I suddenly felt inspired to write this afternoon. So I wrote this up about something that just happened a couple of hours ago.

A Walk in the Woods


Today was a pretty crazy day. I had to spend most of it giving students field trips at our library. Then I had a meeting with a library planning committee. I worked right through lunch and didn’t even miss it (although I’m missing it now—sure hope supper doesn’t take long!).

In the middle of the committee meeting, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. We were meeting in a library study room. Some kid was waving through the window at us. Just what I needed—a kid clowning around while I was meeting with members of the Board of Trustees!

Then I realized who that kid was. It was one of my nephews who lives in town. He likes to come visit at the library. Usually he comes into my office when his mother drops him off. Today I was in a conference—but he still wanted to say hi. I gave him a very little wave back. That satisfied him, and he disappeared.

After the meeting I went to my office to take care of a couple of necessary things. In he came. He was wondering if we could go for a walk outside. We’ve done that before, when he has come to visit—I’ve taken my afternoon break and gone outside and walked around the library’s grounds. The library sits on a large lot with trees. A patch of woods borders the back of the lot. We’ve gone walking in the woods before.

I had things to do and wasn’t in a hurry to go. And then it occurred to me that he needed to spend a few minutes alone with an adult all to himself, like all children do—something that children with two brothers and a new baby sister and no father at home don’t get to do that often. I also realized that after eight straight hours in the building (and with two more to go before closing time) I needed to take a break myself.

So I announced to the staff that I was taking a break, and out we went. It was a perfect time for it. We’ve had beautiful skies all day. The late afternoon sun shone warm, but not too hot. There was nobody else outside on the library lawn.

As we walked toward the northern end of the property, he reminded me of the time a few months ago when we had walked outside and he had spotted something moving on the edge of the library lawn in the late evening sunlight. As we got closer we could see that it was a rabbit, feeding on the grass. We had approached slowly and quietly, freezing now and then when the rabbit started to move. “I got within like an inch of it!” he said.

“You didn’t get that close,” I reminded him. He has a knack for exaggerating his exploits.

“We were within like a yard of it, anyway.” That was still somewhat closer than we got, as I recall, but I let it go at that.

We stepped off into the edge of the woods. Since our last walk in the woods the owners of that property had logged it. The loggers had done us the service of removing three dead trees from our library’s back yard for free. I was hoping that at least some of the lot had been spared so that we could continue to walk on it.

No such luck. But at least it hadn’t been clear-cut, like most of the land around here. There were still a lot of trees standing. It still qualified as “woods.” It was just hard to walk around now, with tree tops down everywhere.

He started heading south. I headed north and told him I thought we might still find some passable trail. I was wrong. After a few yards we had to turn back, though not before he had dived into a real thicket of fallen tops.

Then he said that he had seen some open trail before I called him away. We went back that direction. Sure enough, he had found the main trail through that patch of woods. I had not remembered its location exactly from a few months before.

So we headed along that little road, with him in front. He jumped up and down on down saplings and branches, and plowed through vines lying along the ground. “Nothing’s going to stop me!” he said. He talked about how he liked getting into the wilderness. I doubt he’s ever actually seen any. We talked about “Survivorman,” a show we both like to watch. At one point I stopped and commented on the wonderful scent of berries we encountered at one spot. It would have made a great potpourri scent.

The last time we had come this way we walked all the way to a little side street a couple of blocks north of the library’s lot. This time with the rougher going we did not make very fast progress. When we got within sight of a building along that street I decided we had gone far enough. I had to get back to work.

On our way back he ran out in front again and decided to scramble over a pile of branches that rose higher than his head. I decided I might as well let him do it. Boys have to try stuff like that when they get the chance, after all. There wasn’t much risk of anything worse than a little skin or scrape. At one point he did nearly fall into the middle of the pile. I told him that I didn’t want to have to pull him out by his ankles.

He was proud as he could be of getting over the pile. I told him how it wasn’t much fun moving over stuff like that with a pack on your back. I had done that on Brush Heap Mountain in the Ouachitas two years ago. They named it well—off the trail the place really was all one huge brush heap. I had tried to bushwhack my way to a scenic overlook that had once had a trail to it, and had had to turn back when I fell with my pack. I had spent the night camped on the mountain in the middle of the trail, there being no other place clear enough to pitch a shelter tarp.

We continued back. He got a way out in front. At one point he asked whether he was moving too fast for me. No, he wasn’t. I could have caught him pretty easily had I been in a hurry. There was no point in telling him that.

We emerged back onto the library’s lot, having not gone more than a couple hundred yards. It had been a great little hike. He had worked off some of his hyper boy’s energy, and I had had a refreshing rest from inside work.

Back in the building I showed him a Power Point presentation someone had made for library promotion. His older brother came in with a couple of books he had checked out. He spotted my miniature Zen garden that I had gotten for Christmas and insisted on taking it down and remodeling it. That task quickly absorbed both boys. Soon most of the little rocks and the tiny faux Japanese bridge had been buried.

One of my staff came over and needed me to show her how to operate a projector. I spent the next few minutes helping with that. While we worked on this, the time came for the boys to go outside to meet their mom. I said goodbye and that they should say hi to their mom for me, and that I was sorry I had been too busy to speak to her.

Then they were gone, and I was still at work, with a little over an hour to go. As soon as I had finished with the projector I came back into my office and put my tabletop Zen garden into a semblance of order. I don’t think there are any pebbles still buried in it. It doesn’t look exactly as it did before. But then I’m sure there’s something very Zen about recognizing the transience of the physical world.

This evening I had the idea of writing up what happened this afternoon. So I did.

This is a nice memory. I feel like I was there.