There is a pleasure in the pathless woods...

                                                        -Lord George Gordon Byron         

     

With one of my first freshly-earned days off from work, I made the short drive over to the campus of my alma mater for a solo hike in Happy Valley. It was a cloudy day, and the unseasonable warmth had at least temporarily given way to cooler temperatures.

First was a quick stop at a pull-off along the scenic entrance to change into my hiking shoes and say hello to an old favorite spot (one of many) I used to run to when I just wanted to breathe for a few minutes. It is no more than a small waterfall just above the valley with some crumbling limestone ledges and the remains of fallen trees from a windstorm in 2008, but it is hidden, just off the road. I didn't stay long though. The valley was waiting silently, but for the quiet gurgling of water from two days' rain slowly soaking into the ground.

I wound my way around the familiar curves of Scenic Drive, aware of the sheer drops to the valley below and the Ohio River, just out of sight over the wooded hillsides. Ditching my little Forester behind the library, I hugged the edge of the woods behind professors' houses like a ghost, not envying the the exam-bound students walking toward their dorms and houses.

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Just a bit back out Scenic and a turn into the woods: I was home. I stopped briefly to observe changes made and laugh at a memory at an old, stone fire pit, and started down. Improvements to the trail were a nice touch, but I missed the old wooden stairs, worn and pitted enough to not be slick in rain, that I would once bound down fearlessly on countless long adventure runs during track and cross country seasons. Now the trail has just a few, new stairs and some long, straight switchbacks across the side of the hill. It's a good path, but not so good in the mud, so I went ahead and left the trail even earlier than planned for a more direct, carefully-chosen route down to the creek.

Turning left along the hillside and well off the trail, I wound through the trees and scattered, moss-covered rocks toward the first ravine. The valley is full of steep ravines, each leading to a waterfall or splitting into another. I know that valley. I spent four years just above it, tearing through books and papers toward my "education," venturing down when I could for long runs or hikes or class fieldwork. But I like to get lost in it. I find myself trying to disconnect real life from maps and geographic thought. I want it separate. I don't want to know what is just up the ravine, what part of campus or Scenic Drive or the next neighborhood over lies above. I want it separate and wild.

I love climbing those waterfalls. Each is different, and they are always changing. From many hikes and daring runs, I know the best routes, in general, to ascend each one. But each time is like a puzzle of carefully-chosen steps to make it up: Which rocks to step on, which will hold your weight or move beneath you, where to place your foot for balance, which saplings will offer a little support (though mostly moral--they are still bendy and insubstantial), which layer of rock to step on as you climb one of the mini waterfalls on the way up. I've been doing it my whole life.

It felt good. I felt strong, and agile, and sure of my feet...bouncy, even. I was so free. Along the way, I marveled at the tiny mosses and fungi on the fallen tree trunks I swung over or crawled under. I stopped to inspect a pitiful few of the millions of fossils cropping out of layer upon layer of this frayed, exposed edge of an earthen history book. I ran my gloved hands along the rough, pitted surfaces of limestone boulders or big slabs miraculously upended like funhouse walls in the middle of the forest, or grasped their edges for support and leverage as I scaled the basins.

It was the big things and the small things. The layered cliff faces with water cascading down them, the soft feeling of all the different species of moss beneath my fingers as I gripped rock to pull myself up onto some precarious rock face, the mysterious hole in the ground at the base of a rock face with a telltale hint of skunk smell nearby. The whole time my eyes roved the piles of massive stone, my mind wondering at the power of weight and gravity that gave in to the incessant streaming of water and air to drop these incredibly huge pieces of solid earth at the waterfall's base or send them rolling down the valley.

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Somehow I found myself ascending a ravine I did not recognize. It was big, and stark, and sheltered, and new. How had I gone four years there and two and a half since and never found myself there? An imposing sheer cliff lay out before me as I maneuvered over mossy rocks and long-fallen trees. I made it all the way to the pool at the base of the waterfall and felt strange. That fall felt different--not bad different, just almost out of place. But it was beautiful and staggering and real.

The last waterfall was the most familiar--a personal favorite. I had been there so many times--alone, on giggling and singing-soaked runs with two of my closest friends, on random hikes with all kinds of people. I had been happy and sad and stressed and calm and awkward and angry there.

I sat atop the familiar, slanted surface of one of the larger boulders just below the base of the waterfall. The temperature had dropped, a detail I had failed to notice until then. As I noticed how curiously quickly the cold rock had warmed where I was perched, my eyes met a tiny, white ice pellet falling onto my black shirt sleeve. I looked around, trying to focus on the air between me and the cliff face. Sure enough: the first snowflakes of the year--sparse and barely noticeable at first, but then strengthening into a true light snow. By then I was up, gliding from rock to rock up toward the bottom of the falls. I just stood there looking up into the cliff and trees above, down the ravine, marveling at the perfect moment around me and sort of laughing out loud, giddy at my good fortune and the recognition of how happy I was in that moment.

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The snow soon waned, and so did my body heat, so I knew I should head back down and retrace toward the trail. My shivering limbs started to do that with the most honest and urgent of intentions, but as they warmed as I began really moving again, I kept getting new ideas of continuing through the valley to check in on the tree I could stand in or on the creekstone labyrinth constructed by a friend for her senior project.

At several points, I found myself a little disappointed I hadn't just worn my running clothes. My tights would have snagged on branches and rocks, and my old running shoes would have been considerably less water-resistant than my hiking boots, but I could've torn through that valley. Swiftly and sure of my steps, quietly over the rain-soaked leaves. A few times, I did break into a run: coming down the last bit of an incline from a ravine or surging over a dip in the trail and up over a hump around a tree. I made mental note to come back for a real run as soon as it gets a bit drier.

But finally I did make my way back to the trail back up the hill. It was silent the whole way up--and probably had been the whole afternoon, but I had only really noticed in passing. As I came up on another switchback curve, again inwardly bemoaning the loss of my beloved hillside staircase, I was startled by a flash of white. At first, my personifying instincts jumped at the thought of another person, and one not following the trail, but moving swiftly straight down the hillside. Quickly, I realized it was a white-tailed deer and felt silly, though it all took place in only the flash of comprehension. I hadn't even heard it moving. Even as it leapt away, just yards in front of me, it was silent on the saturated leaves covering the ground. I wondered if I had been that silent too.

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Too soon, or soon enough, I stepped back onto the blacktop of Scenic Drive and wandered back the way I had come. As I got nearer the parking lot, I wondered if any of the students inside the Fine Arts building were looking out the window at this random girl purposefully swishing through the edges of puddles and dragging her boots through thicker clods of crabgrass in the yard to get the mud off. Then my thoughts turned to the heater in my car. I really should have bothered with another layer.