I bought this book, Day Hikes of the Smokies, a few years ago at either a thrift store or a used bookstore, I can’t remember which, and it’s full of useful and practical information about the length and difficulty and landmarks of various trails, but there are also passages in it that read like poetry.
“The solstice is no more, and unmistakably no less, than another beat in the pulse of time. All life partakes of that pulse, and even the ancients who performed the rites knew and revered the rhythms. There was an almost sacred order to the seasons, an order still unchanged and unchanging. Man lived by the rhythms, and he knew it.
And no matter in what language we disguise them, man still lives by the rhythms. A solstice, and another Winter. Change within the eternal constant. And there lies the great assurance for man, whose pulse, whose breath, whose very life is of a rhythm beyond his understanding.“
“November nights are long and chill and full of stars and the crisp whisper of fallen leaves skittering in the wind. November nights are good for walking down a country road, when the world is close about you, a world drawn in bold charcoal strokes against the sky.
I suspect the reason is that night and darkness simplify the world to a point of understanding. The hill across the way is any hill, with substance but no detail. The valley has depth but no contours. The river is a path of sky with a handful of stars wavering in the rippled footsteps of the wind. The pines on the mountain are a thick, restless shadow leaping like a hound at the horizon. The house, from a little way off, is nothing but blinking yellow eyes, windows with no walls around them.
This is no complex world. It is a world of simple things, now brought to rest. Who can make complexity of wood smoke, so sharp on the night air? Or the barking of a dog announcing footsteps and leaf-rustle on the road? And what is so simple as a tall maple, all its leaves shed, silhouetted against the sky?
To walk on such a night is to know that the only mysteries are the great mysteries of all time - the stars, the heavens, the restless wind-tides, the spinning Earth, and man himself. Daylight and suntime are the time to explore these matters; nightime and darkness are the time to accept them and build dreams and poems upon them. Night, when the cool of the year has come, is the time to walk with them and know intimately the bold simplicities.”
