What goes up must come down

Sunday afternoon, knees creaking with every step, I remembered ABC’s Wide World of Sports intro from many years ago and thought the wording could be changed to, “The thrill of summiting and the agony of descent.”

Coming down Cannon earlier this summer.

Hiking can be a punishing sort of pleasure, even more so with kids, and I was feeling the punishing part of it on the way down Mount Moosilauke.

There was a time when I preferred the downhill to the up. I remember running down trails as a kid, exhilarated by the speed and making daring leaps over obstacles. Not once did I consider my knees and their perfect cartilage.

Those days are long gone. Now, the descents are often, indeed, agonizing. My knees grind and click with every step. I lean heavily into my hiking poles to get through the steepest parts of the trail. Somehow, I still expect the down to take less time than the up, but that is rarely the case.

“When will we be at the bottom?” the youngest hikers in our group asked repeatedly during Sunday’s descent of the steep Beaver Brook Trail, when each landmark we remembered from the trek upward seemed impossibly far away from the last one we’d passed.

The tradeoff for the pain of going down, of course, is reaching the lofty tops of mountains after going up, looking over a small piece of the world from thousands of feet higher than when you started. On the upward journey, there is the promise of the summit, of views that stretch for miles across other peaks and into neighboring states.

Sunday’s hike up Moosilauke also included scrambling along pretty waterfalls and marveling at the wooden steps bolted into granite ledges for our climbing pleasure. The kids checked out a backpacking shelter just off the trail, the boys distracted themselves with some imaginary game they’d devised, and the younger girls happily plucked bright red bunchberries from the edge of the path.

There was mild consternation at the steepness and length of the climb, but this was easily assuaged by doling out chocolate and well-timed breaks. Less than a mile from the summit, a tweaked knee threatened to keep the 8-year-old tweakee and her mother (me) from the top, but with the goal tantalizingly close, she power-limped through.

And then – ahhh. What a summit! What a thrill! I’d be long content at the top of about any mountain I’ve climbed – at least on days like Sunday, which was sunny and bug-free and warm even at nearly 5,000 feet up. I could sit there and watch cloud shadows drift across the landscape for hours.

Alas, the world below always eventually calls.

With our summit aspirations met, lunches dug out of backpacks and hungrily consumed, and obligatory top-of-the-mountain photos taken, our merry crew of five kids, two dogs, and three creaky-kneed grownups headed down. The kids were raring to get back on the trail, unimpressed in their youth with contemplating life from on high. We adults, though, lamented the quickness with which we were back below treeline, away from the views and the openness of the summit.

On tired legs, we slowly made our way down the mountain. Back through the high-elevation fir forest, descending until we reached birches and mountain ash, following the trail back to the steep cascades of Beaver Brook, picking our way carefully down the wooden blocks and boulder steps. Once down, we piled, relieved and exhausted, into the car, where the dog promptly fell asleep with her head in the littlest’s lap.

“That was not my favorite hike,” said littlest told me when we reached home.

That’s an easy sentiment to hold immediately after a challenging climb and descent. But once we’re all showered and fed and have unloaded our packs, we remember most the fun – or funny – parts of each hike. The moon rising over Mt. Lafayette and that sense of awe in looking out across a wilderness nearly unmarred by human activity. The gray jays that ate puffed corn snacks off the kids’ heads on Mt. Jackson (incidentally, on the way down that not-as-steep trail). Our famished dog thieving a pizza lunch on Moosilauke (not funny at the moment, but something I bet we’ll all remember for a long time).

We tend to forget the hardest parts of each hike and hold tight to the special memories and the lofty places that make hearts sing. In the end, we are always happy to have gone up a mountain – even if it means we’ve also had to come down. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the September 22, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.

A Tale of Two Seasons

On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, rather than going for a hike or a bike ride or an end-of-summer trip to the beach, we settled into what felt like a fall day. That morning was one of a string of chilly mornings, and the day’s damp start turned into a steady rain by lunch time. I was tempted to nudge the thermostat up and kick the furnace into action for the first time since May, but it just seemed too early.

Some gifts of the changing seasons.

Instead, we lit a fire in the fireplace, letting the woodpecker-drilled logs of an old apple tree burn into fresh ashes on the hearth floor, swept clean months ago. We dug through the shorts and t-shirts of summer to find jeans and fleece tops and socks. And during the big weekly grocery shop, I put a roasting chicken into the cart rather than something to throw on the grill. For good measure, we added locally-grown apples to bake into a pie.

It’s a bittersweet transition, this shift from full summer to early fall. I lament the new darkness of early mornings and the relative freedom of summer days spent mostly with the kids, but I am also relieved to get back to a more predictable routine of work, school, soccer practice – busy as it is.

Probably it was that return to the school year schedule that meant the kids were happy enough to spend a rainy day inside Sunday. Although the hauling out and tidying up of bedrooms was met with a chorus of complaints, the rest of the day they were content to cozy up inside, read, play a few games. Not a bike was ridden, nor a ball kicked all day. There was no tree-climbing or swimming hole jumping or even digging in the sandbox.

It was a stay-at-home day unlike any we’ve had since the flip-flops came out – and are unlikely to see again until that brief window in November between the end of soccer season and the start of ski season.

That nestling in against the cool and gray of outside, the crackle of the fire and cinnamon-tinted scent of apples baking felt welcomingly cozy. Still, we were happy when Monday dawned suddenly summery again. Back we went to doors flung open to warmth and brightness, to running around barefoot in the grass, to savoring the waning light of summer. That night I pushed aside the extra blanket I’d added during the recent chilly nights and slept again with windows wide open, on sheets dried on the line and smelling of sunshine.

Despite the rainy week that has ensued, that brief return to summer amid autumnal weather was a reminder that we haven’t fully turned the corner into fall yet. We are on the transitionary cusp, with one foot loitering in summer, even as the other one is stepping toward fall.

Yes, the mornings and evenings are darker now, the leaves are making their undeniable transition from summer green to autumn red-orange-gold, and the vegetables remaining in the garden are of the hardier variety – beets and carrots and kale – but chances are we’ll have a few more days that feel like summer. Days where we can toss aside the sweaters and pull out the t-shirts again, turn faces to the sun, maybe dip still-tanned toes into the cool river. Days that seem like a gift from the passing season, even as we cozy up to the next one.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the September 8, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.

Mowing

I have been helping to mow our fields these last weeks of August, making long work out of what could be done by an experienced operator in a few days.

 This mowing is far from Robert Frost’s contemplative whispering scythe, though the poet kept his own fields just down the hill from ours some 100 years ago. No, our field is long past hay, if it was ever used for that, and is full of an array of wildflowers and brush and ferns. There is nothing whispering about the tractor, which gives a baritone rev when I turn the key, before settling into a deep mechanical purr. Where a scythe would clang resoundingly, I imagine, should its curved blade meet a boulder, the old bush hog instead grinds to a shuddering stop when I fail to avoid those brush-hidden chunks of granite left by the glaciers eons ago.

Probably I should have helped with the mowing long before now, but I have left the task to my husband, who has much more tractor-driving experience, for all the years we’ve been living here. The truth is that I am a bit afraid of the big, green John Deere tractor, with its noises and levers and giant, churning wheels. But I am getting used to driving it, learning how to maneuver around obstacles, though I have left the more challenging spots – like the tumbledown apple orchard with its trunks and low-hanging branches and hidden stumps – for my husband to mow.

Despite still being a bit edgy behind the wheel as I bump along – sitting on the front edge of the seat to reach the tractor’s pedals – I have found that I like the distraction of mowing, the redrawing of the landscape little by little. And while it is certainly not a quiet chore, I have found mowing can be a contemplative one.  

The first day I mowed, as I nervously watched for rocks and endeavored to avoid overhanging branches, a rainbow arced across the sky at dusk to land behind the mountains. Another afternoon the tractor, crawling noisily along, spooked two deer from where they must have been bedded down in the still-tall grass. They bounded in the opposite direction, down the hill and through the row of old apple trees, all lithe bodies and big eyes, their sleek pelts deep amber in the summer sun.

As I trundle along I am rediscovering the anatomy of our fields from the perspective of a tractor seat. I mow down to Big Rock, site of occasional picnic lunches; around the old burn pile, twined now with growing things; as near to the ancient, tumbling stone walls as I dare creep. I mow over rocks and around trees, through unseen ruts and across surprisingly muddy areas, where the tractor’s big wheels threaten to sink (and, indeed, sometimes do) under its heft into the soft ground.

I’ve watched poor meadow voles scurrying away and leaping mice hurdling over freshly cut clumps of grass to flee the path of destruction. One day I stopped to move an abandoned board left in the field and did some scurrying of my own, high-stepping back to the tractor to get away from the startled and writhing snakes I found beneath the wood. Probably they were garter snakes, but I didn’t stick around long enough to confirm their identity.

Little by little, I have mowed swaths through the tall, dead stalks of lupine that two months ago were filled with purple blooms and are now covered in seed pods dried to a mottled gray-brown. Mingling with these gone-by flowers are lofty tufts of bright yellow goldenrod and late-summer asters in white and purple, which I lament knocking down mid-bloom.

It is not all destruction, though. The patch of blueberry bushes still producing a few fruits I have left untouched, for now. Same with a few of the blackberry brambles, whose fruits are just ripening. If we don’t get to picking them, surely the bears will. The other day I stopped the tractor to break a section of pin cherry off so I could save a goldfinch nest – long abandoned at this point in the season – to admire its perfect cup, which once held eggs and growing chicks, and the birds’ method of affixing the nest to the tree by spider web silk.

And, with the destruction comes rejuvenation. Left unmown, the fields would revert to forest more quickly than it seems possible for trees to grow. In a section of the field that was not mowed last year the pin cherry and brushy willow saplings have grown bold and tall, requiring multiple passes with the bush hog to knock down. In another few years, these trees and others, the berry brambles, the scrubby bushes would align to block the view of the mountains, swallow the old apple orchard completely, change a habitat that has been, if not constant, at least similar for many decades. 

So we mow, contributing to the cycle our fields have grown into: from winter snow to the dull hues of early spring before color creeps back into the landscape and the fields’ grasses and ferns and flowers grow as high as our knees, then our waists, then our shoulders and beyond, blooming into summer before being cut down to do it all again.

There is no whispering scythe here, but the fields hold poetry just the same.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the August 25, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.