Hike-a-day Plus Vitamins

"Some People worship nature. Others consider such worship blasphemous. Most of us are less direct; just beyond the veil of rain, we feel a presence for which we have no name. Or no presence at all, except beauty and terror. Whatever form wonder takes, nature gives us, at the very least, kinship." – Richard Louv, "Vitamin N for the Soul"

4/22

Poor spring weather can always become a hindrance to heading outside for no good reason other than just getting outside. When it is nice outside, and the long lines of good weather walkers begin march along the sidewalks and the bridge out here across the street, we know that it is far more pleasant and easy to slip on a pair of shoes, destination be damned, and just walk around the block. The vitamin D feels at these moments as though it is veritably seeping through our pores; sometimes you see the early spring scenes of folks doing nothing but sitting on the stoops of their front porches with eyes closed absorbing something that has been mostly unavailable for many months. Like plants and flowers, I suspect, the human organism really a creature of either organic growth or hibernation. Do we know of any extra vitamins that we absorb as we sit inside our living rooms throughout the winter months? It doesn't seem so. The trick is to figure out how to yank oneself outside despite the weather. After days of dark quiet in April, it can sometimes be very shocking to the senses to head out on that same exact walk during hours of the day that are raining, cold, sunless. In contrast to the silence, even the raindrops hold out some new sounding chord; the wintering bird, or the just barely arriving, do still make their shrill sounds from somewhere off in the distance; as you walk along the river, here anyway, the flap of a canvasback along the top of the water is almost always present. Walk along the paths of the conservatory marshlands and look left or right to the naturally occurring drumlin ponds and you will see others quietly streak across the surface; a pair of cold cold geese dip their beaks into ice water. A hike a day is, whether we want to think it or not, like taking vitamins. The fact that we 

don't do it is just an indication that every person already knows: it doesn't truly matter what is good for us, or what we even know, through raw experience, we need – we only on rarer occasions will do it anyway. If we heed that instinctual awareness and yank ourselves out of the house out into a 30 degree day that has no prospects for sun, we return and say to ourselves, 'that was worth it.' But do we do it again, again? If we take a vitamin D supplement once because we know we are lucking sunshine in our day, will that absorb and assist in our bloodstream? Of course not. Give it a month, then we will be able to tell that we are on a regimen. Same with hikes. The only thing that we can think of that would be consistently good for us, the hike, we might think, should be regimented in the same way as a vitamin. Two days ago, driving back from a workout facility, I felt the itch for a vitamin N (nature) and temporarily wrestled in my mind whether I wanted to drive the extra ten miles to Governor Nelson State Park, a very nice local lake park that is also a great example of native oak savannah. At the last moment, I took the necessary right turn and drove to the park, parked in a parking lot that empty except for one other car, then took the mowed path around the rolling prairie hills of the oak savannah that was lit like a beige bonfire by spring sunshine. The burr oaks were leafless and charcoal black, lining the path, ancient, but seemingly guardians, holding underneath their deep trunks often a bluebird house, some with young eyes peeking out of the front holes. There was a slight breeze and it rustled through all the desiccated marsh grass. Because there was no one else on the path, and because traffic relatively low along that stretch of the highway that parallels the 

Park, it took virtually no work whatsoever to imagine this oak savannah from another epoch of Wisconsin history, when this would have been a predominant scene pre-pioneer. The same psychic muscles that we use when we read our history - the ones that are able to match up facts and imagination – are used when we consider natural history. The trees are not just current marks on the landscape but, almost eerily, of course, much older than us, the dominant living features, and make our own brief journey not just along this particular path, but along our own paths in life, seem awfully transitory. That brief reckoning with self and our truest elders, the savannah itself, is, let's face it, impossible to reveal from the couch. The couch and our gadgets are in many ways sycophants of ourselves, always teaming up to show us our temporality and the supposed import of our modern hours as they relate to....the very technology we have in our hand! It is the self-referential loop, and it constructs very little except for an insulated notion that this is enough, this is plenty, and that we should be able to move through the rest of our days safely with phone in hand. The oak and the grass, the marsh and dead leaves, are us, and we see ourselves inside it whether we allow for the full thought or not. The vitamin here is something then that does tinker with the soul; for the soul is all of the humanity coiled up into a bundle. The past, the history, the senses, the experience, the future, the love of fear, the hope and the reckoning, all is soul. Vitamin N can sound something like a ploy or something out in left field, but that is only the surface and immediate thought of someone who is not allowing themselves time to take a brief look into their very own experiences. It's a kind of knee jerk self rejection not to accept that there is such a thing as vitamin N. As I walked back to my car, a little soulful urge had quickly come on me; just as two hours ago there was a little urge to keep my car on the path back home, to engage back into my routine, I now wondered what it would be like if I never had to go back home, but could walk back up into the contours of the bright prairie and figure out how to be human again.