If you are very quiet, treading softly, watching carefully, listening closely, you may come around a bend in the trail and hear the low, cooing hum of the mother sooty grouse – appropriately called given its intricate camouflage – calling, scolding really, for its twin little ones to please report to their mother – as in now! – because there is a human coming down the trail.
And then you see them. The twins are apparently playing tag, scampering about, first this way across the trail into the underbrush and then back again, clearly ignoring their mother’s repeated attempts to gather her brood.
I smiled. So like our own children sometimes when they were growing up.
Bouquets, sometimes entire hillsides, of Cascade Asters greet you as you saunter on.
Yes, we saunter in the forests, we do not hike. Sauntering is to go slow, gently, relaxed, unhurried.
To hike is to see the mountain.
To saunter is to see the flowers.
Hiking will get you there.
Sauntering will too, but chances are, along the way you’ll notice the beauty in simplicity, the countless diamond droplets on a single leaf for example, as many or more twinkling points of light as you saw stars twinkling in the sky the night before.
A walk in the woods is best suited for the woeful, the weary, the woebegone.
The widow.
The widower.
The woods are where their wounds are treated.
They find what they are looking for above them, and around them.
And within them.
