The day started as it always does: I drove my youngest daughter to school. Rather than turn homeward, I headed to Monkton, a small town north of Baltimore, where I live, and to the rail trail that dead-ends about 35 miles in southeastern Pennsylvania. The trail is my tonic in the other three seasons, when I bike on it almost every weekend, sometimes as many as 25 miles a day. I'd never been on it in winter, but the day was bright and I was restless, so getting outside seemed like a sensible thing to do. After all, every how-to-be-a-writer handbook says the great advantage of being in my racket is that I control my hours: I work when I want to work, play when I want to play, nap when I want to nap. It was about time I took advantage of the situation.
Ordinarily, I'm not a walker. Walking is a functional way to get around, one that sometimes just can't be avoided. But I take greater pride in my biking, in shifting those 21 gears on my Raleigh, in knowing that my safety rests on the thin, narrow patch of the tires that touch the ground at any given moment, in hearing my own huffing and puffing as I approach the top of a hill--certain, at last, that I'll make it to the crest. But since it was winter, I went to the trail sans bike. The breeze created by biking would have generated a wind-chill factor below freezing--and I'm not that much of a masochist.
So for five miles, I walked--briskly, then slowly, then even more slowly. I wasn't out there to set records. Just to get fresh air and clean out my mind. I found that unlike biking, in which the world whizzes right by you, walking gives you a chance to see things as they are. And to see them much more closely. To remember, as Ecclesiastes says:
One generation goes, another comes.
But the earth remains the same forever.
The sun rises, and the sun sets--
And glides back to where it rises.
With the leaves gone from the trees, the trail seemed brighter and more open than it does the rest of the year, although more barren and, in its own way, more lonely. The sky was clear, with long, scattered striations of clouds. A jogger wearing a red sweatshirt and black tights barreled toward me, and neither of us looked at the other--uncertain of the etiquette of a lone woman and a lone man being on a near-deserted path in the middle of the week.
