Why I Walk in the Woods

by Jay Paul

[Note: This piece was written back in September, when the weather allowed me to hike in the woods. I was too busy to write this week, so I found an old essay I had yet to publish.]

Walking through the woods at William O’Brien State Park north of Stillwater, I asked myself why I was there. Why did I drive an hour from my cozy apartment in Hopkins just to be there, walking with no one but the trees and squirrels and birds? I wondered what motivated me to do such a thing. I knew I liked walking there in the woods. But I didn’t know why.

Before I even got to “why,” though, I considered how lucky this schizoaffective man is. I have a car that I can drive to the woods. I have enough money to pay not only for gas, but for the park fee as well. I’m obese, but I can walk fairly long distances with no problem. Yes, I have a serious mental illness. But in many ways, I am quite lucky.

 

So I knew why I was grateful to be in those woods, yet I still wasn’t sure what brought me there in the first place. I can go for long walks in the city. There are even nature centers located a 10-minute drive from my house where I can be in the woods. What is it about these woods, a fair distance from home?

 

I heard the wind blow the trees high up in the canopy. I wondered if it would rain; they predicted scattered showers that day. I heard each time my heel contacted the dirt of the trail. The rhythm of it. The rocking.

 

Something about walking, any walking, is soothing. How often do people say they “need to go for a walk” when they are feeling upset or anxious? Part of the soothe is the burning off of nervous energy. But this could happen with any exercise. Something about the motion of walking itself soothes. The rhythm and rock of heel to toe to air to heel on each foot. 

 

It's as if my body becomes a metronome. Better yet, I become my own drummer in this ensemble about me. As I drum out the beat with my rocking feet the leaves fall from the branches, shimmying in the breeze. A squirrel scurries across the trail. A chipmunk bleats. An unidentified bird sings, and another answers, perhaps alerting each other to the presence of this walking human in their territory.

 

Things do come together in a kind of ragged melody and harmony. Of course, I know the squirrel and the chipmunk and the birds do not exist solely for my song, but there is a sense that this song is greater than I or we. The birds and the other animals certainly behave differently because I am around. And I behave differently because they are around—perhaps stopping the beat to stand still and watch a blue jay flit from branch to branch before it flies off into the thicket.

 

I am not the maestro of this symphony. I’m merely the drummer. There is no maestro for this sort of music. Nobody directs it all. Instead, it falls out according to the myriad conditions bringing all of us—the maintained trail, the birds, the squirrels, my walking—together into forms beyond any one element’s ken. I can only hear parts of the symphony I help form.

 

I can only hear parts because so much is beyond me. Unlike a musical symphony that has a definite center in the interpretation the conductor makes of the composer’s score, my walk ultimately has innumerable centers. Just as I swing my leg for the next step forward, my focus, a blade of grass tilts toward a slant of sun, its focus, and a trickle of water works its way down a crevice, its focus.

 

This vibrancy is what separates a walk in the woods from a walk in town. There, the human intention of the last 50 or 60 years determines everything, from where the streets go to which trees remain standing to how long the grass is. In the woods, there is much less of that. Instead, billions of years of natural selection is brought to bear not on the moment, but on the moments, plural, in each beat of time. All the various foci somehow come together in a unity beyond my comprehension that I nonetheless participate in.

 

Before I started writing this essay, I didn’t know what exactly motivated me to get out into the woods and hike. I have a better idea, now. The music I and my fellow musicians make in the woods is of a different quality and tenor than the one I make with my fellow humans and their houses and cars and bikes as I walk in the city. I go to the woods to help make a different kind of song.

 

Sometimes I wonder what happens in the woods when no humans are walking down the trail. There is a famous essay by Thomas Nagel entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat.” I have yet to read it, though it is on my list. Maybe then I will have a better idea what it’s like to be an animal, but I doubt it. I have a sneaking suspicion that, from the perspective of that whole, infinitely multiple symphony we make together, they are not so different from us. Imagine a lone male deer walking down the trail, antlers high, and the birds calling to each other to announce his presence.