Walks

I do not attend church. “Walking is my church,” a friend once said and I think it holds for me as well. I seek solace in taking walks, often with Karen, nearly always with a dog or two. Days are incomplete without a walk and some time to reflect. I enjoy walks in the woods or around our local cranberry bogs. There is comfort in the familiar path that allows the mind to wander, to contemplate, to reflect, rather than focus on keeping track of turns and intersections.

Off-season walks on the beach are my favorite. Dogs run freely, chasing gulls and stopping to inspect some particularly interesting smell along the wrack line. Sandpipers race along the water’s edge as each wave brings new morsels. When the dogs come too close they take flight en masse landing a few tens of yards farther down the shoreline. Sometimes the dogs give chase and the birds lead them down the beach. Eventually both the dogs and birds double back.

I carry binoculars once in a while to note the passing of the seasons and migrations of the many birds that stop over on their way north or south. Summer brings Sanderlings, Sandpipers and Willets. The Northern Harrier flies low, hunting its way along the dune grass. Winter brings the Lapland Larkspur and the Snow Bunting that flit about in the grass and Rosa Ragosa. A Snowy Owl sits as a silent white totem among the fence posts along the barrier beach until it spreads its massive white wings and flies off in search of solitude. I carry a camera on those days when inspiration strikes: sometimes when I hope inspiration will strike. After years of seeing pictures that fail to capture the colors of the sunrise, the subtle greens and tans of the grasses, the synchronized flight of sandpipers as they skim the waves, I more often leave the camera at home.

A gentle breeze stirs the dune grass. A stronger breeze blows loose sand. Strong wind blows sea foam across the beach like desert tumbleweed. Dry sand blown across the beach prickles exposed skin: the dogs squint, holding their heads low to the ground in a futile effort to avoid sand getting into their eyes. Eventually they learn to keep their heads high and backs to the wind, turning only occasionally to see where I am.

Our beach is sandier in the summer and rockier in the winter as the winter waves push the sand to deeper water. Pebbles are rounded and though some may be as big as a softball, most range in size from a baseball to a marble. Wetted pebbles reveal a range of colors and textures that give hints as to their origins: uniformly crystalline granitic pebbles of black, white and feldspar orange from some far off batholith. Impossibly contorted bands of metamorphosed purples and pinks – once marine sediment then, after heat and pressure, part of a bedrock outcrop and now a rounded cobble on the beach the size of a man’s fist slowly being worn down to sand to start the geologic cycle again. Is it possible to imagine the eons this pebble has seen? The mountain building? The glaciers?

Solid white milky quartz pebbles catch my eye standing out against a field of browns, greens and grays. When I see a particularly nice pebble just the right size I pick it up and roll it around in my hand. In the winter the stones are cold but eventually warm as I turn them over and over. My favorites are those that are not quite spherical so that each rotation in my hand turns the stone half way over and I feel the pebble come to rest in my palm. I roll the pebble, massaging it, as one might worry rosary beads.

At the end of the walk I pocket the pebble. When I get home I toss the pebble onto our gravel driveway. As we have lived at our house for now two decades the remnants of my many walks are easy to spot among the angular grey and black “bank run gravel” placed by a local contractor. I sympathize with my grandmother who, according to my mother, used to return from trips with suitcase pockets filled with pretty stones collected while walking along a beach somewhere. These stones later discovered in closets after my grandmother died and her house was cleaned out. I comfort myself in thinking that though this collection of pebbles on the driveway may show signs of madness or obsession at least my children will not discover suitcases full of special rocks after I pass.