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High Pines trail
Sep. 20th, 2004 10:17 am
On our last day at Bon Echo, we argued over a plant. She said it was hemp, but it was cinquefoil. We had already discussed it at the cottage, where she found one along the roadside, took me back to see. I explained, cleared up the confusion. Cinquefoil doesn't always have five leaflets. It has yellow flowers.The last day at Bon Echo, Marian didn't want to hike, didn't want to swim, wasn't interested in anything. Asked to be left at the campsite alone. No, I said. We went hiking the High Pines trail.
Marian had started walking a few paces behind Brenna and I, did that all summer, her too-big shoes shuffling in leaves. She says she has wide feet. She is 12 years old, five feet tall and wears men's size nine. Now she says she wears the biggest shoes in her school. She wants everything too big and dangling, wants to swim. What lake is she swimming in? Doesn't go with me and Brenna. Where is she stroking the dark? Nobody is watching her. I don't want her to drown.
A parent worries endlessly. It's hard to let go. Let them make their own choices sometimes. I let her make choices, so when I put my foot down she listens.
She wasn't listening about the cinquefoil. I saw it along the whole path that day, pale yellow flowers, five petals.
When we got deeper into the woods, she caught up with me. "I saw hemp back there," she said. "It wasn't cinquefoil. It didn't have stalks."
"It was cinquefoil. There were yellow flowers all along the path," I said.
It was the same plant we had agreed about before. Today we weren't agreeing. I had forced her to come on this hike, so it was hemp.
Why should we quarrel over a single plant, when 300,000 species became extinct in the latter half of the 20th century? We're picking them off like clay ducks.
Why should I go pack shelves in a grocery store when I can earn $25 an hour in Quebec harvesting marijuana? I don't think it's a good idea to legalize the stuff. If we do, our teenagers won't have anything to pad their pockets, buy themselves iPods.
I won't know how to earn a living. I still don't. I never will, unless I move to Quebec with my friends from Rhode Island, buy a farm and grow hemp so I can show my daughter what it really looks like. If I grew the stuff, I wouldn't want the country to legalize it. That would eat up my small fortune, nest egg, stash in the wilderness, hope for the future.
We didn't go back to look at that silly plant, standing alone by the path. We continued on, scrambling over lichenous rocks. I got tired of hearing her shuffle five paces behind me and slowed down. Then she sped up, sped over trails littered with pine needles, disappeared into the distance. Brenna was back and forth like a golden retriever, far ahead, far behind, combing the woods for beauty. The whole hour we walked alone, three solitudes.
On the rocks we found depressions carved and painted. Were they petroglyphs? No, the bear prints looked too realistic. A walking trail painted into the hills, pointillist dappling through the trees, tiptoeing among mushrooms, inviting us into a dream world where cinquefoil smells sour. A shoddy boy passing on the street, strange air seeping over fence tops, squalor among pines, endless poverty.
At the top of the rocks, the air fell suddenly hot on our shoulders. The patches under my arms were soaked. All I could think of was descending and swimming. We stood around, silent and contorted as pines caught in a northern wind atop the cliff. A lifetime battering us, tearing our branches, making us fit for a Buddhist temple.
