Saturday, April 21, 2012

BASTARD SUMMER

  "I think that if I touched
  The earth.
  It would crumble;
  It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously
  Like a dream"  

  ~Dylan Thomas  

                                

Once again the best laid plans of mice and men went astray.  I planned on a beautiful 15 and ended up with a walking 9.  I have to shake this feeling that each of these runs is a quickly disappearing gift before the bastard summer pushes me, breathless and mosquito swarmed, into the cool environs of the indoors.  I wait out the insect rhythms and cloying heat of the summer the way most wait out the winter; with it's savage cold, trees raped of their color, earth the texture of stone.  As much as I believe the craving for sunshine and lush landscape are an innate drive for most, I prefer the elements stripped back, jaws laid bare by the snow and tearing wind.  Though the AT in wintertime isn't absent of life, it is a silent and stoic kind of life; silent but for the yawning of dried and dead limbs and shuddering ice.  This counting down of days turned what should have been a sublime few hours in the woods into a stumbling hike.

On the drive home, at the Route 22/Appalachian Trail Metro North train stop, I spotted a van with an AT logo on the side and a group of about 10 people completing the last 20 feet of this:


Apparently they call these things 'puncheons'.  What a shitty name for something so fucking cool.  I hereby dub this the Bridge To Somewhere,

I'd been trying to find a project to work on on the AT to give something back and build up a little trail karma, but was never able to find anything on the Appalachian Trail Conservancy website.  They were winding down the project but I was told they might need someone to maintain a section of trail in the Pawling Nature Preserve section, a place I run through almost every weekend.  Once again, pulled back from the brink by this trail.  My knee still feels like shit, I'm irritated with myself for ignoring my body, but at least now I'll have the chance to give a little rather than take a lot.  




This is my Temple.



Only I could turn a beautifully sunny 70 degree day into a vision of the apocalypse.

Apocalypse Pt. II





2 comments:

  1. I'm with you, I dislike spring and loathe summer. Give me autumn and winter.

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  2. Good to hear from you!!! At least we have a week of heavy rain on the way. I'd rather run in that than the sun/humidity. I wish I hadn't torqued my knee this week. I'll be putting up a fairly boring Hoka Bondi review at some point. So far I really like them, although my newfound enthusiasm for running thousands of feet of rock strewn downhills like a lunatic may have in some way been responsible for my jacked up knee.

    I hope the font size/color isn't too difficult to read. Every time I pushed a fucking button or saved something it seemed to fuck up something else so I'm afraid to make any changes.

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