Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
“I like long walks, particularly when they are
taken by people who annoy me.” — Noel Coward
[I]’m walking on the frozen road at high noon. My shadow seems to be 100 feet long and, unlike me, is green-bean-slim and space-alien-lanky. Although I’m probably still me, I seemed to have morphed into Gumby at some point. I slip my glove off to check my watch and immediately regret the decision. The freshening wind drives a penetrating cold, rendering my fingers useless in a matter of seconds.
Solstice is still two weeks away but it feels as though last winter never left. Summer seems a luxurious fantasy, a hallucinogenic fever dream, easily missed by turning away or blinking. Passing the gray whitecaps of the pond, I feel a shudder, my 100 days of swimming impossibly far fetched.
A single loon, this year’s surviving chick rendered independent by its parents departure weeks earlier, seems to be gone as well, instinctively wary of the ice formation that means almost certain death. The same bone density that makes him an efficient diver has the opposite effect on flight, requiring hundreds of yards of open water to achieve liftoff. Amazingly, he’ll return, but only after spending at least two years somewhere off the Atlantic coast.
He’s been replaced by several buffleheads and a hooded merganser or two, somewhat difficult to differentiate from a distance but both species are fueling up and getting out while the getting is good, headed from their summer range in eastern Alberta to points as far south as coastal Florida along the Gulf of Mexico. Their logic seems impeccable as the feeling very slowly returns to my fingertips.
This transition between the last brilliant foliage and the first serious winter storm can be a short as a couple of weeks or as agonizingly long as several months while we wait to cross country ski or snowshoe. Downhill skiing evolved into a bruising example of diminishing returns several years ago as I was bouncing down an icy slope at Sugarbush, realizing retroactively that gravity had never been my friend and for the 30 years of this madness, I never really learned how and I spent most of my time in the mountains terrified.
The objective is less about fashion than about a digestible crumb of independence in an increasingly regimented culture, particularly with corporate America calling the holiday tune, expecting us all to dance.
With good reason apparently, as several of the sports injuries that have come back to haunt me in middle age are directly related to alpine ineptitude. I never took a formal lesson and evidently spent way too long learning informal ones as my neck, rotator cuff and left hip eloquently articulate.
Meanwhile, I walk, which can begin to take on an almost expedition-like quality this time of year. Because of several small snowfalls and one decent nor’easter, coupled with the requisite thawing and freezing cycles common in late November, Yak Tracks (or some such) and hiking poles are imperative, although no guarantee for remaining upright. Walking like an emperor penguin provides some stability but a round trip of four miles makes you feel like you’re in a Charlie Chaplin movie and takes hours.
So I layer up from the skin out because oxymoronically, if you get too hot, you get too cold. I huff and puff up the several hills on my route, confident my clothing is breathing as well, seemingly less labored than me, wicking perspiration and repelling moisture while blocking the wind and keeping me just warm enough. I silently wonder if I should have spent the extra money for armpit zippers to provide immediate purging of superheated bodily vapors that can presumably flash freeze you like a fish stick.
But — in the end — getting out is the important thing, whether in high tech walking attire or a wool plaid shirt and a leopard print babushka. The objective is less about fashion than about a digestible crumb of independence in an increasingly regimented culture, particularly with corporate America calling the holiday tune, expecting us all to dance.
Combatting plummeting temperatures and biting wind on a rutted back road or in the woods as the sunlight fades these last few weeks of autumn — instead of a store, mall or website — becomes almost like an act of defiance. A small, symbolic gesture perhaps, but one that nonetheless makes you feel extremely good.
