New York’s Catskill Mountains are a haven for adventure and waxing philosophical

“Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green field, and from yon azure sky.”
– from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude

We often think of travel as a way to consider the world in a novel way, and that the very act of seeing new landscapes and horizons can challenge us to look inward as much as outward. Less celebrated are the beauty and insight we can gain from everyday magnificence; from small moments, close to home, which we might not feel are worth our investment – psychological or otherwise – in the way far away and exotic travel are.

Certainly, this idea is not new, nor is it original. Thoreau knew and valued his Massachusetts woods and he admitted that he did most of his traveling in his hometown. As Arches steward before it was a national park, Edward Abbey intimately knew the rocks, mice, and even the snakes that lived around his trailer near Balanced Rock. Both naturalists knew that a keen understanding of a place often demands one’s daily investment.

In one of my favorite Hemingway stories, Nick Adams, melancholy after a breakup, goes bird hunting with his friend. Once out-of-doors, his heartache “…was no longer so tragic. It was not even important. The wind blew everything like that away.” I’ve been considering this idea a lot – how nature can provide us much-needed perspective and serve to meaningfully distance us from our daily struggles. Lately, I’ve come to appreciate how loss, particularly, can be put in its rightful place, as simply one (if difficult) component of our beautiful and bittersweet existence.

In the fall of 2020, I bought a house at the eastern edge of New York’s Catskills. On a county road, my 1930 farmhouse doesn’t have another house in sight. Oaks, pines, and maples – and all the creatures that inhabit them – are my nearest neighbors. For me, one of the home’s most compelling selling points was the quiet mountain roads surrounding it, which meant unlimited opportunities to both enjoy nature and to exercise just by walking out the front door. I quickly discovered that I treasured the routine of walking a few miles every day after teaching.  The sparsely-populated woods and roadside fields offer a wide abundance of flora and fauna, and the earth’s constant turning and slow tilting assured me that – if I paid attention – seemingly insignificant changes would reveal themselves in each day, week, and season.

When the sun’s rays have grown a little stronger in March and the roadsides are covered in granulated, gray snow, the branches of willows and sugar maples become rose-hued, swollen with buds. Over the long winter, the snowplow’s blade might have cut into the bark of a roadside pine, but by spring it is no longer raw, and seems to have already hardened in the injured place.

Peepers, small frogs which inhabit vernal pools, usher in the Catskills spring almost as soon as the snow melts. Their shrill, insistent calls, heard up to a mile away, are one of the first audible harbingers of spring. Days later, after a rain, eastern red spotted newts will start to cross the roads, traveling from their underground burrows to vernal pools. They are slow moving, so once I’ve seen one in the road I’ll typically be on the lookout for more to assist them across.

Most of the migrating black-and-white juncos, which winter here, have already left, bound for Canada and points north, and make way for the first robins, the “Check! Check! Check!” of adolescent red winged blackbirds, and bluebirds – a very welcome flash of vibrancy after winter’s various shades of gray and brown. Newly-installed power poles already have large holes in them, drilled by pileated woodpeckers, to house their young. Ravens, in their synchronized dance, play with and call to their lifelong partners on the sometimes-cruel March wind.

The first thing to bloom after the long winter in the Catskills is coltsfoot, a small, bright yellow flower, erect atop purple foliage, and which adorns roadside ditches, shooting up from drab gravel. Though by now it shouldn’t be, it always feels like a surprise, as coltsfoot sometimes appears in the ruined snow. Daffodils bloom far off in the woods near ancient rock walls or what’s left of the foundations of homes long since abandoned, and I wonder about the person who planted the bulbs in an autumn so long ago.

One of the things I’ve noticed about walking, the actual act of placing one foot in front of the other, is that all the seemingly insignificant surroundings change gradually but noticeably if one pays attention. For instance, in May, pinxter, a kind of rhododendron, has small buds; a few days later it erupts into a cheerful, elegant, coral beauty which attracts hummingbirds, newly-arrived from Mexico and Central America. About the same time, the strange and beautiful mayapple, its bulbous, pale pink flowers blooming beneath its exotic-looking foliage, attracts bees and butterflies.

As the spring days grow (mercifully!) longer, gaywing’s purple flowers grace its waxy leaves, growing close to the forest floor. The lower mountain elevations – I live at one-thousand feet – might be very vibrant by then, but one glance at snow-covered Mombaccus Mountain or the nearby ridges of the Sundown Wild Forest indicates that spring is not advanced everywhere else.

Sometimes if we are struggling through adversity it can be difficult to remind ourselves of everyday beauty. That the world moves on – whether we like it or not and whether we’re ready or not – can absolutely amplify our pain and sense of being left behind. However, I’m leaning towards a different, more hopeful perspective:  If we are willing to devote our attention to nature’s gradual changes, we could allow ourselves to be carried along on its waves of momentum.

Spring’s eventual arrival is inevitable; but the acceptance that spring comes every year can enable us to allow what happened in a previous season to sting a little less acutely – and to make way for the possibilities in our future, just as last season’s gray, granulated snow gives way to the fresh, evening call of peepers.

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