Nestled, as we are, next to Puget Sound, a winter walk on the Farm is generally a saunter through a muted world; a walk where my own thoughts are likely to be louder than most things external. Humptulips County’s climate is wet and relatively warm. Temperatures often hover in the high 40s or low 50s, and, when it isn’t raining, the sky is leaden and cloying mists linger in the hollows eager to capture and deaden sound. It is not a climate designed to elicit rapturous joy; instead, it is one promotive of bundling both within home and burrow which seeks to create the sort of atmosphere of isolation in which self-reflection is king.
When I walk outside on winter days, I must listen carefully to assure myself that there is life abroad other than my own. The lack of leaves on the deciduous trees allows the faint bluster of the swollen river in the distant valley behind the house to combine with the intermittent engine growl from the equally distant freeway to create the white noise in which self-reflection may flower. Birds, not humans, are the only other species usually heard from, but the relative infrequency of their calls attests to the small size of winter flocks and serves to remind me of my relative isolation.
The most clearly heard sound on my walks is the crunch of my own shoes on our gravel driveway. When I stop to look around and listen, it disappears and the muted world reasserts itself as if to ask who I think I am to disturb its cloistered silence. For this is a time of resting and dreaming, a time when nature is content to abide within the stillness of expectation; this is a time when nature prefers to meditate upon endless possibilities in self-absorbed satisfaction even as the sources of those forthcoming circumstances which will limit those possibilities are being ground to dust by the pestles of fate and mixed together within the crucibles of chance. Humanity’s vague scrabblings are not welcome within this cathedral of repose.
But I persist of necessity, for I have no way to return to my own womb of self-contemplation but to complete the walk which I’ve started. And as I resume, the crunch of gravel returns to defy the prevailing norm and intrude upon nature’s somnolent dreams in the same unapologetic way that mankind has exhibited throughout the decades of human existence. And thanks to the rhythm of this lonesome song, I realize I am not alone nor have I ever been.
