Lunch walks

Looking all the way back to the job I began one week after college graduation, in early June of 1989, I could trace my work history by job title. Or by salary. By immediate supervisor. By office address. By length of tenure.

But yesterday it occurred to me I could also trace my work history by midday walks. I’ve always appreciated the benefits of a lunch hour spent outside in the fresh air, taking a little exercise. And each workplace setting comes with its own options for lunchtime strolls.

When I worked in Boston, I’d walk over to the Public Garden and circle the Frog Pond and the Boston Common during the noontime hour. I’d watch tourists riding the Swan Boats. I’d see well-dressed Beacon Hill aristocrats stepping along carefully, carrying their little purses and walking their little dogs. I’d see Bullfinch architecture on the skyline and Freedom Trail landmarks along the way.

When I worked in Cambridge, I walked along the Charles River, from the Esplanade down to the Mass Ave Bridge or sometimes only as far as the Hatch Shell, where the Boston Pops play on the Fourth of July. At that time I worked for a big company and a lot of my co-workers liked to go walking as well, so we’d head out together and talk about anything but what was waiting for us on our desks when we got back.

When I worked in Waltham, walking was not a popular midday activity in my company. In fact, I’m not sure I ever saw anyone venture outdoors except to get to their cars in the parking lot. We were situated in an office park on a highway exit, so the surroundings were not exactly inviting, but some of the office parks around us had relatively appealing landscaping, with lawns and manmade ponds, and I even found a cut-through to a little suburban neighborhood that backed on to one of the parking lots. It was a neighborhood nondescript enough that it could have been featured in a study about what went wrong in the design of American suburbs, and I doubt even the people who lived there went for many walks around the block. But it was better than sitting in a windowless break room.

Using the standard of lunchtime walks as a framework, though, it’s obvious to me that I’ve figuratively won the lottery at this point. I’m self-employed and get to write all day; better still, I’m at home, where my so-called office – which is actually our kitchen alcove – looks into the woods. A trail from the yard leads into the state park, with over one thousand acres of trails.

So on days like yesterday, which was an absolutely perfect New England fall day, with cool dry air, an occasional gust of wind, and yellow leaves shimmering in the sunlight, my lunchtime walk consists of grabbing the leash, calling the dog, slipping a trail map into my jacket pocket and heading out.

And once I’m in the woods, deadlines and quotes and fact-checking don’t seem to matter so much. I can enjoy the scent of the forest, the rocks and pine needles and tree roots underfoot, the rush of water from the brooks that lace through the woods. The setting is far better than any of my previous office situations, but the joy of getting out in the middle of the day is the same.

Ultimately, that’s always been the purpose of lunchtime walks: to stop thinking for a little while about the work left behind. The woods, as Robert Frost observed, are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises – and deadlines -- to keep. Still, it’s inspiring to know that as long as I keep up with my work, I can slip out to the woods again at lunchtime tomorrow.

Trail walking

I’m not sure why it took me so long to follow through on this resolution, but at last I am.

Six months ago, we moved to a house perched on the edge of a state park. Even though I’ve long known about this state park, and lived just a few miles from it for most of my life, I’ve never spent much time in it, and the few visits I did make usually didn’t go beyond the ice cream stand at the park headquarters. One truth about living in Carlisle is you seldom need to drive anywhere to find a good place for a walk, and so I almost never bothered to make the trip.

Now, though, it’s not a drive; it’s literally a walk into the woods bordering our back yard to pick up the trails network. And as soon as I realized how close we were, I was intrigued, hoping this would finally spur me on to become acquainted with Great Brook Farm State Park, far beyond the headquarters and ice cream stand section of it and deep into the dense woods beyond.

But for several months, it didn’t. Our new house is at the far end of the park, so our initial forays were only to figure out which trails led to ice cream. We did that several times over the summer, but we didn’t stray much from that path, once we’d figured it out. And when ice cream didn’t tempt us, the mosquitoes were too strong a deterrent for us to want to explore much farther afield.

Now, though, I’ve renewed my resolve. This park covers more than 1,000 acres of fields, forest, wetlands and farmland, and I want to become familiar with all of it. But I have a notoriously dismal sense of direction, so I want to learn my way gradually and thoroughly.

My first step was to take the familiar route to the park headquarters last weekend to pick up a trail map. And after that, I was well on my way. I tried following one trail on my own last weekend, another trail with my friend Donna on Columbus Day, a third option with the dog during a midweek break from writing. I found that the trail map was actually quite easy to follow, and the more I tried different routes, the more I started to gain confidence I’d never had before in my orienteering abilities. The topography began to look a little bit familiar in different places, and the compass points almost always lined up with my sense of where they should be.

Last year, I made a different resolution: to become better acquainted with the works of Thoreau. I made a little progress toward that end, but not as much as I’d hoped; and then over the summer I received as a gift a copy of The Quotable Thoreau, which is sort of like the Cliff Notes version of Thoreau’s work, perfect for literary dilettantes like me. Now, I feel like the two endeavors – reading more Thoreau and getting to know the trails of Great Brook Farm State Park – are complementary. Thoreau writes about walking in the woods, and that’s just what I’ll be doing. So I hope the two projects will fuel each other.

So far on my walks through the woods, I’ve seen ponds large and small; green, yellow, red and orange leaves; other people walking; birds; a log cabin; a Colonial-era stone foundation; and yes, lots and lots of mosquitoes. But the mosquitoes will soon be waning as colder weather arrives, and I plan to still be walking. So let’s hope this is one of my few resolutions that sticks, because there are a lot of acres of woods out my back door. And a lot of Thoreauvian passages to read. But I have time, I think. I just need to stay resolved.

Trail riding (or jogging)

In a way, what happened yesterday afternoon complemented what happened on Saturday.

Or, really, what didn’t happen on Saturday. I was sincerely hoping to go on a hike with my kids, but hiking was not meant to be. At least not as the kids saw it. They just didn’t want to. So we didn’t. But although I went along with the alternative they proposed – a walk through Portland and a visit to their favorite playground there – I still kvetched, in my own mind and on my blog if not audibly to them.

Yesterday afternoon, the opposite happened. The kids had a professional day, and so I didn’t get out for a run at the time I usually go, right after Holly boards the school bus. By late afternoon, I was anxious to get going, so I tried to come up with a plan that might interest Holly since Tim was already occupied. “Want to ride your bike alongside me and we can go up to the soccer field?” I asked her. “Then once we’re there, you can ride around the track with me or play on the fitness course.” Running laps is about my least favorite kind of run. But I’d had a good aerobic workout on the stationery bike earlier in the day; my primary goal was just to get my daily mile in, and to see Holly get some exercise as well. Getting her to agree to join me at all would be a struggle, I thought; but she said she’d ride along.

But then we took a detour. The ice cream stand next door to us closed for the season on Monday, so as we headed out to the road, I gave her the option of doing laps around its large parking lot rather than around the soccer field. She liked that idea. And on the first lap, she noticed something: a trail leading off the edge of the parking lot. I told her that it went past Bates Pond and through the woods, ending up at the end of my parents’ driveway next door to our house. “But you don’t want to ride on a trail,” I assured her.

Actually, she informed me, she wanted to try it.

So we started down the trail. Since this same kid will never agree to a hike with me these days, I assumed she’d turn back as soon as she saw that biking on a trail through the woods is a far cry from biking on our town’s paved footpaths or even the gravel driveway. But she stuck with it. We went farther and farther back, and once I realized she really planned to forge ahead on this route, I started noticing how gorgeous the path was on this particular day: the foliage nearing its peak, the waters of Bates Pond still and reflective, the sun dappling through the tree canopy.

Holly rode on, and when she reached parts of the trail that were too narrow or winding for her undersized Barbie-accessorized two-wheeler to manage, she walked her bike. I jogged behind her with the dog on the leash. “This is fun!” she exclaimed.

“But why…” I wanted to ask. “Why is it that if I’d suggested a walk in the woods you would never have agreed to it, but here we are bushwhacking our way along on a combination run/bike ride?”

Eventually we were all the way at the far end of the loop. “If we cut through right by that stone wall, it’s just a short walk down Grandma and Buppa’s driveway and home,” I told her.

“But if we turn around, we can do the whole thing again,” she responded.

According to my Nike Plus odometer, we’d already completed nearly two miles. “Do you really want to retrace the whole trail?” asked her. We could almost see our house through the woods.

“I definitely do,” she said.

So that’s what we did. In the end, we logged more than three miles. It was Holly’s first time trail riding, and she loved it. And what surprised me most was that I hadn’t planned it; it just developed spontaneously.

But sometimes I overplan, like with Saturday’s non-hike. Sometimes the best things happen when I don’t plan anything at all. Holly and I had a great time out on the trail, even though I was expecting a few laps around the soccer field. If I ask her if she wants to do it again today, she’ll probably say no. When I plan things, they end up not happening. So I’ll just wait until the next time that the pieces spontaneously fall into place, and then I’ll enjoy it all over again.