By Jessica Wimett
I have always been a gal with itchy feet and a nomadic compass. My aspirations often included an element of the new: different rocks to climb, fresh snow to ride, open roads to explore. I’d felt most at home in the tenuous jumping off point between here and there, lost in the meandering journey between destination points.
When I arrived in the Adirondacks three years ago, I assumed I’d establish the same casual love em’ and leave em’ relationship that I’d adopted with most of my favorite locales. I imagined enjoying a summer of exploring the deciduous expanses of the Champlain Valley, but nothing more. That was the summer however, that everything changed for me.
By the subsequent winter, I was starting a family here. It was on the CATS Black Kettle Trail, that I decided on a name for my then unborn daughter. As the dry snow crunched like gritting teeth under the bare white spines of birch, I wove through the stillness and onto a ridge that looked out over a marshy frozen pasture. My partner was standing next to me, gazing over the innumerable snow diamonds refracting pink light across the field. AMAYA! The cloud of frozen breath accentuated the name like a magic trick. My partner nodded. It was decided there in the taciturn radiance of that Adirondack sunset, that this would be her name. I looked it up on the Internet that night and found that Amaya was a Basque word for a great resolution. We’d found our name. I’d found my home.
“A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.” ~Edward Abbey
The CATS trails, for me, have become entry points into the layers of deeper exploration involved in connecting to this land. There is something inexplicably satisfying about earning the secrets of a forest, beyond surface observations. To learn which bend in the Boquet River a great blue heron is sure to be stalking fish, where I might gather morels and fiddleheads in the spring, or what the memorable scream of a fox sounds like in the stillness of evening. I’ve developed a sense of intimacy with this area that somehow connected me to a deeper knowing of myself.
I now work at Dogwood Bakery in Wadhams. It has provided me a way to connect with the community living, working, and playing in this valley. I am always tickled on Friday nights, when we stay open late for our weekly wood-fired pizza night, at the tapestry of patrons. Crowded around family-style tables, the cacophony of divergent conversations reverberates from the old beams of the bakery, creating the old-time feel of a weekly social. In one small room, there often includes muddy booted farmers, school teachers, yoga instructors, retirees, conservationists, arborists, filmmakers, excavation crews, massage therapists, carpenters, potters, politicians, and even a Hollywood actress thrown in for good measure.
This variety has always stunned me. For such a rural area, the wealth of resources and knowledge within the population here is limitless. Just as the CATS trails have made the natural world more attainable, the Champlain Valley continues to evolve and highlight the skills and knowledge of its divergent population. With the revival of plays and other cultural events at the Whallonsburg Grange Hall; the introduction of Live Well, a collective of yoga, massage, physical therapy, and more; and the continuation of events at Black Kettle Farm, folks here have supportive forums to share their talents. Our bakery bulletin board at work is often a collage of enticement, for events such as meditation workshops, movie nights, lyceums, book readings, visiting naturalists, and barn dances. Living here in the Champlain Valley, has endowed me with the beauty of finding roots, and letting them absorb the nurturing properties of living in a true community.
I recently took Amaya for a hike on the Beaver Flow Trail. Bobbing next to me, insisting on holding a walking stick and taking her gloves off, I watched my daughter open to the natural world. Every few feet, she’d bend low on her little haunches; furrow her brow to poke a pudgy finger into a patch of moss, or a runaway eff. I had initiated our hike with an urgency to reach the beaver dams, but Amaya was too absorbed by every detail along the way. Every interesting tree had to be felt, and occasionally leaned against. Every small trickle was an unforeseen phenomenon. After proceeding in this manor for some time, I too began to forget to think in the future tense. I let Amaya’s curiosity guide the hike, and marveled at the minor miracles along with her. And so, three years after my pregnant hike where I decided upon her name, my great resolution reminded me of another: Slow down and be present to the scores of interconnected details working in harmony to create the whole.
Tags: Black Kettle Trail, Dogwood Bakery, Bouquet River, Whallonsburg Grange Hall, Beaver Flow Trail
