THE GIFT

It came packaged and delivered, as much does these days. But our friends’ recent visit returned with it, calling back the simple pleasure of talking into the night. Many of us have missed such evenings during isolated COVID times.

“Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World,” I read on the book’s jacket. The photo showed a slant-lit forest of massive pines; even at first glance, I could see the light was all wrong: it streamed up from below. Its source was — as the title suggests — conflagration.

Still, the author, Barry Lopez, a lifelong tutor for me in seeing and being outdoors, wrote his essays and stories with a care and voice that seemed the opposite of fire’s destructive crackle; his work admitted you to worlds you might have walked and yet missed if you’d been distracted. And, we all acknowledge, we are chronically distracted.

Some pages in, I reached a spare essay titled, “The Invitation.”

“Why not set this piece at the beginning?” I wondered. It invites a reader to learn how to join a place more fully, come to know it and be known by it.

But “The Invitation” is no simple summons; it may be slight, but it is from Lopez’s heartland, and, if accepted, it can be life-altering. It can even lead one to embrace the burning world, with or without fear. The essay stems from Lopez’s lifelong travels with people native to a variety of areas. Early in his life, Lopez discerned that his indigenous companions often noticed much more during their travels than he did. Slowly he discovered the roots of these deeper perceptions and a habit that had blocked him from doing likewise.

Lopez, as writers and many of us will, sought to put his experiences into immediate words, taking a shorthand phrase — e.g. meeting the bear — and seeking to tell its story, to contain it. His indigenous companions resisted putting what they perceived into words; they kept perceiving, and, as they did, they understood more. “For me,” Lopez wrote, “the bear was a noun, the subject of a sentence; for them it was a verb, the gerund “bearing.”

Within that distinction lies the gift of repeated travel and work on the same stretch of land, at times with others native to it, at times alone. Over these times, the land can shift from being the subject of our walking (or writing ) to being a companion in our emotional core. We shift then from being a solo person to being accompanied when we walk. We come to care for land, and, yes, it comes to care for us. That is a very different way of walking, of being, from the usual visit to a place.

Here’s an example from what might be such a place.

WITH THE WATERS

Nearly five years ago I signed on to a committee convened to plan for the rescue of the Mare Brook watershed, which had acquired the seamy, official descriptor, “urban-impaired.” In eight prior columns, I’ve chronicled walking and getting to know this watershed, and recently I’ve joined some other citizens in accepting the invitation to be on The Mare Brook Steering Committee, which will begin to implement the watershed’s redemptive management plan. I look forward to this work.

But what I value even more is trying to be in a relationship with these watershed lands. Nearly every day I walk there, and wherever I am, I’m joining one tracery with another. This pooled rainwater, for example, will drain toward that slope, which tends to a tiny stream that bears water during the wet seasons. That becomes in a tiny delta, at the outlet of a slender finger into Mere Brook. So many hands of land and water.

Here, from some earlier watershed-writing is a symbol of how aligned I hope to be:

October in the Mare Brook Gully: it’s 50 degrees, wind’s in the north carrying with it a needled drizzle. Few others are out and about. It’s a perfect afternoon to walk down along the gully.

A hundred feet ahead I spot surprise — there’s a figure, hood up, in a red parka; he is staring at the brook, unmoving. As I draw near, I see what he’s watching: a young, black lab is elbows deep in the creek, intent, it seems, on its current. His ears are up, his tail wags steadily, he watches; the lab is dialed into something. I stop to watch too. A minute passes. “What’s he after?” I ask. “Fish,” says his red-jacketed companion. “Hasn’t caught one yet, but it’s not for lack of trying.”

The lab ignores us. I note that his rope lead is looped casually onto a streamside tree. Now he repositions, turns upstream, furrows his brow, restarts his tail, watches, his focus unbroken. The transparent water slides over its sands; some yellowing ferns glow in the gray light. I watch for another minute in silence. The dog never wavers. “This is it,” his stance says. It; there’s nothing else.

All of this unfolds while, as Barry Lopez writes, I wait, attend, receive.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com