauty of the Grand Canyon must have been just as jarring and awe-inspiring to the mid-19th-century denizen as these cosmic vistas are to us.