Omega Path Trailhead Welcomed by ticks and poison ivy, maybe nettles, and tree of heaven? or sumac? I sense Pennsylvania’s gone out of me. There’s nowhere I’m native now, but the yellow-green arching sea waves me in. 1 and 2 The path starts rocky: a wall coming down, boundary changed to course. Then I’m at 2, missing the first pause - off to a subpar start like most endeavors. This pine with spokes, wagon wheel whorls wrapping thick trunk - she’s never seen stop one either. 3 and 4 No 3. Guess I’m on an even path. On the way I find a memory. A mittened palm halts me and my tongue goes wild. I chew that petiole to pulp, green turkey foot dangling from the corner of my mouth, a kid with a taste for sassafras again. Sweet, woodsy, spicy, a bit like that old-fashioned Teaberry gum in the quaint wallpaper-pink wrapper. Here stone rims a dry vernal pool; hems in more green than shade. 5 A sign less obvious than what it signifies - a rich subject: perfect pileated ovals dripping dried sap and a lean-to that gives no shelter (unless you’re 10) capped by a natural tented flag. I whack the tree just for my son’s sake. Nobody answers, just like always. 6 I only find this one on the map: shortcut to a nap or “steep climb.” A tick runs over my pack. Twice. Not enough to dissuade. 7 So much forgetting in 25 arid years. How a tree can hold a hollow jug at its base, an old trunk cleaved til a wet vessel remains. How in these hills sky’s a tease. You never get to ridgeline. The blue beckons but the land just rolls. 8 A lace of leafy celadon lichened limbs might make a poet pop out of even the most hardnosed nonfiction truth-teller. 9 Don’t do this: follow the sun west to the clearing I claimed wasn’t there - a surprising boon from the high-tension wires. Don’t sit on the knoll listening to an ascending stair-step trill from a bird you’ve never known. If you come later, don’t palm the raspberries or stroke the straight-up ferns anchored in sideways rock. Don’t wait for the hillside to go gold - you can already see the red in the maple. If there’s a crackle in the line it’s lost in cricket and wind. Stay on the safe, tracked path instead. 10 A clear mahogany trace outlines a life lost. The dry light leavings of the heart- -wood fracture to faults punched by borings. Behind me the low creak of a dead trunk easing his load slowly to earth. Now singing a final song: sometimes high like a wail or rough like a croak or arcing like coyote. He’s singing us all the forest lullabies he ever heard, learning what it takes to leave his own rust track behind. 11 Crows announce 11 or maybe an owl they’re mobbing. The whole field of stippled light sways. I flip a fern frond searching for sori - the currency of backwoods secrets. 12 Nuthatches spiral up around Until I’m backbended down trying to keep up with their diligent beeping. Easterners don’t know what pleasure canopy brings: ready shade right there and moss at your feet. Westerners must work to get relief from glare. We climb on up into the tinder-dry spruce-fir, straight up like matches, casting as little cool as possible. Even the amiable aspen hang their leaves down - more pendant than parasol. But, curiously, here in the flickering diffuse light an ovenbird bakes. 13 An old cairn of shale like steep-walled Walnut Creek and the blue-grey bed I waded in. These rocks lined our foyer floor, locked in a glossy layer of wax that never felt natural, and broke whatever landed. But at the creek we pounded them to clay, left mud pots to cure in sun. 14 Feathery hemlock, near prostrate, felled by one weak limb. Too tall and skinny for its own good. It will never wear the skirt we used to settle beneath in the deep snows of being little. 15 Backlit boulders and an abundance of acorn caps walnut boats catkin strands: the loose parts we staked our stories on. 16 and Trail’s End It ends like it starts: no sign for me. Just a sinking spring house and the calm assurance of a good old two-track - signs the way’s been known before, maybe leading home. |