Trick question: how far can you walk into the woods?
Around here, in early June, the woods feel like August. Hot, humid, quiet. I’m walking in a loop through a wilderness of old forest and fields with a river running through it. My path curves.
Hey, there’s a Swainson’s Thrush. It doesn’t fly.
By picking trails that loop around and back, I’m always moving forward. A different way to hike, I guess, would be to walk for a while, then do an about-face, and return. Yeah…but I don’t like U-turns.
There’s a Hairy Woodpecker. Too big to be a Downy. Too still to be normal. But in this heat, birds are just sitting.
Thinking about the word “loop” reminds me of the Chicago Loop. This is also a stamping ground of mine. It’s the cluster of skyscrapers circled by a loop of train tracks. Big, tall, tough, two-fisted Chicago.
Hey, an Eastern Bluebird in a clearing. A Tree Swallow on a reed.
I’m not going to see a Scissors-tailed Flycatcher today. Or a Purple Gallinule down by the river. Such improbable sightings are occasionally reported on birders’ forums.
If I ever see something that rare in here, I’ll stop thinking about loops, and report the sighting right away.
Meanwhile, I look behind me to see if I’m alone on this quiet trail.
In the Chicago Loop, a guy I know was walking to the train one night and didn’t look behind him. He felt a gun barrel on the back of his neck. He heard, “Don’t turn around. Gimme your watch and wallet.”
My friend walked away without these things. His back crawled, he said, expecting a bullet. Nothing happened. Except he had a good story.
In the woods there are coyotes and maybe cougars. Plus, the possibility of dangerous humans. Screw ‘em. Just makes the place more interesting to walk through.
That’s what I did this morning. I walked through the woods. I saw some hot, quiet birds, and thought about the word “loop.”
After a while, I walked out. Which brings up the trick question. Whether you backtrack, or loop around the way I did, you can only walk INTO the woods half way.
Marc’s reference is to a haunting little song from the early 1900s about bears in the woods. It has a melody you’d know right away. Marc’s a two-fisted desert rat formerly of west Texas, and a writer with a lot of knowledge about a lot of things. A riff about an uneventful birding hike can trigger allusions to Hemingway, Kerouac, Dostoyevsky or a piece of music. We enjoy these, and hope Marc keeps ‘em coming. As far as bears in the woods around here, not yet. But they’re in upper Wisconsin, and stragglers have been wandering south, almost to the state line. Every time I go into the woods in northern Illinois I hope there might be a bear there.
True, you can only walk half way into the woods.
But if you walk in today, you’re in for a big surprise…
“If you go down to the woods today
You’re sure of a big surprise.
If you go down to the woods today
You’d better go in disguise.
For ev’ry bear that ever there was…”