Just Walking in the Woods

The sky is not what it was an hour ago. Heavy grey clouds with silver linings are gliding with a deceptive slowness from the east. The breeze rings in the ears constantly with a flat and solid drone.

Walking on the still wet grass from yesterday’s rain is refreshingly cold and wet. It is nothing to worry about. The grass brushing against the feet shakes in the breeze of late fall as the leaves fall into the breeze and then on to the grass. Walking on the grass is good and refreshing after a night of partying. But waking up with a hang over is not nice. Hopefully, the grass, the breeze and the approaching woods will clear the head up eventually.

Back then I would not have gone on hikes just to look at leaves and listen to the low din of the woods. And I certainly would not have gone alone. But I was always amazed at those inji-gopsers, those yellow-haired westerners, who would go on a hike just to go on a hike.

They traveled all over India with no seeming purpose. They traveled from one place to another and another. And then another, just to see those places. So stupid, I used to think. Why did they leave their countries with all the cars, skyscrapers, nice roads and clothes? Just to travel on those crooked narrow and dusty jammed roads bustling with the noise and people. Do they really want to travel in those trains where six people share three seats? Where sometimes you have to sleep with a stranger on the same bunk? They cannot even handle the food and water. Every time they shop, they get ripped off. Why do they want to wear a kurta anyway? What’s the point? They said they wanted to find themselves.

Those clouds are still there in the same place with the same shapes. Maybe it looks less like a duck than it did before. Apart from the breeze, birds are making sounds but it cannot actually be called singing. Birds in India sing. Cuckoos sing in India. These birds are cackling. Yeah. That’s what it is called, cackling.

The leaves slightly veil the sounds of the breeze in the ear and of the unseen birds in the woods. Now a new sound comes up from the ground and it is the gravelly sound of soles rubbing against the trail. And the leaves also crunch under the feet.

We would hike five miles every time we had a function or a teaching to attend at the temple. It was the Dalai Lama’s temple. We would wake up before dawn, put on the uniforms and rush out for breakfast and then leave in lines. We would talk and joke all the way up the hills in those cold mornings. The functions were all ceremony. The officials would give speeches in high Tibetan that was hard to understand. And every time they would tell us, “You are the future seeds of Tibet and study har`d so that we can go back to our country.”

Most of us did not understand the Buddhist teachings that we used to attend. But we sat through these teachings for hours in silence, playing with the frayed ends of the tattered carpets and poking each other while the monks chanted on, and we hoped that the teachings will rub-off on us. And due to the good karma generated we would have a better next life. At least, that’s what our teachers told us.

Some of the fallen leaves are still brightly red and orange. These leaves are from different trees and they have all fallen off the branches. A lot of the leaves are still hanging on to the trees in spots of fiery orange and red in a rustling sea of green. But they will fall eventually. Dry up, fade, shrivel, and get crushed by the passing feet before the rain and snow melt them into the ground. These trees are mostly tall making a canopy of leaves that shades the trail and patches of sunlight fall on the ground like missing pieces of an ever changing jigsaw puzzle. One moment they fit the next they don’t.

Fall because of falling leaves. And autumn means the same thing but fall sounds more natural. Fall sounds like the rustling leaves with changing colors. Fall because of the fresh breeze. Now here are the two roads that diverged in the woods. More leaves cushion the path on the right as it dips down. The road less traveled goes down, curves and goes up. It is a bit bumpy. Shit. Is that a snake? It is striped white and black. Vermont has snakes but they are not poisonous. Wearing shoes is better but walking in sandals and feeling the rustling leaves is different. This path less traveled leads back to the main path without apologies. Maybe that’s how it is.

Every one had big dreams for me. It was a game that they used to play. Maybe it was amusing to the adults to ask kids what they wanted to become in life. I never really knew what I was going to become in life but I knew that I never wanted to become a doctor. Listening to my aunt´s stories of cutting up cadavers and watching nurses squeeze pus and clean up wounds at the school dispensary had a profound effect on my career plans. Back in India, if you were a good student, you chose the science stream, studied only science after tenth grade and you either became a doctor or an engineer. So I guess I was supposed to become an engineer. Secretly I wanted to become a great soccer player but was never really good at that. But I remember reading a lot of everything. I even read that poem by Robert Frost a long time ago and I remember it even now. It is funny to realize that I am in Vermont now and may tread along the same paths that he walked on.

Those flowers might be purple or violet. No idea what they are called. Nice circles of around twenty petals attached to a tiny yellow pin cushion center. Most of these flowers have withered and are now surrounded by tall grass, spreading their seeds in the wind before the snow comes. After the long wait of winter there will be new flowers again, just as the trees will have new leaves when the snow melts away.

That tree is weird. It is as tall as the others but there is a big knot in the trunk three quarters of the way up. A birch? Definitely not oak or maple. The leaves are long and they turn light yellow before they fall. There are lots of young trees in jagged rows. Someone must have planted them, intentionally trying to create an effect so they look like they have grown naturally. Some thick, some thin, some with more branches and some less and their leaves are all green and they make a flat green horizon where all the leaves melt into each other.

Finally, here is the bridge across Otter Creek, just like the map said; a suspension bridge that bounces and sways with each step. It is made of steel cables and wood planks. The water moves lazily below, carrying with it a procession of fallen leaves of different colors and shapes and there is a perfect reflection of the cloudy sky with trees in the water where this silent creek bends upstream to the left. Dipping branches break the film of water making swirls against the flow that become bigger and then finally fade into the current. According to the map, there is no fish to be caught on this part of the creek. Maybe because it’s too shallow.

Rivers and streams have always been there wherever I went. I was born on a farm in Ladakh by the mighty Indus River. The village was called Spituk. Before we had a hand-pump on the farm, my aunts and uncles went to the river to fetch drinking water from the Indus. My mother told me how she used to cross it with her friends when she was young. It was a big river and it became bigger and brown like coffee in the spring when all the snow melted somewhere up there in the Himalayas in Tibet. I used to swim and fish in the stream that flowed through our farm. It was shaded by apple trees and tall grass grew on its banks. I used to sit there with my own fishing rod that I made with a stick and a bent nail tied at the end of a string. I did not know about baits. My grandma would try to call me back for lunch on those Saturdays but I shushed her because she disturbed the fish. Of course, I never really caught anything.

There was the Ganges in Banaras where my father taught at the Tibetan University. We Banarasis call it Ganga Ma – Mother Ganges. The water of Ganga has great healing powers and it never goes bad. It is used in Hindu and Buddhist rituals and there are hawkers selling it in small brass jars called lotas. Hindus from all over India come to Banaras to wash off their sins in the polluted waters of the Ganga. The shore of the Ganga is also the place for the final rites of the Hindus of the world. There is the cremation ground where they say the fires of the funeral pyres have never died. My father took me there to see burning dead bodies after we had gone for a nice boat ride in a rowing boat. I do not remember how it smelled but I saw sickly yellow feet sticking out of the pyres, bloating and steaming. There were people dressed in white mourning their loss and priests chanting mantras. Some people were collecting the ashes in a clay pot to release them into the Ganga. The waters of the Ganga will wash off the sins and those that have passed away will be reborn in a better place.

The path upstream along the creek is narrow and covered with ferns on both sides that brush against the legs. It runs counter-clockwise around the sports fields of Middlebury Union High School in a giant arc that can be part of a bigger circle. Rusty white goal posts are lying around with the empty benches on a wind blown soccer pitch.

Near my Tibetan boarding school in Dharamsala there was a big stream in a vale. You could hear it gushing all the time and it was much louder at night. The water always made its way around those boulders and rocks as you watched it from the rooftop terraces of the dorms. We used to go for swims in it even though it was not allowed by the school. I mostly swam downstream with the current because I was not a good swimmer and it was easier. Every monsoon that stream would rise with the rains and it would turn into a brown torrent and it did not matter whether it was night or day, the gushing was loud all the same. Then, the stream did not care about going around those boulders and rocks. It just forced its way through the valley with such voracity that when these periodic storms of monsoon stopped, we had to find new swimming holes because the stream had changed its course again.

One of the many branches of a big tree has fallen high over the path. The tree has leaves growing and changing colors on it. Although it is covered thick with green moss, the fallen branch still has some leaves growing on it. It is thick enough to be a tree itself. Eventually this branch will give in to the moss, the rains and the bugs. Much of it will go back into the soil and the creek from which it came. And then new trees will grow again on the same ground. There is no death in the woods and life gives in to life.

Now the creek bends away to the right but the path stays straight. It leads out to an open field where the grass is shaped by the wind like the waves in a stormy sea. A big puddle of rain water from yesterday pours into a gully that is going nowhere and random dandelion seeds are floating in the wind.

The path leads to a road where a few cars are passing by. Up ahead on the right are empty houses of a gated community. It might be the foreclosures. There are no gates yet. One of the empty houses is a model house open for clients to visit. A white picket fence runs around the periphery. The model house has a kitchen with bright yellow flowers on the window sill and cream colored walls with a grey roof. There is no construction going on, but there is a sign in the yard of the model house that says: Danger, Hard-Hatted Area. A couple on their morning walk stopped and looked at the model house and then went on their way. It is all part of the economic cycle. There are booms and busts. They just caught the wrong one this time.

Across the road is a middle school building. It is big and brown. There are no children playing in the fields because it is Saturday.

The concept of the weekend with free Saturdays and Sundays was strange. We used to have just Sunday free and Saturday was a half day. On Saturdays we could wear our casual clothes instead of the uniforms. When I went for the last two years of my high school at the United World College of India, I had both Saturdays and Sundays off. I did not know what to do with all that free time. I was quite hard at first. It was a strange feeling to be alone because it forced me to think about life, identity and all that stuff. I had never really thought about such things. Thinking about life seemed stupid to me. You go to university, get a degree, get a job, fall in love, marry a girl, have kids, make some money, maybe become famous and then die before you get too old. Again it was mostly those kids from other countries who were philosophical and could talk about life and politics. They were already exposed to so many different ideas about everything. Some of that rubbed off on me during those years. They went on hikes just to go on hikes as well. But I did not go along.

The path behind the empty school again leads into the woods. Back into the woods but there are not many maple trees. Just pine trees with pine needles that fall and cover the path underneath them like a carpet. Following the orange TAM signs into the woods there were two diverging trails again. One is longer and the other shorter but they both lead out to Vermont Route 7.

These woods are lovely and dark and deep. Battell Woods they are called. The grassy knoll that skirts around it looks almost like a part of the shire from the Lord of the Rings. The clouds are bluish gray in the distant horizon. There are no orange tags giving direction so let’s just tread on worn down paths. It is safer. It will be hard to get lost in these woods. Which way is the north? Looking at the sun does not mean anything because there are no well worn paths to take. Just choose a direction and keep walking. That map is useless.