Wildwood
I made a recent trip to the White Mountains of NH for a respite from the everyday everyday thing to sit in the woods forest bathing mind wandering waisting time staring at the fire and sleeping in a little tent with the moon and stars and tall trees all around.
I first went camping in my teenage years usually with friends my brother had a tent which I’m not sure that he had ever used so he gave it to me the old style canvas no floor and big rather heavy poles nothing like what you can get nowadays when your tent can be the size of a postage stamp and you open the package and presto.
In the White Mountain National Forest there is a campground and an area named after a town that used to exist in the way that some of those gold mining towns out west used to and this town Wildwood and its myths and legends carry on and rate historical marker coverage.
My tent bought many years ago in a fit of optimism and delusion and kept in my car unused for quite some time but in the last few years I have begun to go for these little camping trips and enjoyed the experiences.
No set calendar just a rough outline how the days are spent sometimes alone sometimes with a hermit friend who lives among the high peaks. I like to include kayaking this time it was on Long Pond in Benton and on the Connecticut River from Newbury VT. Also should be a short hiking trip or even just a walk in the woods and of course first order of business a run and a swim in a lake or a “ponds good enough for you.”
In the evening reading and writing this time Matt Fitzgerald’s “Running the Dream” which gave me some weird dreams of my own should have been committed past. Also a book titled “All this Marvelous Potential” Robert Kennedy’s visit to coal country Appalachia in 1968. Also each summer as sort of a summer reading thing I read some classic writer I have never read and this time I am just starting Celine’s “Death on the Installment Plan” I read “ Journey to the End of the Night” a few years ago.
And so the reading is part of the escape and stimulates the brain between that and all the exercise though nothing like in younger years still has the same effect if not more so. Older man, man of my experience of life needs to rest his aching head reflect and count his blessings.
Soundtrack: Gimme Shelter