Maine Cliff Walk a Lot Like Life
/The Boston Herald
The path is familiar. I have been walking it for nine summers now. I know where the roots of trees protrude, where rocks jut, where poison ivy hides, where blueberries and raspberries nestle, where puddles form when it rains, where tiny yellow birds perch, where the brush is so thick that the path seems to disappear, where the broadest view of the Atlantic is.
The path isn't exactly as it was nine years ago. It isn't even the same as it was a month ago. That's what makes it interesting.
"Aren't you bored, yet? Don't you ever get tired of walking along the same old place?" my children ask every time I bolt from the car and head immediately toward it. "No," I tell them. "I don't get sick of it. It's the same, but it's different, too.
This path that I love is a cliff walk which meanders through brush and rock and sand and parallels a stretch of ocean that is a part of Prouts Neck, Maine. There are other cliff walks and other paths, hundreds of thousands of others all over the world, but this is the one I love. It is home to me in a way that my real home is not. I come to it for strength and peace. I am renewed by it, and humbled and awed.
In the early spring before the sun parches the soil and prods the living things awake, the path is a walkway of mud. But you can see through the bushes then, the briars and branches bare, to the huge homes which sit above the ocean like royalty, their wide verandahs and walls of windows incongruously big in this place of simple pleasures.
In June, it's a different place: green. Branches bear furry things that look like pussywillows but aren't, and orange flowers and bright red berries. Ducks squawk and gulls squeal, and from the homes now hidden from view, come the summer sounds of people partying and the smell of charcoal blending with sea and sand.
All summer the path grows lusher. New life burgeons, and the walk gets thinner and thinner. Blueberries, raspberries and blackberries ripen, small yellow birds appear, butterflies flutter and pink roses that a friend tells me are rosa rugosa bloom everywhere.
I could walk this path 10 times a day, and each time see something new, inhale a fragrance I've never smelled before, hear a new sound, observe a new wonder. That's the thing. I am here with eyes trained to search the path for rocks and holes, eyes so occupied with the journey, with the obvious, with not tripping and falling that they fail to take in all that is above, below, beside and behind me.
I am here with a nose so used to gas fumes and cigarette smoke and the strong, harsh smells of every day life that it doesn't sense all of nature's subtle sweetnesses. I am here with ears accustomed to noise not nuance, so the whisper of grasshoppers eludes me.
The path, I think, is a metaphor for life. The same, but different. Full of wonders we don't notice. Here we are, day after day, year after year, treading along a familiar landscape. Seasons, holidays, birthdays, celebrations, these are all predictable. They come again and again. But danger lurks between and among them. We have to watch out. We have to look ahead, beware of what might trip us up, make us slide, sting, bite, hurt, maim, kill us.
And so we walk, ever vigilant, ever alert, on the lookout for DANGER, seeing only steep inclines and jagged rocks and poison berries and the snakes lurking and storm clouds forming because this path called life requires that we use our senses to pay attention to these things because anyone of them could do us in.
"The world will never starve for want of wonders but for want of wonder," the English journalist Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote 100 years ago.
Is it because it takes so much effort simply to survive in this world that we don't pay as much attention to these wonders? Is it because we are always on the lookout that we see only the dangers and disasters?
Stuck in the here and now, afraid to let down our guard, surrounded by bad news, we too seldom see the gifts the earth continually offers. We are so busy navigating the trip that we don't stand still long enough to look out, up, ahead, behind at a sky that, in a single day, turns from turquoise to pink to blue to black. We don't linger long enough, or inhale deeply enough or feel passionately enough all that is good and beautiful around us.
On the cliff walk I slow down. I notice. I appreciate. I am grateful to be alive. Back home I hear the traffic and smell its fumes and turn on the radio and read the newspaper and in minutes forget how lovely life can be.
