When I was a kid my father used to take me into the woods to hunt. Usually he was after some sort of game that I wasn’t quite qualified to tackle like grouse or pheasant or (if he came across one) woodcock. He and I would walk into the woods until we found a nice little place and he would leave me there alone with my little single-shot 22-caliber rifle to (at least theoretically) hunt squirrels. I would sit at the base of a tree and scan the surrounding trees for squirrel activity. Not a tough hunting situation, since squirrels in the woods aren’t precisely hard to come by.
I didn’t shoot the squirrels for the most part. I sure, I did a couple of times when my dad was there so he’d be proud of me, but I had no real interest in shooting the squirrels. I liked watching them, jumping through the trees and scampering around and it didn’t take me long to realize that they became significantly less interesting after they’d been shot. Eating them was no fun either, and my dad insisted that we eat anything we shoot. So, I pretty much just sat in the woods, smelling the air, watching the trees and listening for the telltale sounds of distant gunshots that indicated that my dad had found what he was hunting.
Last night my wife had to work late for some sort of project and by late I mean laaaate. I wound up picking her up from work around 11:45. When she told me that she would not be home until later, I decided to take the opportunity to do a little geocaching in my neighborhood. The first cache I attempted to find was in the middle of a residential neighborhood and I failed to locate it in large part because I was nervous about the location being so exposed and looking like some sort of weirdo on the street. The second one was adjacent to a soccer field and when I looked at it’s location on my GPS I wasn’t sure I wanted to go after it because it too seemed like maybe it would be a bit exposed but I drove over to it and surveyed the area. It was clearly off the beaten path a bit. Perfect.
To get to it, I had to walk up a fairly steep hill which was slippery with mud and snow melt. I almost fell a couple of times but I had a hiking stick with and managed to keep on my feet. When I got to the top of the hill I discovered that it was also adjacent to a farmers field. I was standing in a tiny little slice of wildness, complete with a stream, pond, ducks, trees and tall grass, in the middle of a crowded suburb next to a manicured sports field and cultivated land. If I focused just on what was in front of me, I could imagine I was off in the wild, away from the things of man. I got chills. I was back in my childhood, slogging through cornfields and sloughs with my dad, wearing a tan hunting coat with pockets full of 20-gauge shotgun shells, a Remington 1100 slung across my arm, burrs sticking to the laces of my boots. I just stood and enjoyed the moment for a while before I saw the cache I was looking for sitting right in front of my face, stuck in a tree, covered in camo tape.
On my way back down to my car from visiting that cache, I started to get contemplative. I had never particularly liked hunting with my dad. I had never been too keen on the whole “shooting defenseless animals” part of it. I liked shooting, I liked walking through the woods, I liked hanging out with my dog and watching him hunt and I liked spending time with my father. All in all, I would have loved it if we had just let the birds go, but I suppose without the prey we never would have been out there in the first place. Geocaching has given me a good excuse to get out there without having to kill anything, which I appreciate, but mostly it’s reawakened in me some sort of bigger desire to be in nature.
After I found that cache, I went in search of another. This one was located in a small wooded area in the middle of a nearby park and once again, I found myself transported back. This time it was to the squirrel scenario that I mentioned earlier. There was a small pond buried in this little patch of woods and standing there, poking around for the cache that I never did manage to find, the smell of the woods, the smoky, cold, musty, wonderful smell of a wood at the end of winter just as it starts to wake up to spring, threw me back. Suddenly I was 10 years old, huddled under a tree, watching a squirrel partying it’s way from tree to tree, while cradling a gun and wondering if I would shoot the squirrel for my dad or just watch it for myself. The sun was setting and the temperature was dropping but I did not want to leave the woods. Eventually I did, of course, and as I sat in my car watching the sun setting I found myself consumed with thoughts of hiking and exploring and wandering through the woods.
There is a 2,000 acre park right up the street from my house. It has about 20 miles of hiking trails. I’ve never hiked it. But, for some reason, the idea of walking 20 miles through the woods is so compelling that I can’t shake it. I want to do this. I will.
I feel like there is a part of me that has been asleep for a long time. A happy, animal part of me, something that feels connected to the earth, something that craves quiet and distance from humanity, not as an escape but just because I need it. I love my fellow man, but sometimes I feel like we’ve built too much, civilized ourselves too much. We think we need an excuse to be in the woods. We drive by them every day and we don’t see them as anything other than obstacles to be traversed. Geocaching has really helped me realize just how much wildness is still peppered into our suburban landscapes and just how much even that tiny bit of wildness can touch a person. The office building I work in overlooks the MN Valley National Wildlife Refuge and I keep thinking about heading into it and taking a walk. It’s like a magnet pulling on me as I sit at my computer working in cyberspace. “Ryan, you’re a human and humans are a part of the natural order and it’s still here, waiting for you, if you want to see and be within it.”
I don’t know if all of this sounds silly, but I know I’m not alone in finding this thing awakening inside me. When I was doing a little Googling on hiking last night I found a website that put forth the question, “Why hike?” and basically answered it by saying that hiking is a spiritual practice and an opportunity to reconnect with ourselves and the world around us. When I read Bill Bryson’s book “A Walk In The Woods”, I discovered that same sense on his part. Loren Eiseley’s “The Immense Journey” also captures this feeling. The simple act of being out in the woods, walking, has a power to it that I felt as a boy and I’m rediscovering as a man. As much of a 21st century guy as I am, I find myself a little surprised by it, but I’m loving it. I’m loving it and I need to find some good footwear… I got walking to do.
