On The Trail

by Amanda Passmore-Ott

 On the Trail

Trough Creek State Park, March 2016

             Mid-morning sunlight filters through rhododendron and hemlock, setting Onoko’s coat into shades of wildfire. We’ve just dug our heels into the rock and moss of Ledges trail to come out at the junction of Copperas Rock.  I’m reminded of an old Native American proverb about two wolves that battle inside our hearts. The wolves are always a dichotomy: love and hate, light and dark, life and work. They say the one we feed is the one who wins the battle. Today, life bites the belly of work and she wears the red-brown coat of a summer doe.

Overhead, a red-tailed hawk winds round thermals only she can see with the underside of wings. Sometimes, I wish I could also feel what she feels and pinch my shoulder blades together to feel the closeness of bone where wings might be.  Today, we are grounded, feet pressed firmly to the earth and sometimes stubbing toes on the massive roots of trees that stood above this gorge for hundreds of years. I wonder if my Shawnee ancestors made it this far north, if they gazed out on these vistas and read the songs of the Great Spirit in the spine of mountains still a deep indigo this early in Spring. Up ahead, echoes of Abbot’s Run play their own kind of music over boulders rounded from incessant run-off and snow melt.

We rest here, at the cascade of falls into Trough Creek and tilt our heads back to the summit and Balance Rock; this rock has tilted in the balance for as long as anyone can remember, falling and not falling. And here is where I’ll be later this evening curled in my easy chair, my legs burning with muscle fatigue and satisfaction, and the mottled memory of light caught between the highest bough and mountain root. I’ll hold that boulder there, caught in  the teeth of my two wolves, waiting for the tilt into the water below and knowing that I’ll rest there in that space behind open eye and eyelid until the next hike.

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Author’s note:

Last spring I gave a PWR talk on the importance of maintaining work-life balance; as an EFT with a 5 course load per semester, I do what I must to keep my sanity for both me and my students. Most of my colleagues are already familiar with the main musical side of the scale I use to balance my sanity: fiddling in the Celtic rock band, Full Kilt (http://fullkilt.weebly.com). However, I perform enough shows each year that Full Kilt is also a time-consuming job (work, but fun work).

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”  As a busy introvert, the only way I truly soothe my spirit is to get out onto the trail, often with my husband and husky, Onoko (you can follow her adventures at: https://www.facebook.com/AdventureswithOnoko/ and see more hiking photos by following me on Instagram @ huskymom7).

I contemplated for some time how I can also balance work and life outside of teaching. A friend and one-time professor, Steve Sherrill, told me upon graduating from Vermont College, “some recent grad students stay writers, but too many become teachers. Stay a poet above all else.” I never really understood what he meant until I became an EFT. I just don’t write my own stuff anymore. I write poetry in spurts, yes, but my manuscript, Human Wilderness, has definitely taken a back seat to just about everything. I need to write as much as I need music and the woods.

Sometimes, as a teacher, I just don’t have anything left to give to my own writing. I will use the trail to get back to my words (sometimes in the creation of a poem and sometimes in the murky waters of the brief essay), and to maybe share some inspiration to get out there and enjoy nature and seek balance in your own lives. As Muir put it so simply, “the mountains are calling, and I must go….”