Walking Is Drawing: Mount Wachusett: The Second Time

On August 14, 2013 I headed off for Mount Wachusett for the second time (GPS drawings appear at the end of this post). Thoreau made 2 trips to Wachusett, his second being in October of 1854. This time he went by train to Westminster and from there on foot. He stayed at the Foster house on this trip, 4 miles from the train. It was then a 2 mile walk to the summit via the summit road. On his first trip to Wachusett Mountain in 1842 which he documented in A Walk to Wachusett, Thoreau was still very much under the sway of the classics, looking to find evidence of their universality in the world around him and through them place himself, "Who knows but this hill may one day be a Helvellyn, or even a Parnassus, and the Muses haunt here, and other Homers frequent the neighboring plains?"

By 1852, he seems more in tune with his own physical and spiritual experience and how that fits into the universal fabric. The mountains are not symbols, nor are they mythic. They are, however, for Thoreau evidence of the divine, "We could at length realize the place mountains occupy on the land, and how they come into the general scheme of the universe. When first we climb their summits and observe their lesser irregularities, we do not give credit to the comprehensive intelligence which shaped them; but when afterward we behold their outlines in the horizon, we confess that the hand which moulded their opposite slopes, making one to balance the other, worked round a deep centre, and was privy to the plan of the universe..." This is a more mature Thoreau, out from under his education and mentors.

For me, coming from a zen perspective, I appreciate Thoreau's reliance on his direct experience, but he loses me a bit with the notion of a creative "hand" involved in their making. However, on the other hand (what is the sound of that hand?), in zen there is a saying, "Before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains, and water was water. After studying Zen for some time, mountains were no longer mountains, and water was no longer water. But now, after studying Zen longer, mountains are just mountains, and water is just water." This speaks of a deeper understanding of things not having a separate self, but arising from a myriad of things that are not that self, what in buddhism is called sunyata which translates as emptiness. The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls this co-arising Interbeing. It is at the heart of zen and what I was referring to in my post on Dogen's Genjokoan.

This is an image from the road leading to Mt. Wachusett. If a hand didn't "mould" the mountain, hands definitely created the ski trails, 3 of which I crossed over on the hike.

If my last hike on North Pack Monadnock was about water, moss, blueberries and ultimately Dogen's Genjokoan, this one seemed all about stones. On the way up I took the Bicentennial Trail to Mountain House Trail which I took to the top. As I documented in my first Mt. Wachusett post, the Bicentennial Trail is rocky and rooty and this day was a bit slick after a brief, overnight shower. To my great pleasure the dampness brought out an unexpected sight: a red eft making his way between the roots. the red eft is the juvenile, land-dwelling stage of the eastern newt. Apologies for the poor image. I was balancing on a slippery root as I made this shot.

Mountain House Trail is an almost entirely human-built trail ("the comprehensive intelligence which shaped them?"). It is a riprap of stones creating a path up the mountain. American poet Gary Snyder who worked on trail crews out west in the 1950's found a way into his mature poetry through working on ripraps. His breakthrough collection was in fact titled Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. When I saw this trail the poem immediately came to mind. Snyder, and his work: poetry, essays, and environmental activism, has been and continues to be an important figure for me.

Riprap

by Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
		placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
		in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
		riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
		straying planets,
These poems, people,
		lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
		and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
		four-dimensional
Game of Go.
		ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
		a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
		with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
		all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

Mountain House Trail

It was quite fun to clunk my stick on the stones as I ascended. It counted my steps and rang out like a gong. It occurred to me that I've had that stick for nearly 20 years. Near the summit I made another little friend. This peeper was hunkered down in the moss. He was no more than 2 inches long, an over-estimate. One of the things I miss, living away from the country as I now do is the sound of peepers in the spring (and tree frogs and owls and crickets and...).

I took the long way round coming down, deciding to visit Balance Rock. Balance Rock is a glacial remnant, totaling about 20 feet in height. The rocks may have been "stacked" as the glacier melted or, more likely, are the only two remaining of a boulder field shifted or scattered by the glacier. Some of those rocks may be the ones surrounding the clearing. I took Old Indian Trail to West Trail to Semuhenna Trail, which joined back up with Old Indian, to Balance Rock Trail.

As I said, it seems to be all about the rocks. While Balance Rock is a spectacle, I feel drawn to all the stones. There is a great silence within them and around them... more than anything else I encounter in these forests, these great stones, sitting like great buddhas, are manifestations of time.

As for drawing... if a line is the trace of a point moving in space, well...